JENNY woke up the next morning in a gray land of mist. A sea-fog had come in to obliterate Trewinnard and even the sparkling month of June, creating a new and impalpable world, a strange undated season. Above the elm trees and the hill-tops the fog floated and swayed in vaporous eddies. Jenny's first impulse was to postpone the meeting on the cliffs, and yet the day somehow suited the enterprise. Shrouded fittingly, she would face whatever ghosts Maurice had power to raise.
"I'm going for a walk," she told May, "by myself. I want to tell Maurice not to hang about here any more because it gets on my nerves."
"I'll look after Frank when you're gone," said May.
"Don't let him eat any more wool off that lamb of his, will you?"
"All right."
"I sha'n't be long. Or I don't expect so."
"If he comes back from Plymouth before you come in, where shall I say you've gone?" May asked.
"Oh, tell him 'Rats!' I can't help his troubles. So long," said Jenny emphatically.
"Say 'ta—ta' nicely to your mother, young Frank," commanded Aunt May.
As Jenny faded into the mist, the boy hammered his farewells upon the window-pane; and for awhile in the colorless air she saw his rosy cheeks burning like lamps, or like the love for him in her own heart. Before she turned up the drive, she waited to listen for the click and tinkle of Granfa's horticulture, but there was no sound of his spade. Farther along she met Thomas.
"Morning! Mrs. Trewhella!"
"Morning, young Thomas."
"Going for a walk, are 'ee?"
"On the cliffs," Jenny nodded.
"You be careful how you do walk there. I wouldn't like for 'ee to fall over."
"Don't you worry. I'll take jolly good care I don't do that."
"Well, anybody ought to be careful on they cliffs. Nasty old place that is on a foggy morning." Then as she became in a few steps a wraith, he chanted in farewell courtesy, "Mrs. Trewhella!"
Along the farm road Jenny found herself continually turning round to detect in her wake an unseen follower. She had a feeling of pursuit through the shifting vagueness all around, and stopped to listen. There was no footstep: only the drip-drip, drip-drip of the fog from the elm boughs. Before she knew that she had gone so far, the noise of the sea sounded from the grayness ahead, and beyond there was the groan of a siren from some uncertain ship. Again she paused for footsteps, and there was nothing but the drip-drip, drip-drip of the fog in the quickset hedge. On the steep road that ran up towards Crickabella, the fog lifted from her immediate neighborhood, and she could see the washed-out sky and silver sun with vapors curling across the strange luminousness. On either side, thicker by contrast, the mist hung in curtains dreary and impenetrable. Very soon the transparency in which she walked was veiled again, and through an annihilation of shape and color and scent and sound, she pressed forward to the summit.
On the plateau, although the fog was dense enough to mask the edge of the cliff at a distance of fifty yards and to merge in a gray confusion sky and sea beyond, the fresher atmosphere lightened the general effect. She could watch the fog sweeping up and down in diaphanous forms and winged nonentities. The silence in the hedgeless, treeless country was profound. The sea, oily calm in such weather, gave very seldom a low sob in some cavern beneath the cliff. Far out a solitary gull cried occasionally.
How absurd, thought Jenny suddenly, to expect Maurice on such a day. What painting was possible in so elusive a landscape, so immaterial a scene? He was not at all likely to be there. She stood for a moment listening, and was violently startled by the sight of some animal richly hued even in such a negation of color. The fox slipped by her with lowered brush and ears laid back, vanishing presently over the side of the cliff. She had thought for a second that it was Trewhella's dog, and her heart beat very quickly in the eerie imagination of herself and his master alone in this grayness. She walked on over the cushions of heather, pricking her ankles in the low bushes of gorse. Burnet roses were in bloom, lying like shells on the ground. Ahead of her she saw a lonely flower tremulous in the damp mist. It was a blue columbine, a solitary plant full blown. She thought how beautiful it looked and stooped to pluck it. On second thoughts she decided that it would be a shame not to let it live, this lovely deep-blue flower, nodding faintly.
Jenny stood once more fronting the vapors on each side in turn, and was on the point of going home, when she perceived a shadow upon the mist that with approach acquired the outlines of a man and very soon proved to be Maurice. She noticed how pale he was and anxious, very unlike the old Maurice, even unlike himself of five or six weeks ago.
"You've come at last," he said.
"Yes, I've come to say you mustn't stay here no more. It worries me."
"Jenny," he said, "I knew I'd been a fool before I saw you again last first of May. I've known for four years what a fool and knave I'd been; but, oh, God, I never knew so clearly till the other day, till I'd hung about these cliffs waiting for you to come."
"Where was the good?" she asked. "It's years too late now."
"When I heard from Castleton where you were, I tried not to come. He told me I should make things worse. He said it would be a crime. And I tried not to all this winter. But you haunted me. I could not rest, and in April the desire to see you became a madness. I had to come."
"I think you acted very silly. It isn't as if you could do anything by coming. I never used to think about you."
"You didn't?" he repeated, agonized.
"Never. Never once," she stabbed. "I'd forgotten you."
"I deserve it."
"Of course you do. You can't mess up a girl's life and then come and say you're sorry the same as if you'd trod on her toe."
They were walking along involuntarily, and through the mist Jenny's words of sense, hardened to adamantine sharpness by suffering, cut clear and cruel and true. She did not like, however, to prosecute the close encounter in such a profusion of space. She fancied her words were lost in the great fog, and sought for some familiar outline that should point the way to Crickabella. Presently a narrow serpentine path gave her the direction.
"Along here," she said. "I can't talk up here. I feel as if there must be listeners in this fog. I wish it would get bright."
"It's like my life has been without you," said Maurice.
