‘Certainly, by all means. But let’s have tea fairly early, so that you won’t have to rush back and tire yourself out.’
The girl patted his shoulder affectionately. ‘All right,’ she laughed, ‘we’ll be here in good time. I’m not going to kidnap Mr Storm.’
Her tone apparently gave satisfaction to the painter, for he bestowed upon them an amiable nod of dismissal and resumed his work.
Miss Moreton led her companion past the west door of the cathedral, down a little avenue of limes, between nursery-maids holding gargantuan infants, and aged nondescript philosophers, the smoke of whose placid pipes ascended to heaven.
On the further side of the close she led him down a narrow brick alley, over one wall of which hung wistaria and over the other white and blue clematis.
At last they came to a little brightly painted green door which she opened with a small key taken from her purse. ‘Mrs Ireton was a friend of mother’s,’ she said, and they passed through. ‘I can pick anything I like here, as long as Mr Tip doesn’t see me. They’re all terribly afraid of Mr Tip. He’s the dean’s man really; but he works for them all since the war.’
How much of England and its incurable charm lay, for Richard, at that moment, in that insignificant sentence! The obstinate importance of personal character, or personal peculiarity; the relaxed, easy-going, unofficial casualness of the old traditional methods which lent to Mr Tip — who doubtless tyrannized mercilessly over the dean — a more carefully respected authority than was vouchsafed to any chief of police, how profoundly national it all was!
Richard could see Mr Tip among his own private roses, in his own trim villa, reading The Times through his spectacles to his good lady who in her day had doubtless ruled over more difficult personages than deans.
‘Well! what do you think of it?’ sounded the youthful voice at his side. ‘Isn’t it a sweet place? Do you wonder I wanted you to see it?’
Richard was indeed so overcome by the beauty of it all, by the charm of Nelly herself, by the delicious symbolic figure of Mr Tip — who fortunately was elsewhere just then — that this wonderful garden seemed to him the last drop in the cup of mortal happiness.
It was the sort of garden that one cannot conceive of as existing outside England. It was not large, and the high walls that surrounded it — for the house against which it lifted its waves of fragrant fertility was itself, it seemed, no more than a great buttressed monastic wall with massive-mullioned windows — made it look smaller than it really was.
The lawn across which the girl led her new friend was so velvet- soft to the touch and so incredibly smooth that it seemed to reject as sacrilege the idea of any sportive usage except perhaps the ancient and venerable game of bowls.
Richard thought to himself that he would feel as indignant as Mr Tip if anyone suggested playing croquet or lawn tennis here. It was hieratic grass, suitable to be trodden by the most learned of all canons, as he read his Greek Testament before Matins. It was not grass from which tennis balls should be allowed to bounce.
‘How many years has it taken, do you suppose,’ he asked his little friend, ‘to get this lawn as smooth as this?’
‘That tree,’ she pointed to a tremendous cedar of Lebanon, ‘is supposed to have been planted by Henry the Third. And they always planted cedars on lawns; so I suppose it was there then.’
They stepped off the grass upon a long brick path, on both sides of which was a high herbaceous border from whose carefully weeded brown earth rose in luxuriant green profusion the promise of every sort of summer perennial. Many of the plants, canterbury bells, London pride, pinks and stocks and sweet william were scarcely in bud; but ‘the wealth of the globèd peonies ’was in full glory and the delphinium flowers were already appearing, some purple, some light blue, like delicately poised butterflies, on their tapering stalks of pale fresh green.
The brick path ended in a terrace at both its northern and southern extremity, and each terrace was overhung with white and red and yellow roses. On one of these terraces, under the massive stonework of the old monastic house, Nelly and her companion sat down upon a wooden bench.
Richard removed his hat; and with a charming blush of girlish self-consciousness, for which this time no critical demon in him found a mocking jibe, the girl did the same. –
Moved by a simultaneous impulse they then proceeded quite openly and without shame to survey one another from head to foot, smiling happily as they did so as if well pleased with the result of their scrutiny.
They made indeed a charming contrast as they sat together, the man’s grizzled hair, swarthy unbearded face, and hawk-like profile, pedestalled in the manner of some old imperial statue against a cluster of white roses, while a neighbouring spray of heavy damask ones, deep red as a wood-god’s blood, overhung the girl’s fair head, fair face, and bare slender neck. She might have been, but for her English dress, some early Forentine’s conception of Psyche waiting for her invisible lover.
‘We seem to be making friends extremely quickly,’ Nelly shyly observed, withdrawing her eyes from his face and following the sweep of the great cedar’s shadow as it turned the sun-warmed grass into cool velvety blackness.
There was a faint recrudescence of the imp of criticism in him at this. Was she, after all, just an ordinary little flirt? And then some other, subtler, deeper devil reminded him that all these pathetic, frail, wilful beings were driven by the eternal necessity of things to be something of that sort, if life was to proceed. How else could anything at all, in this chaotic world, begin to happen?
‘It was certainly fate,’ he remarked stupidly, his thoughts more occupied with the general situation than with anything he actually said, ‘that brought us together like this.’
‘I hope,’ she responded quickly, ‘not the fate whose name is also Sorrow.’
Richard felt slightly annoyed with her for this. He wanted her to be receptive, silent and dreamy. He didn’t want her to indulge in neat quotations from authors which he might possibly have forgotten!
‘It’s odd,’ she continued, ‘how little we know of each other except that we are getting on so well. What was it that brought you back to England?’
One of his troublesome demons prompted him to answer quick as a shot, ‘The white skin of Elise Angel,’ but what he said was quite different. ‘I’m a writer, you know — what I suppose you might call a professional critic. What I’ve done so far is to write about poetry, mostly about the French. Now what I want to do is to say something for myself, something that’s come into my mind lately, something that can’t be said in any other way except in the form of poetry.’
Nelly looked at him with deep interest. Her instinct made her aware that he was less certain of his ‘line’, less confident of his power, much more receptive to influence, than was Robert Canyot. The profound feminine passion for offering ‘help’, any sort of ‘help’, to an artist, a thinker, a person with ideas, thrilled her young blood with a thrill like the answer to a caress.
‘And you came to England because you thought you could express your real self better here than in a foreign country?’
He loved the eager girlish tone with which she said this; but the too familiar expression ‘your real self’ made him jib like a touchy horse. He seemed to remember that every woman who had ever got him into her power had used the expression ‘real self’ when the sharp claws came out from below the velvet pads.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I felt I must hide away from everybody. And everybody for me means France nowadays. Why are you smiling? Was that a rude thing to say? Of course I couldn’t know I should meet Miss Nelly Moreton?’