A marrying man

Kathleen Morrison, on her return to London, was not prepared for the empty, echoing house, the loud thud of her footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs, the ghostly appearance of the linen-shrouded furniture.Her brother and sister-in-law, with whom she made her home, usually abandoned the seaside towards the end of August; these were already the first days of September.

"Not before Tuesday week, Miss Kathleen," the one resentful housemaid-in-charge answered her enquiries; "the Missus said she'd written to you."

She had.Many times.But Kathleen, having once sent an assurance of her safety, together with a brief explanation of the circumstances of her escapade, very carefully refrained from opening the letters that came in reply.Not that family disapproval would for an instant have turned her from a decision to remain at least a month in Alpenruh; but the month itself was so strangely and perfectly apart from the sounding discordances of before and after, that she refused to mar its harmony by the possibility of a single jarring note.So the envelopes addressed in Edward's handwriting, and in Nelly's handwriting, accumulated in a neat little pile.Doubtless they contained "home-truths."Kathleen promised herself a careful perusal of these on the ensuing New Year's Eve, when from previous experience she anticipated a fit of depression so intense that nothing could possibly serve to augment it.Meanwhile, she was glad to find that Edward and Nelly, and Nelly's father, old Mr. Jeyne, and Nelly's two children, Muriel and Nicolas, and Nelly's nurse, and Nelly's cook, were still absent from the house in North Kensington.

The house was high and narrow-breasted, situated in a neighbourhood which, whatever the generation, had been fashionable with the generation before, so that its inhabitants mainly consisted of ghosts and grumblers.The grumblers were of the kind who religiously take their five weeks' holiday in the summer, and are firmly imbued with the immorality of leaving their homes at any other period of the year.Therefore North Kensington was now a deserted wilderness of drawn blinds and white-smocked house-painters, of spectral scaffoldings and forlornly prowling cats.The milkman's was an eerie cry at dawn; and at eve the German band blared mournfully to unresponsive areas.Kathleen trod softly from one empty room to another; was given her meals at eccentric hours, in unfamiliar parts of the house; shivered a little as she locked her front door at nights—how stiff they were, those bolts!and with what startling clangour they shot at last into their sockets!—and was wonderfully at peace.With a present entirely negative, with a future carefully unglanced at, she was free amidst the prevailing spells of silence to yield herself entirely to a memory still so fresh and near that it asked to be re-lived, caressed and handled, laid to sleep for the pleasure of bidding it wake again.Idly she wondered why it was that she did not miss Gareth more poignantly; why she was content to believe their idyll wholly a gift of thirty-one days which haphazard had capriciously flung them, that hot oily afternoon, on the wharf at Folkestone....

In company with Fräulein Gerhardt and Mademoiselle Lefranc, she had been shepherding a party of seven schoolgirls on an instructive trip to Switzerland.Gareth Albert Temple was one of the Society of Young Botanists, touring the Alps in search of specimens.And they had both missed the boat....

Thereafter, a headlong chase together across Europe in quest of their separate parties.A growing intimacy—"You must let me be of any assistance I can on your journey," the boy had remarked in his gentle courtly manner.He was not more than twenty-four; and good to look upon, with his wavy black hair and pleading dark eyes; eyes that were the only contradiction in a face compounded of strong curves, firm jaw and determined mouth and outjutting squarely-formed eyebrows....Kathleen smiled tenderly enough at memory of his straight young comeliness.And was it incapacity or merely laziness on his part which had caused all the practical management of that fantastic continental scamper to lapse into her hands?management of times and trains and meals and foreign money and luggage at the Customs?...But she was accustomed to leadership, and she found a rare sweetness in Gareth's admiration of her competence; admiration which he mingled with an old-world romantic deference to a certain element of innocent and unprotected maidenhood which his upbringing seemed to take for granted even in a schoolmistress in her twenty-seventh year.

Twenty-seven!—and this was still the period of the late eighteen-nineties, when girlhood ended abruptly at thirty; when middle-age was supposed to begin at forty; and the intervening years were for the unmarried to learn their lesson of quiet resignation.Twenty-seven!—Kathleen was clutching hot-fingered at the moments, lest she should be left with empty hands.And the days ate at the years ...and she was going abroad in the company of nine females and the spirit of discontent.