"Shut up," she stabbed again, "and don't talk silly. Your life's been quite all right till you took a sudden fancy to see me again."
"Walk carefully," said Maurice humbly. "We're very near the cliff's edge."
Land and air met in a wreathed obscurity.
"Down here," said Jenny.
They scrambled down into Crickabella, slipping on the pulpy leaves of withered bluebells, stumbling over clumps of fern and drenching themselves in the foxgloves, whose woolly leaves held the dripping fog.
"This is where I often used to sit," said Jenny. "Only it's too wet in the grass now. There's a rock here that's fairly dry, though it does look rather like a gravestone sticking up out of the ground."
They were now about half-way down the escarpment from the top of which the rampart of black cliff, sheer on either side of the path, ran up for twenty feet, so far as could be judged in the deceptive atmosphere. Jenny leaned against the stone outcrop and faced Maurice.
"Jenny," he began, "when I didn't turn up at Waterloo that first of May, I must have been mad. I don't want to make excuses, but I must have been mad."
"Yes, we can all say that, when we've done something we shouldn't have."
"I know it's not an excuse. But I went away in a jangle of nerves. I set my heart on you coming out to Spain, and when you wouldn't and I was there and thought of the strain of a passionate love that seemed never likely to come to anything vital, I gave up all of a sudden. I can't explain. It was like that statue. I had to break it, and I broke my heart in the same way."
"If you'd come back," said Jenny, determined he should know all his folly, "I'd have done anything, anything you asked. I'd have come to live with you forever."
"Oh, don't torture me with the irony of it all. Why were you so uncertain, then?"
"That's my business," she said coolly.
"But I never really was out of love with you. I was always madly in love," Maurice cried. "I traveled all over Europe, thinking I'd finished with love. I tried to be happy without you and couldn't because I hadn't got you. I adored you the first moment I saw you. I adore you now and forever. Oh, believe me, my heart of hearts, my life, my soul, I love you now more, more than ever."
"Only because I'm someone else's," said Jenny.
"No," he cried. "No! no! The passion and impetuousness and unrestraint is all gone. I love you now—it sounds like cant—for yourself, for your character, your invincible joyousness, your glory in life, your perfection of form. Words! What are they? See how this fog destroys the world, making it ghostly. My mere passion for you is gone like the world. It's there, it must be there always, but your spirit, your personality can destroy it in a moment. Oh, what a tangle of nonsense. Forgive me. I want forgiveness, and once you said 'Bless you.' I want that."
"I don't hate you now," Jenny said. "I did for a time. But not now. Now you're nothing. You just aren't at all. I've got a boy who I love—such a rogue, bless him—and what are you any more?"
"I deserve all this. But once you were sorry when I—when I——"
"Ah, once," she said. "Once I was mad, too. I nearly died. I didn't care for nothing, not for anything. You was the first man that made me feel things like love. You! And I gave you more than I'd ever given anyone, even my mother. And you threw it all back in my face—because you are a man, I suppose, and can't understand. And when I was mad to do something that would change me from ever, ever being soppy again, from ever loving anyone again, ever, ever, I went and gave myself to a rotter—a real, dirty rotter. Just nothing but that—if you know what I mean. And that was your fault. You started me off by teaching me love. I wanted to be loved. Yes. But I gave too much of myself to you as it was, and I gave nothing to him really. Only anyone would say I did. And then my mother went mad, because she thought I was gone gay; and she died; and I got married to what's nothing more than an animal. But they're all animals. All men. Some are nicer sorts of animals than others, but they're all the same. And that's me since you left me. Only now I've got a boy, and he's like me. He's got my eyes, and I'm going to teach him, so as he isn't an animal, see? And I've got my little sister May, who I promised I'd look after, and I have.... Go away, Maurice, leave me. I don't want you. I can't forgive you. I can only just not care whether you're there or not. But go away, because I don't want to be worried by other people."
Maurice bowed his head.
"I see, I see that I have suffered nothing," he said. "Superficial fool that I am. Shallow, shallow ass, incompetent, dull and unimaginative block! I'm glad I've seen you. I'm glad I've heard you say all that. You've taught me something—perhaps in time. I'm only twenty-eight now—and fancy, you're only twenty-four—so I can go and think what might have been and, better, what I may be through you, what I will be. I won't say I'm sorry. That would be an impertinence ... as you said, I simply am not at all."
The mist closed round them thicker for a moment; then seemed to lighten very slowly. Jenny was staring at the cliff's top.
"Is that a bush blowing up and down or a man's head bobbing?"
"I don't see any man," he answered.
"Good-bye," Jenny said.
"Good-bye."
She turned to the upward path, pulling herself up the quicker by grasping handfuls of fern fronds. Suddenly there was a shout through the fog.
"Snared, my lill wild thing!"
There came a report. Jenny fell backwards into the ferns and foxgloves and withered bluebells.
"Good God!" cried Maurice. "You're hurt."
"Something funny's happened. Oh! Oh! It's burning," she shrieked. "Oh, my throat! my throat!... my throat!"
The sea-birds wheeled about the mist, screaming dismay.
| Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: |
| techinque=>technique |
| assimiliated form=>assimilated form |
| later's opinion=latter's opinion |
| nose is high=>nose as high |
| baseles=>baseless |
| afternon=>afternoon |
| biabolic strangeness=>diabolic strangeness |
| yet you know=>let you know |
| as got a most=>has got a most |
| than oy=>than by |
| unseeen follower=>unseen follower |
| Bochym=>Bochyn |
| Terpsichore=>Terpischore |
| faintiest=>faintest |
| shooked her head=>shook her head |
| beanfast at Clacton=>beanfeast at Clacton |
| you'm a marvel=>you're a marvel |