The Privet Hedge Part 17

But she had no idea that she was sharing the exact experience of thousands of women throughout England--throughout Europe: that as she stood there alone over a stove in a quiet little house in a remote part of Yorks.h.i.+re, carrying out the everyday details of her narrow existence, she was more widely and actually international than the manual workers themselves.

She only knew that she loathed the smell of frying fat.

_Chapter XIV_

_The Cliff Top_

Caroline had just come back from her tea and stood at the door of the pay-box, talking to Lillie, who was about to go off duty. The bright light reflected from the sea shone on the two girls, and on some children with brown legs and streaming hair who raced along the promenade.

"Going for a walk?" said Caroline, glancing idly in front of her at the expanse of dappled water.

"No. Mother has a bad cold and we're full up with visitors. I shall go straight home."

Then--just at this least expected moment--the thing happened for which some hidden feeling within her had been so intently waiting all day.

She saw G.o.dfrey standing there as she had pictured, with his broad, long-fingered hand on the iron bar; the hand so indicative--had she but known--of the contradictions in his character.

Lillie sat down again to release the clutch, and he pa.s.sed through to the promenade. "Oh, lovely afternoon, isn't it?" he said, and walked briskly away between the neat rows of bedding plants.

The two girls looked after him; at last Lillie said with a slight giggle: "Seems in a hurry, doesn't he? But I expect he's got his young lady waiting for him. My word, she'd give him beans if she knew he saw you home last night, wouldn't she?" A pause, during which Caroline failed to respond; then, rather shortly: "Well, so long!" But Caroline did not notice; her whole mind bent on G.o.dfrey's retreating figure as it went firmly down the broad concrete walk of the promenade--for now the question she'd been craving to ask all day had been answered. He thought nothing about what happened last night. The kiss had been nothing to him. He intended to show her that he did not recognize any slightest claim on his attention which she might think she had gained from it.

Then she had to cease looking after him in order to answer a stout lady visitor who made a point of being nice to the girl at the pay-box.

"Yes--a great pity the weather was not like this for the Gala."

But all the time she was saying to herself, with the queer, dazed feeling which comes from a sudden shock of discovery: "I'm gone on him!

I'm fair gone on him, and him going to be married!"

Even in her thoughts she usually chose her words--just as she kept herself scrupulously "nice" underneath to match her carefully tended hands and well-brushed hair. But now she reverted back to the expressions of her earliest girlhood. "I only meant a bit of fun, and I'm fair gone on him."

Oh! it was desolating--most miserable. There was nothing on earth to be got from it but heartache. She had tried to do the best for herself, and Fate had treated her like this--stabbed her from behind.

It was abominable that she should be punished so for a bit of fun when other girls got off scot-free who had done all sorts of things that she would be ashamed of doing. Life was unfair. It was horribly unfair----

An Urban District Councillor on his way home separated himself from the stream of men with bags which emerged blackly from the railway station and flowed over Thorhaven between half-past five and half-past six.

"Fine evening! Fine evening!" he said, bustling through the barrier.

For a moment the agony lifted; but when he was gone it started again worse than ever--like the pain in an inflamed nerve. The waste of it!

She had thrown away her best a.s.set for nothing. She could no longer fall in love with the rich young man who might want to marry her one day--as she had always more or less sub-consciously expected--because she loved G.o.dfrey. Instinct warned her that the best goods in her shop window were gone without any return, and for the moment her chief feeling was an intense anger against fate first and then against G.o.dfrey.

Not that she blamed him particularly for the kiss. Any man would kiss a girl when he saw her home if he had a chance, of course. But she was vaguely furious with him because he was the cause of such a disorganization of all her life plans. She felt cheated, though she did not realize what she was cheated of, as she sat there looking out of her little window towards the north.

Through the remainder of the evening and all the next day her mood remained thus--indrawn and sombre. The people going on the promenade pa.s.sed by her like marionettes, and she like another marionette responded, but there was no feeling in it at all. She might equally well have seen the whole lot of them, herself included, jerked by wires from a sardonic heaven that had no purpose, no plan--only such figures of thought were not within her scope; still the feeling was there, corroding her faith in life.

At last Sat.u.r.day night came. But the week of long working hours during which she had been constantly in the sea air and yet protected from wind and rain, had left her filled with vitality, despite her bitterness of mind. The night was not dark, because of a growing moon and pale stars peppering the sky, and as she walked along the light road with no care for her footsteps she found a vent for that unusual vitality in a certain habit of her girlhood which she had almost entirely dropped during the past year or two. Often enough before that, she had walked about the Thorhaven streets imagining herself in all sorts of impossible situations, though always happy, beloved and rich. But she had since given it up, as she had put away her dolls a year or two earlier; and she now felt a secret shame in abandoning herself to it again--as if she had at fourteen taken to playing with dolls once more.