...Gradually, a fretful eagerness to join up with her party, merged into a mischievous eagerness to avoid doing so; to prolong a little while, though by cheating and stealth, the charm of travelling a woman with a man by her side, as nature and tradition demanded.Folly, perhaps; but the sort of folly of which a girl—a very young and silly girl—would be capable....As proof of her own capacity for such youth and folly, Kathleen welcomed the impulse; encouraged it.And then, just as it seemed impossible to stave off any longer the encounter with duty and discipline, fate had aided her with a genuine accident by which they had been shoved late on a rain-misted evening into the wrong train at the little Alpine station, and had been carried off to Alpenruh, instead of to Lauterbrunnen in the opposite direction; and had been forced to spend the night at the gold-brown châlet hotel.And the next morning was washed in vivid blue and sunshine; the snowy mountain peaks called for repetition of the thunderous saga of their names: Schreckhorn, Faulhorn, Wetterhorn, Finsteraarhorn!...And the tinkle of ascending cowbells among the mountains, duetted with the musical plash of cascade and rivulet; the mules champed and flicked their tails in the winding village street; the guides sat comfortably astride of the wall, and surveyed the round rickety tables outside the cafés, the bundles of walking-sticks and chamois-heads so prodigally displayed for sale; the pines wafted their resinous fragrance through the green-shuttered windows of the hotel; and down the polished wooden stairs, Gareth was awaiting her, and clear yellow honey for breakfast....It was not a morning even to think of Fräulein Gerhardt and Mademoiselle Lefranc, and Elsie and Gwendolen and Kitty and Beatrice and Dora and Flo and Mary, doubtless angrily bewildered at this desertion of the English history and arithmetic teacher.

But Gareth had pleaded: "Let us stay here—just for to-day...."

Presently he confessed that on the latter part of their journey he had been taking the utmost care to avoid catching up with the Society of Young Botanists.Once he had even caught sight of them....

"I couldn't bear to end our good time.Can you forgive me for dragging you into this?"

Kathleen smiled—but made no counter confession.She let him think he was responsible for their daring escapade, because she was twenty-seven, and he twenty-four, and it gave him a fearful pleasure to think so.

Thus the affair had begun.Was she wrong in letting it take its course?Plenty of leisure now to regret, if regret were to be her portion.

No....She was glad they had lingered on at Alpenruh; even when the brilliant fever of her youth at its zenith, the flame of reds and browns which she had inherited from an Indian grandmother, from whom had also been bequeathed her noiseless walk and the streak of buried fierceness in her nature, even when all this had rushed Gareth past all dreaming chivalry to a passion of strictly chivalrous adoration—even then she did not regret, in retrospect, having provided herself with this fortified memory against all future bitterness of self-reproach for wasting the years.

She did not for a second doubt that the episode was definitely at an end, and laid aside.Certainly, at parting, Gareth's hand had sought to detain hers in a lingering clasp; but beyond the actual "Good-bye, Kathleen," he had not put into words any desire to prolong the play after the curtain had fallen.Nor had she known till the present, how serenely one can dwell in the mellow afterglow of happiness, though summer be drawing to its end in the railinged squares of North Kensington.

A letter arrived, in Gareth's boldly uncharacteristic calligraphy.She withdrew the sheets lovingly enough from their envelope, as the postman's clattering passage retreated down the street.

The girl perused the quaint, rather formal sentences, with the feeling that just this was needed still to round off the incident completely.He had spoilt nothing, had sweetened still further the aftermath, and added to its fragrance.Well-pleased, she would have replaced the sheets in their envelope, when she noticed that she had overlooked on the last page yet another scribbled line; a postscript:

"When may I see you again?—G.A.D."

And suddenly the human man sprang alive to her.How often she had heard him putting the very same question; how often smiled at the absurd kink in his nature it revealed, a queer incapacity to take leave of her, be it for ever so slight a period of time, without the eager question: "When shall I see you again?When?Where?How?"...Seeking always to let one meeting overlap the next; no trust in chance or in management."When shall I see you again?"The one phrase touched a spring that set free a whole warm gush of recollections.Of course he should see her again!She was impatient for his coming, wrote to him instantly a summons to visit her the very next evening.

At the far end of the dark narrow hall, was an outjutting ledge, hidden from view by the staircase.It was seated here that Kathleen awaited him, the expectant fire in her red-brown eyes quenched by the sombre lighting, her feet drumming impatiently against the wall, as she wondered if Gareth in North Kensington would be very different from Gareth in Alpenruh.She was guiltily conscious of having slipped on an evening-dress, something soft and clinging in moss-green.Glad, too, that Nelly was not present to comment on the fact.

