He took the opportunity of kissing her before he set her on her feet again. They were still sufficiently in love for these snatched embraces in unpromising spots and queer moments to be very pleasant to both of them.
Hand in hand they drifted to where the old naturalist lay; as if anxious to receive his benediction upon their erratic impulse.
That afternoon Richard deliberately slipped off after tea so as to leave his wife a free field to discuss the details of their departure with the young man. She had told him she had to go down to the farm to get some eggs from Mrs Winsome and he took it for granted that the painter would be expecting her there. A faint glow of self-righteous magnanimity still hung about him and his knowledge of the dancer’s being in America still remained a vague exultation far away in the back of his mind.
He thought to himself, as he followed his favouriievhazel path, that these difficult relations between men and women were really growing a little more adjustable nowadays. The war had left its impress, he thought. Old rigid conventions were breaking down. Human beings were learning to be more generous to one another, less tenacious of their legal rights, more flexible, more reasonable.
He was inclined to attribute the thrill of new happiness which he felt, as he swung along the lane under that leafy roof, to the spirit of his own generosity to Canyot. Something of it was perhaps due to that. But if he had analysed his feelings down to the bottom he would have found that it was not at all disagreeable to him to have Canyot there, somewhere about, so that when he was in a mood for solitude he could hand over Nelly to him and go his own way. He liked to go off for long walks alone. He was still obsessed with Nelly as a lover; but he was not perfectly satisfied with her as a companion. There were moments, especially after he had made love to her a great deal, when he was decidedly bored with her society. The companion he really loved best was, after all, none other than Richard himself. Richard alone with Richard was what really gave him the deepest satisfaction.
He branched off after a while down a lane to his left, which led ultimately by shadowy byways to a small country town to the west of Selshurst. He had never been precisely this road before and the absence of any old landmarks made the path full of fresh and new impressions. The fact, too, that he was destined to leave England so soon again gave an added attraction to every little omen of the way. The jerk to his mind of this impending adventure shook him out of the half-sensual half-mystic lassitude into which he had insensibly fallen and he found himself thinking and feeling with more clear-cut subtlety.
He paused at the entrance to a long avenue of ash trees that led away across a marsh into the very land of the sunset.
What was it in a road of that kind, bordered by those twisted weather-beaten trees, that caught his mind up and carried it so far?
There came over him, just then, a feeling that he had only known once or twice in his life before; a feeling far too evasive to be put into intelligible words.
It was as if the obscure emotions of many lonely travellers upon many lonely roads, the fragments and morsels of their intercourse with the low — bowed branches and the gleaming pools, with this particular patch of moss and that particular bed of reeds, had mingled strangely together and had waited for him, had been waiting for him, precisely at the turn of the road, so that he should respond to them and give them a sign of recognition.
It was as if they became for him, at that hour, a solitary signal, a beckoning intimation, something that emerged out of long lonely expectant nights, nights full of soft-falling rain and rustling wind and the sound of shaken leaves.
It was a feeling that was only possible in a very old country, a country where generations of men and women, one after another, had mixed their human sorrows with the wistful loneliness of marsh and mere, of moorland and wayside. It was a feeling that could not have endured for a moment either in the uproar of a city or in the inhuman desolation of jungle or desert or mountain. It was the evocation of a strange marginal purlieu, lying midway between the loneliness of solitary human beings and the loneliness of inanimate things, things that had been witness, in their long centuries, of the passing of many such wayfarers and had become the accomplices of many vaguely floating thoughts.
Richard turned back at that point — he was already some three miles from home — but the glimpse he had been permitted that day into the very secret of his native soil went with him as he retraced his steps.
He felt humbled and saddened. He realized that he had in these days of lovemaking lost some clue, some contact with the unknown, that it must to one of his motives to rediscover.
That half-sensual half-mystical communication with nature, such as he had blended with his love for Nelly, had not been subtle enough. Certain more delicate voices had grown inaudible, had passed over his head, had been drowned in the grosser monotony of his material sensations.
Towards Nelly herself, how dull, how insensitive he had been! Towards her and towards poor Canyot too!
It was likely enough, he thought, only too likely, that there were aspects of Canyot’s work deeper, more clearly emphasized, nearer the great withheld secret of things, than anything he had himself ever written. And how little he had written, of any kind, during these recent months! He had betrayed his better self; and in doing so he had betrayed Nelly also.
He had not retraced his steps very far when he observed a dogcart driving rapidly towards him, with a couple of dogs running beside it.
It pulled up with a jerk when it reached him and he perceived that the driver was none other than Mrs Shotover.
‘How do you do, Mr Storm,’ said the lady. ‘It’s a pity we’re going in opposite directions. I’d have offered you a lift. I’m going to Fern-ham Beeches to fetch a bitch pup I’ve just bought — such a little darling. Well! how’s Nelly and everything else at the cottage?’
Richard put his hand on the side of the cart. Her horse chafed and stamped and fretted; and the two dogs barked at his legs. The wheels of her smart little vehicle smelt of new paint. Mrs Shotover was dressed in a tightly fitting tweed suit and her grey hair was well tucked in under a cloth hat. She looked the typical Englishwoman, out for a race meeting or an agricultural show or, as was actually the case, to visit her dog fancier.
With her champing and stamping horse, her barking dogs, and the taciturn Thomas sitting on the back seat, she broke in upon the writer’s thoughts like an image of the ‘verdict of society.’
‘Oh, Nelly’s very well,’ he said. ‘I have been for a long walk. I often go for long walks.’
‘Too long,’ Mrs Shotover hazarded. ‘It’s a mistake! Married men ought never to go for long walks. They ought to take their young wives out — to see people and all that kind of thing.’
‘To buy terrier pups, eh?’ said Richard.
‘To buy the good opinion of people that count,’ rapped out the lady. ‘Oh no, my dear Mr Storm, you really must be seen a little more, you and your charming Nelly. There’s that adorable Lady Wincroft; why, she’s asked me over and over again why Nelly hasn’t returned her call. Of course I say it’s her father, and so forth — but her father, poor dear, is out of it now.’
‘I don’t see why I should break my usual habits, Mrs Shotover. I married Nelly Moreton, not the society of West Sussex.’
‘That won’t do! That won’t do!’ cried the lady, and she sat so bolt upright in her seat and looked so fierce that Richard began to feel as if he had encountered the chariot of the sternest of the Eumenides.
‘You’re a great deal older than she is,’ was her next remark; Richard could not help wondering what comments upon all this the coachman’s imperturbable profile concealed from the world.