So she let herself imagine G.o.dfrey walking by her side with his arm through hers--kissing her at the gate. After all, n.o.body would ever know. It hurt n.o.body; it was all she would ever get. Then weakened by her dreaming she actually did see G.o.dfrey come forth from a clump of dark elders and had not the power to walk straight on as she would have done half an hour earlier. Instead, she stood still and looked at him--disturbed, unhappy, yet with the dull bitterness suddenly gone.

He was close to her before he spoke; then he said hurriedly: "I only wanted to apologize for the other night. I hope you were not offended?" But he knew quite well she was not: it was the urge of that curiosity still burning within him which drove him to find out what she had felt--how his kiss had left her--whether he had been able to reach anything in her.

"You didn't seem to be bothering much about me when you went through into the promenade," she said at last.

He was answered in part; the next moment she felt his arm through hers, just as she had been dreaming on the road, only the reality had a compelling magnetism which was beyond any dreams. "Let us go a little way along the cliff," he said. "I want to speak to you. I want to explain." He spoke excitedly, with a sort of jaded eagerness in his tone; and though she knew her own unwisdom, she went with him.

The turning towards the cliff was just beyond the Cottage, on the opposite side of the road, and consisted of a gravel path that opened out into a small s.p.a.ce on the cliff top. It was a lonely spot, out of the way of strolling visitors at that time of night: the bench in the middle of the gravelled s.p.a.ce lay empty in the luminous sea-twilight with a great arch of sky overhead and the waves below catching a gleam from moon and stars on every ripple. Though Thorhaven might not be beautiful on a Gala evening, with futile little lamps and starved visitors blown about by the wind, it had, on such nights as these, an exquisite, cool beauty which appealed to the spirit as well as the senses.

As they sat down, Caroline could feel his fingers trembling on her arm; suddenly his kiss struck hard on her lips and her head fell back so that he could see the dark rims of her eyelashes. "Ah! You're in it too--you're in it too," he murmured triumphantly--caring for nothing but that triumphant knowledge.

She knew what he meant--they were both in it. Their oneness enveloped her in a cloud of rapture. Then she jerked herself out of his embrace.

"No. No. I can't have you kissing me. It isn't fair to take your fun out of me when you're going to be married directly. I don't know how you can want to do it."

He jumped up without speaking and walked towards the cliff edge. "Good G.o.d!" he burst out. "You don't imagine I _want_ to be in love with you! I'm in h.e.l.l--h.e.l.l! Whatever I do, I see your face. It's beyond all reason----" He stopped short, amazed and enraged by this strange, biting curiosity which made him mad about a girl who was nothing--who was not even really pretty. What could influence men in this way--driving them to insane acts for the sake of some one woman out of all the millions? There must be something not yet understood.

Suddenly he dropped on to the seat, holding his head in his hands. "I don't know what on earth I am going to do," he said.

She looked at him--so helpless in his pa.s.sion--and the protective instinct of a real woman for her man began to stir in her: so, in spite of her own pain, she tried hard to find something to say that would comfort him. "You--you'll get over it," she said, her voice shaking.

"It isn't as if you and I had been going together long, you know.

You'll soon forget me."

"Don't!" he said sharply.

She drew back offended. "Oh! All right." She rose with a sort of dignity. "I think I'd better be going home. It must be getting late."

"Now you're vexed." He peered at her--haggard-eyed in that curious twilight from the sea. "Can't you see that everything you do and say makes me want you more? If you'd only turned out a fool!" He drew a long breath.

"I must be going home," she repeated, moving away.

He caught hold of her dress as she went. "Carrie, I can't let you go.

I can't do without you."

"You'll have to," she said sombrely. "We shall both have to. There's no help for it."

He waited a moment, then the words seemed to come out of themselves--despite him. "I'm not married yet, you know."

She started. "You don't mean----" Then she backed away from him, the silhouette of her slim figure very clear against the luminous background of sea and sky--every line of it dragging at his senses--hurting him with pity. "You know you couldn't do it," she said after a pause. "We neither of us could. It would kill her. Besides, I couldn't sneak another girl's man after the banns were up and the cake bought--a girl who'd never done me any harm. I aren't so low down as all that, yet."

"Anything is better than marrying without love," he said, but he said it half-heartedly. How was a decent man to throw over a charming devoted girl to whom he was to be married in a fortnight, shaming her before all her little world after he had sought and won her? He thought of Laura's soft acquiescence with an agony of self-reproach and impatience. Then he heard Caroline speaking again, her voice low and clear with the murmur of the sea running in and out of it--he felt it go to his heart.

"It's too late to begin to think whether you'll be miserable or not now," she said. "You made her fond of you. It was your own doing.

And you wouldn't get me if you did give her up. I'd no more take you from her, now she's got her wedding-dress and all, than I'd stick a knife into a baby sleeping in its pram. She wors.h.i.+ps you--can't you see that? It would spoil all her life."

"What about yours--and mine?" he said. "You don't really care for me, or you couldn't talk like that."

She looked away to the glimmering sea, not troubling to answer him.

What was the use? He knew.

"Well, I'll be getting on," she said at last.

But he found the hopelessness in her voice unbearable.