It was an exciting vigil, listening for the crunch of footsteps, the sharp peal of the bell which would scatter stillness.And all her knowledge of its approach did not prevent a quick jump in her heart at the actual happening.Then she sat motionless, thinking of him on the other side of the door.Presently, muttering to herself, the disagreeable housemaid-in-charge opened to the visitor.

"Is Miss Morrison at home?"

"Yes, sir."Hannah left him standing while she departed in search.Then, with a leap and a laugh, Kathleen was before him.

"Isn't this fun?"She was radiant against her dull umber background."Gareth, why don't you say something?Come in here."

"Here" was Edward's study, with swathed chairs, and chandeliers draped in a sheet.Kathleen had lit a pair of candles, but in the semi-obscurity he could form no impression of his surroundings.It might have been any house, anywhere.But he had a sensation that he ought to speak in whispers.

"Are you alone here?"and wondered whether, under those circumstances, he did not do wrong in coming?Which was absurd, considering Alpenruh.But North Kensington was different.

Before many minutes, she saw that he intended asking her to marry him, and rather feverishly sought to ward it off.The hushed room was a trap now, and the moss-green evening-gown an added menace.Gareth, quietly persistent, dodged all her bright and chatty openings, and succeeded at last in putting the question she dreaded.

"Will you, Kathleen?"

"Gareth, how do you see marriage?"

Astonished, he replied: "With you?As a fire-lit dream-come-true."

"Not with me.With anyone."

He drew her a series of charming, conventional pictures, steeped in a ruddy glow from the hearth of illusions; a child's laugh, a sundial in a garden, the flicker of lamplight on shelves of books, as needful accessories.He also mentioned, rather shyly, the illuminating spirit of love to lurk beneath outward trivialities; the joy of sharing evil and good alike; the flaming interest to be taken in each other's work, whatever that might chance to be.And he spoke of two as the only magical number in arithmetic; and threw in a Persian cat, to boot.And was silent.He had spoken earnestly and well; eloquence was at all times his strong point.

"Gareth."

"Yes, dear?"

"Do you care to know how I have learnt to see marriage?"

Gareth, in anticipation of her disclosure, shrank from it.

"Oh—please," he said.She mistook the appeal for assent.

"It's a clammy state of familiarity," thus Kathleen defied his fair visions; "familiarity of petty outward things that don't count.Breakfast-table intimacy, with the yolk from an eaten egg smeared yellow on the shell.Intimacy of letters: 'Who's your correspondent?''Who are you writing to?'Moving in lumps, undetachable, sticky; waiting about in the hall, and calling irritably up the stairs to know if the other will be long, instead of just—going.It's the shedding of all privacy; bursting into rooms without knocking: Thy room shall be my room!It's to hear a man's bath-water running in the morning, and to know exactly, by sounds, when he gets in and out.To be aware how many shirts he uses per week, because you count his dirty washing.Oh, if I loved a man, I shouldn't yearn for 'the tender privilege of darning his dear socks!'Rather keep him for ever remote, with the mystery still on him.But marriage offers the sight of unmade beds, use of the same piece of soap, pilgrimages to the same friends, the same question every evening: 'What have you been doing all day?'answer to be given in detail.Oh, Gareth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry; your pictures were ever so much prettier, but mine are true."

She paused for response.But the meaning of her tirade had percolated Gareth's mist-bound understanding not a whit.The outburst in itself struck him as harsh and ugly, quite out of keeping with the spirit in which a maiden should receive a declaration of love.She was spoiling something; petulantly he refused to recognize the necessity for its spoiling.

So he made no reply.And less vehemently she went on:

"You mustn't think that all this is because I'm cooped up with an unfortunate example.My brother and his wife are very fond of each other; what the neighbours would call an ideal pair.They see nothing of what I'm telling you; why should they?They're doing it all the time.But it's a mistake to be a perpetual onlooker at marriage when the couple are still young and in the throes.One's mother and father are different; one doesn't regard them as married, merely as parents.But I've lived most of my life a third in a family of three, and been robbed of the—glamour, you would call it, without getting anything in exchange, except a horror of wedded bliss, an utter horror of it.You mustn't ask me to be your wife, Gareth, because I'd be afraid; afraid of all that might happen to you and me; afraid, most of all, of seeing it happen."

---

The enshrouding linen draperies were removed from the house in North Kensington, revealing a taste for furnishing of which the governing principle had obviously been: "Here is a space—fill it!"

For Mrs. Edward Morrison had written, announcing the return of the family:

"We shall be back on Tuesday in time for supper.It must be awful for you alone in the empty house—especially now!"

