Mushroom Town Part 14

"I hope it won't stop long," June replied.

John Willie also hoped it would not stop long, but for the life of him he couldn't have told you why he hoped so. Indeed he tried to smother the hope. He tried to smother it because he had an obscure feeling that--that--well, if a reason can smile, that his reason for not wishing to stay up there too long was quietly smiling at him. It seemed to tell him that he and everything about him were enviably all right--safe--thoroughly and entirely comfortable--need have no fears for the future--and that all would continue to be just as comfortable and safe and altogether all right until he should come to die, in a best bed, with eiderdowns, and frilled pillow-cases, and hot bottles, and the certainty of a handsomely appointed funeral a few days later. Few were as sure of their future as that. John Willie was one of the lucky ones....

He moved, not to the windows from which he could look down on the lights of the Promenade and Pier, but to those that were turned to the dark and unseen mountains. Somehow this reason he had for hoping that the car would not stop long seemed to come from there. He told himself that he would be better presently. He had these--bad humours, call them--sometimes. He hid them from June, but Minetta had noticed them, and he knew all about them himself. He turned to June again.

"I wonder what's happened," he said.

"It's--it's quite safe, isn't it?" June asked.

"Oh, quite." His lips compressed a little. It was quite safe--neither more nor less safe than everything else in John Willie's life. That, somehow, was at the bottom of these ill-humours of his.

"Dash it," he muttered....

"It is a nuisance," June agreed. "But I don't suppose Minetta will be anxious."

"I wasn't thinking of Minetta," John Willie replied.

Now when you are reluctant to enter into explanation, and there is something you badly want to do, you never (if you are an ordinary young man) look very far for a reason. The first that comes will serve your turn. If it is a flimsy one, no matter; you then get angry when its flimsiness is pointed out to you, and presently out of your anger and obstinacy you will have found a reason as good as another. John Willie did not at all like those interior smiling taunts of himself that took the form of congratulations on his neatly planned life and pillowed and feathered death to close it. If anybody of his own weight had taunted him thus he would have knocked that person down. But you cannot knock down a whisper that seems to come on the wind from the mountains through the night, making you, your ordered comfort notwithstanding, absolutely wretched. Again John Willie turned to June.

"I say, June; this won't do, you know," he said.

June looked enquiringly at him.

"But we can't do anything but wait, dear, can we?"

He did not answer.

They waited. Half an hour pa.s.sed. Then John Willie muttered again that, among so many other things that would "do" beautifully, this particular thing would not "do." June coloured a little.

"But--but--it isn't our fault," she murmured, picking at the fingers of her gloves.

He saw she understood. Again they waited.

Then, suddenly, John Willie came shortly out with that reason that must serve in the stead of his real reason. He knew how lame it was. A score or two of other young couples were in precisely the same situation as they, and more that cheerfully resigned to their plight; but then they were not being goaded and taunted as John Willie was being goaded and taunted. They were not being told that their paths lay, so to speak, on flowers, while the paths of others were the stony road, that cut and blistered the foot, and tired the eyes, and bowed the back (but had no power, perhaps, thus to reproach the heart).... Anyway, John Willie was not disposed to stand it.

"June," he said abruptly, "I can't stay up here all night with you."

Her wail interrupted him.--"Oh-h-h!----"

"It wouldn't do."

"Oh-h-h--it isn't our fault----"

"No, but that can't be helped. The woman I marry----"

"Oh-h-h--but there isn't anything to do!"

"Oh, yes there is. We needn't be together. I can get into another car or something. It will only be like walking along the footboard of a train."

She gave a little shriek.--"Oh--if you do I shall throw myself out--I know I shall!----"

"You won't do anything so silly. Get up, dear; I've quite made up my mind. I tell you it wouldn't do. The woman I marry...."

With gentle force he picked her up and set her on the seat of the car. Then he approached the window. There was a bar across it, which it took him a minute to bend, but the chances were that where his head would pa.s.s the rest of his body might follow. June hid her face and moaned as he took off his coat; then he kissed her and thrust his head under the bar. He wriggled through, stood on the footboard, smiled again grimly through the window, and then looked down.

