The Hermit and the Wild Woman

WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged from the house, Margaret Ransom remained seated in her bedroom, addressing herself anew to the difficult process of self-collection.  As an aid to this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the window, following Ransom’s figure as it receded down the elm-shaded street.  He moved almost alone between the prim flowerless grass-plots, the white porches, the protrusion of irrelevant shingled gables, which stamped the empty street as part of an American college town.  She had always been proud of living in Hill Street, where the university people congregated, proud to associate her husband’s retreating back, as he walked daily to his office, with backs literary and pedagogic, backs of which it was whispered, for the edification of duly-impressed visitors:  “Wait till that old boy turns—­that’s so-and-so.”

This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience, but filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction, of being not as those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of living at Wentworth, pursued elsewhere careers foredoomed to futility by that very fact.

And now—!

She rose and turned to her work-table where she had dropped, on entering, the handful of photographs that Guy Dawnish had left with her.  While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had hardly taken in the details; but now, on the full tones of his low young voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness.  This was Guise Abbey, his uncle’s place in Wiltshire, where, under his grandfather’s rule, Guy’s own boyhood had been spent:  a long gabled Jacobean facade, many-chimneyed, ivy-draped, overhung (she felt sure) by the boughs of a venerable rookery.  And in this other picture—­the walled garden at Guise—­that was his uncle, Lord Askern, a hale gouty-looking figure, planted robustly on the terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a couple of setters at his feet.  And here was the river below the park, with Guy “punting” a girl in a flapping hat—­how Margaret hated the flap that hid the girl’s face!  And here was the tennis-court, with Guy among a jolly cross-legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about the tea-table under the big lime:  in the centre the curate handing bread and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching with more cups.

Margaret raised this picture closer to her eyes, puzzling, in the diminished light, over the face of the girl nearest to Guy Dawnish—­bent above him in profile, while he laughingly lifted his head.  No hat hid this profile, which stood out clearly against the foliage behind it.

“And who is that handsome girl?” Margaret had said, detaining the photograph as he pushed it aside, and struck by the fact that, of the whole group, he had left only this member unnamed.

“Oh, only Gwendolen Matcher—­I’ve always known her—.  Look at this:  the almshouses at Guise.  Aren’t they jolly?”

And then—­without her having had the courage to ask if the girl in the punt were also Gwendolen Matcher—­they passed on to photographs of his rooms at Oxford, of a cousin’s studio in London—­one of Lord Askern’s grandsons was “artistic”—­of the rose-hung cottage in Wales to which, on the old Earl’s death, his daughter-in-law, Guy’s mother, had retired.

Every one of the photographs opened a window on the life Margaret had been trying to picture since she had known him—­a life so rich, so romantic, so packed—­in the mere casual vocabulary of daily life—­with historic reference and poetic allusion, that she felt almost oppressed by this distant whiff of its air.  The very words he used fascinated and bewildered her.  He seemed to have been born into all sorts of connections, political, historical, official, that made the Ransom situation at Wentworth as featureless as the top shelf of a dark closet.  Some one in the family had “asked for the Chiltern Hundreds”—­one uncle was an Elder Brother of the Trinity House—­some one else was the Master of a College—­some one was in command at Devonport—­the Army, the Navy, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the most venerable seats of learning, were all woven into the dense background of this young man’s light unconscious talk.  For the unconsciousness was unmistakable.  Margaret was not without experience of the transatlantic visitor who sounds loud names and evokes reverberating connections.  The poetry of Guy Dawnish’s situation lay in the fact that it was so completely a part of early associations and accepted facts.  Life was like that in England—­in Wentworth of course (where he had been sent, through his uncle’s influence, for two years’ training in the neighbouring electrical works at Smedden)—­in Wentworth, though “immensely jolly,” it was different.  The fact that he was qualifying to be an electrical engineer—­with the hope of a secretaryship at the London end of the great Smedden Company—­that, at best, he was returning home to a life of industrial “grind,” this fact, though avowedly a bore, did not disconnect him from that brilliant pinnacled past, that many-faceted life in which the brightest episodes of the whole body of English fiction seemed collectively reflected.  Of course he would have to work—­younger sons’ sons almost always had to—­but his uncle Askern (like Wentworth) was “immensely jolly,” and Guise always open to him, and his other uncle, the Master, a capital old boy too—­and in town he could always put up with his clever aunt, Lady Caroline Duckett, who had made a “beastly marriage” and was horribly poor, but who knew everybody jolly and amusing, and had always been particularly kind to him.

It was not—­and Margaret had not, even in her own thoughts, to defend herself from the imputation—­it was not what Wentworth would have called the “material side” of her friend’s situation that captivated her.  She was austerely proof against such appeals:  her enthusiasms were all of the imaginative order.  What subjugated her was the unexampled prodigality with which he poured for her the same draught of tradition of which Wentworth held out its little teacupful.  He besieged her with a million Wentworths in one—­saying, as it were:  “All these are mine for the asking—­and I choose you instead!”

For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came to—­the summing-up toward which her conscientious efforts at self-collection had been gradually pushing her:  with all this in reach, Guy Dawnish was leaving Wentworth reluctantly.

“I was a bit lonely here at first—­but now!” And again:  “It will be jolly, of course, to see them all again—­but there are some things one doesn’t easily give up. . . .”

If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough that he should have chosen her out of all Wentworth—­but to have known that other life, and to set her in the balance against it—­poor Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of weight but her years!  Ah, it might well produce, in nerves and brain, and poor unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation, the rush of a great wave of life, under which memory struggled in vain to reassert itself, to particularize again just what his last words—­the very last—­had been. . . .

When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective assault, it pushed Margaret Ransom—­feeling herself a mere leaf in the blast—­toward the writing-table from which her innocent and voluminous correspondence habitually flowed.  She had a letter to write now—­much shorter but more difficult than any she had ever been called on to indite.

“Dear Mr. Dawnish,” she began, “since telephoning you just now I have decided not—­”

Maria’s voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library:  “And I s’pose it’s the brown silk you’ll wear to the speaking?”

In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress’s toilet was performed unassisted; and the mere enquiry—­at once friendly and deferential—­projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the importance of the occasion.  That she should answer:  “But I am not going,” when the going was so manifestly part of a household solemnity about which the thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud participation; that in face of such participation she should utter a word implying indifference or hesitation—­nay, revealing herself the transposed, uprooted thing she had been on the verge of becoming; to do this was—­well! infinitely harder than to perform the alternative act of tearing up the sheet of note-paper under her reluctant pen.

Yes, she said, she would wear the brown silk. . . .