Then a few advance orders respecting milk to be taken in, and a chicken to be roasted; an ecstatic description of Nicolas in bathing-drawers; and "Your loving sister, Nelly."

There were only two words in the epistle which contained matter for reflection: "especially now."...

Kathleen spent profitably her remaining days of golden solitude in visualizing the long weeks and months to come, when she could no more enter a room with the comfortable security of finding it untenanted.

For soon the Winter-fear would find her out.

An old enemy; she knew it well.It came, inevitable, monotonous, with the fall of the first leaf, the flicker of the first fire."It's not warm enough for Nicolas without a coat," said Nelly; that was one of the heralds.There were many others.Always it came.The waiting for it was almost the worst.Winter-fear ...oh, the furious beating clenched resentment, resentment of a thousand Indian forefathers, that Kathleen harboured against the creeping cold.Cold that bit.Cold that gnawed.Cold that ached.

Winter-fear brought a special horror to the house in North Kensington.Concentration.Nelly, liberal enough in most matters, had, like all housewives, a special kink; she economized in coals.Except in cases of illness, in the dining-room only was a fire kept alight.And slowly, day by day, as the increasing cold drove them inwards, the entire family concentrated round this fire.Here they worked and read and talked and ate, huddled together in the semicircle of warmth.Kathleen, in an occasional frantic longing for solitude, would break away; retire to her chilly bedroom or to the raw streets, both harbours of refuge in the summer months.Always, numbed to the bone, she was compelled to surrender, return to the dining-room community—till April with soft warm fingers should come to release her.

A minor horror called cold-in-the-head.Nicolas, by three ominous sneezes, would give the sign; following which, every member of the household was stricken in turn, or in chorus; sometimes a solitary sufferer; sometimes a veritable orchestra of coughs and sniffs and trumpetings and throat-clearings.The talk would be all of handkerchiefs and the lack of hot water; and the faces round the dining-room fire would swell into a circle of grotesque caricatures, blotched, and red-eyed, and hideous.No respite, none!and seven long months of it to be faced.

"...We shall be back on Tuesday"—and already the ghost of Nelly was calling over the banisters for someone to fasten her frock—how the hooks would persist in catching those irritating stray hairs at the back of the neck!Already Edward was turning on the bath-taps; Muriel practising for two hours after tea; Nicolas spurting affection with a jammy mouth.Thus the members of her family, when they finally did return, were by anticipation distorted from quite ordinary figures to horrible marionettes whose slightest action set every nerve itching.

"Well, Katty dear," affectionately Nelly embraced her sister-in-law in the hall, calling her by the name most disliked; "here we are, you see."

Kathleen did see.

She saw also that Edward avoided her eyes, and that Nelly was nervous; while Muriel, aged nine, regarded her aunt curiously, as having been for many meals past the object of horrified conversation on the part of the elders.

Nicolas alone seemed unaware of any tension in the atmosphere. Up the stairs he staggered, a miniature Falstaff; laden to the ground by the burden of his own flesh, and, in addition, an iron spade, a wooden spade, a fishing-net, and two tin pails; relics of summer joys that were fled. Kathleen went to his assistance, listening sympathetically to his breathless explanations of how he wouldn't leave them behind for the landlady's little girl; Kathleen gathered that the landlady's little girl had always cast an eye of appropriation on that iron spade.

"An' I said: 'You won't have it, never!'An' I hit her knees wiv it."Nicolas collapsed triumphantly on the nursery floor; he was evidently a firm believer in the methods of the cave-man.

Kathleen rather liked Nicolas, despite jamminess.His years were five, and his voice was fat.When poked, he gurgled.Once indeed she had been moved to embrace him tenderly, to which moment his mother had unfortunately been witness.Kathleen's subsequent existence was spent in striving to correct the misapprehension that she possessed the maternal instinct.Nicolas had to suffer.

On the other hand, Muriel was no favourite.There was that small matter of practising to account for it; still more, the fact that she was a younger pupil at the establishment where her aunt was installed as teacher of history and arithmetic.From the schoolgirl point of view, this latter condition of things opened up vast fields of thought.Muriel, very neat about the legs and mind, was particularly concerned with the ethics of the situation.To be intimately connected with Authority was an awkwardness to which none of her mates were exposed, and involved a special code of law.