At any rate, he had given a reason of sorts.

Then he looked up.

Instantly he saw that, unless head or wrist or finger should unexpectedly fail him, the most dangerous part of his exploit lay at the very beginning. There was no descent from the step on which he stood. The cars were slung from axles, and in order to get to the rim that held the axles themselves he must climb to the roof of the coach. He glanced at the roof of the coach twenty feet below and to his left. He saw that it had a curved rain-sill like that of the top of a railway carriage. Good; the coaches would be all alike. He set his knees in the window-frame once more. June was still lying with her face hidden on the seat. His fingers felt blindly for the rain-sill; they found it, and he moistened his other hand. He wished he could have glued it, for for some moments mere friction must be half his support. For an instant he thought calmly and abysmally; then he risked it....

It succeeded. He knelt on the roof, holding the sling and coupling that hung from the car-axle overhead. He glanced up at the axle to which he must swarm. The singing in the cars continued, and a babble of sound rose lightly from below. Evidently he had not been seen to get out of the car.

But then, who would have thought of looking?

It was as he swarmed up the coupling that there first came over him the sense of the difference between the reason he had given, and the real reason that had brought him out from that brightly lighted and cushioned car in which he might far more easily have stopped. And the realisation of that difference brought with it, very strangely, the sense, not of bodily peril, but of inner peace. It was unaccountable, but there it was, not to be argued about. The only thing that disturbed this peace, and that but lightly, was that his venture had not a more profitable object. Folk did less dangerous things for far better reason--to save life, or property, or something else worth while. But this neck-risking of his was--could only be--bravado. He knew perfectly well that in the circ.u.mstances n.o.body would have thought a penny the worse of June. "The woman I marry----" he had known that to be an hypocrisy even when he had said it. No, he was merely idiotically showing-off, and that peace at his heart would presently prove to be an illusion....

It was quite suddenly, as he lay out along the Wheel's topmost car-axle, that the thought of Ynys came to him. He didn't know why it should come at that moment, unless it was born of his bodily isolation on the very top of that immense bracelet hung with trinkets of cars. But perhaps it was that; perhaps there was a connection, if only an idle and fanciful one. Save perhaps the keeper of the Trwyn light, n.o.body in Llanyglo was nearer the stars than he that night; and only Mynedd Mawr had been higher than he when he had lain on the rocky head of Delyn....

Or was it, not the isolation of his body at all, but his isolation of soul, that had brought that mysterious and inexplicable and probably fallacious peace.

While not ceasing to keep his carefully calculating eyes open, and every motor-fold of his brain intent on the preservation of his balance, he began to think of Delyn.

He had stayed many days up there; some weeks perhaps; he couldn't have told you how long. Its rain had soaked him, and its winds dried him again; its streams had fed him and its herbage furnished his litter at night; but the sun itself had not warmed him more than had her impulsive looks and surrendering gestures when he had but lifted up a hand. With another eye than that that now measured the distances between girders and axles and ties, he seemed to see the rocks again, and the lake shining in its morning intactness, and the drowned bubbles of the fall in the Glyn, and the thin wind stroking the short gra.s.s, and the mountain-ashes under which they had sat, their leaves like finger-prints against the sky. He could see again the trout she had cooked for him--her breast had fluttered as those dying silvery things had fluttered, silvery as that dry old scar he had kissed. He could smell the smoke of her morning fire again, her hair, her breast.... And he could hear again the shrill warning note in that unique voice of hers that had first set him wondering whether, after all, it would "do." ...