Was it a matter to be bragged about, for instance, or relegated to a shamed obscurity?What was the precise moment every day when careless familiarity must yield to awed respect, and vice versa?Was she justified in selling (for J nibs) details of Kathleen's home existence to Kathleen's infatuated adorers?Or did this come under the category of "hateful mean?"How could one avoid walking to school in company with Authority, when she and Authority left the same house at the same moment, bound in the same direction?In what spirit was punishment to be received, when she who punished had that morning been reprimanded before one's very eyes, for Encouraging the Cat?Above all, what was the good of striving for the first place in an exam.when you know jolly well it will be denied you—"for fear of being accused of showing favouritism"?

Muriel pondered a great deal on all this.She was an earnest child.

The prevailing attitude of condemnation-kindly-suspended-till-after-meals was responsible for a certain amount of strain at the first reunion of "happy family" round the supper-table.Nelly talked a great deal of their holiday in Felixstowe, and not at all of Kathleen's holiday in Alpenruh.And Edward again proved his claim to the old and ancient order of Salt-cellar Strategists, by fighting out an entire minor campaign then raging in the Balkans, with the simple aid of a cruet-stand, two knives, a spoon, a fork, a spreading stain of mulberry juice ("This is Albania, d'you see, Nelly?") and the sauce-boat.There was no topic of the hour that Edward could not illustrate with the assistance of these homely vessels, be the subject of his demonstration a railway accident, a mechanical invention, or the defence of Troy.

Having annihilated Montenegro and the chicken at the same time, he pushed back his chair, and remarked ponderously: "I should like a few minutes with you in the study, Kath, if you're not too busy."

"...Well?"Nelly queried eagerly, half an hour later, on finding her husband alone.

"Can't make head or tail of it," said Edward, very angry."Either Kath is mad or I am."

Nelly supplied the necessary assurances.

"Well, but she says she won't marry him.Now what do you think of that?"The question was a mere form; Edward was aware what his wife thought of "that," and of everything else; to which satisfactory state of things might be attributed his domestic happiness.

"I've been very tactful," continued the head of the house; "very tactful and very lenient.I'm broad-minded, as you know."

"Yes.So am I, of course.But, Neddy, you must have bullied her.And you promised not to.Remember," and Nelly lowered her face, "she hasn't got a mother."

"Nor have I," crossly."The same mother.That by no means explains her extraordinary statement that she doesn't want to marry this fellow who has"—he hesitated between "compromised" and "seduced," then discarded both in favour of—"led her astray."

"And a nice sort of a blackguard he must be," added indignant brotherhood."Not want to marry him indeed!I should like to know why?"unconscious of anything contradictory in his explosive phrases.

But enlightenment had visited his wife, and her eyes brimmed with tears.

"Oh, poor Katty ...poor darling!I must go to her at once.Neddy, can't you see——" She paused on her hurrying mission of comfort to fling an aphorism of unwonted daring and brilliance at the head of her liege lord.

"It takes two to make a pair," said Nelly, and departed.

Slowly Edward Morrison grasped her meaning.Slowly, too, he grasped the fact that here was a perfectly unsubtle problem, to be attacked with a delightfully simple weapon—the horsewhip.And the soul of Edward Morrison was glad within him.That his sister should have sinned was terrible indeed; but not so terrible as that his sister should have new-fangled notions.

"'Pon my word, Nelly is a remarkable woman!"

The remarkable woman was at the moment mounting the stairs towards the bedrooms. Nelly Morrison, when unwed, had been known as the "Belle of Clapton," which over and beyond its reminiscence of pleasure-steamer, had also had a deteriorating effect upon her brains.Otherwise, she was a good-natured little soul, genuinely fond of her sister-in-law, and very anxious always that Kathleen should "feel that this is really her home."In furtherance of which desire, it was her habit to make Kathleen's room bright with flowers; flowers everywhere, on the dressing-table, amongst the ink and pens, on the window-sills, in the washstand-basin.She held now in her hand some half-wilted marguerites, symbols of comfort about as adequate as her husband's contemplated horsewhip of righteousness.

The room was in darkness when Nelly entered on tiptoe—and without knocking:

"Katty, are you in bed?"

Kathleen did not reply; drew the sheet close up to her burning cheeks.What a mess, what an unendurable mess these people were making of her days of enchantment.Perhaps if she did not move, Nelly would think her asleep, and go away.But a slight catch in the breath betrayed her wakefulness.

Nelly groped her way to the bed; felt for the other's hand.

"Katty, are you crying?"

No answer.

"Katty dear, won't he marry you?Is that it?Oh, Katty, I'm so sorry...."