That quarrel had not been on that heart-breaking morning of their parting. There had been no quarrel then. No; it had been at something unguarded he had said about his sister and her friends. Yes, he saw again the insensate jealous flame in those seaweed eyes, and heard the ugly pa.s.sionate cracking of the voice in which she had cried, "They noth-thing, your fine miss-es! They mar-ry house without a man if they could--they take house in their arms--they make those eyes at house, and kiss house, and call it cariad! You no dif-ferent from them! You go to your miss and say, 'I have house'--she want-t you then!----" It had taken a whole morning before he had had her, humble and sobbing and remorseful and enslaved, in his arms again.... No, it wouldn't have done to marry a temper like that--and, temper altogether apart, it wouldn't have done. There are only a few years of this world and its companionships, and, though your friends may have their twists and crankinesses, they are still your friends, all you are likely to have. Better be in the stream with them while you are here. He would only have been sorry for it later, on her account as well as on his own. She had been quicker to see that than he, and had spoken of it in her soft and halting English. At first he had laughed and said "Kiss me" ... but she had been right....

But John Willie, with a Wheel to descend, must not let these things take him too far from the business in hand.

He had reached a chain in a great guiding sprocket, but he thought of what at any moment a hand upon a lever in the power-house far below might do, and of one of his father's men who had once been carried round shafting. No moving parts for him.... He looked down through an iron-framed lozenge at the people below. The grounds resembled a tray of many-coloured moving beads. All Llanyglo seemed to have run to see the stopped Wheel. Probably the Pier itself was half empty. If so, all the more room for anybody who wanted to watch, not a Wheel, but the moon lift her gilded sacrificial horn out of the sea.... There had been far too much drub-drub-drubbing. John Willie was weary of it. It was time he settled down. And Llanyglo itself seemed to have come to much the same conclusion. It had begun to make a restriction here and a regulation there, as if it wished to purge itself of its evil name. There was no doubt that for a time it had been a very sinful place, and ... (here John Willie, with a slow steady pull, hoisted himself to where he wished to be, on the long curved upper plate of a ma.s.sive H, rivet-studded like a boiler, that was knitted with iron lace to other H's--John Willie must not venture too far down that slope unless he should suddenly acquire a fly's faculty for walking upside-down) ... and perhaps the town had begun to get a little frightened, as sinful people, and perhaps sinful towns also, sometimes do. But that would be all right presently. Llanyglo was going, in a manner of speaking, to be married. It was turning over, had turned over, a new leaf. Soon it would be a churlish thing to reproach it for a past that it had lived down; it was becoming sadder and wiser, and better able to distinguish between the things that would "do" and the things that would not. The less talk ... (here John Willie began to realise that he was not a fly, and to collect his nerves for the turn-over to the under side of that H that a few yards away dropped over, with a little gleam, into nothing) ... the less talk the soonest mended. He did not intend to say--anything--to June. Indeed he intended ... (there: that was rather a jerk to his shoulder socket, but he was safely underneath) ... indeed he intended that his att.i.tude to June about such matters should be rather severe. This was not because June's own thoughts were in the least degree lax (she erred, if anywhere, on the prudish side), but because women were very tender things. A whisper was fatal to them. That was why John Willie was clinging now to that enormous piece of knitting of iron and upholstered carriages and electric light. He had climbed out in order that n.o.body should be able to say, after that, that....

Then it was that he knew, once and for ever, that this was a lie. Then it was that he knew that he was not where he was, suspended between the stars of heaven and the lamps of earth, on June's account. He was there because a gipsy girl had called him. This was his service, not of the pretty and pleasant June he was presently going to marry, but of one whom he had not married, of one he had not feared to compromise, of one who had known nothing, cared nothing, save that she had been lost in a wild and tender and beautiful love. She, none other, had called him---- Then, too, it was that there rose to him from below a faint yet high and shuddering "A-a-a-ah!" that was followed by a sudden cessation of all sound whatever save only a distant throb and pulsing in the Dancing-Hall. It surprised him for a moment; then he remembered. Of course. He had been seen---- She, none other, had called him, and he knew now that so she would continue to call him, wherever he might be--from his labour by day and from his rest by night, from his laughter with his children and his clasping of his wife. She would continue to call him until softness and ease should have done their slow and fatal work, would continue to call him until that nerve, with her harping on it, should have become dull....

He seemed to hear the echoes of that voiceless calling, diminishing through the years to come. They would end in a silence that his wife's innocent garrulity would never, never be able to break---- The faint throb in the Dancing-Hall also ceased. The Kursaal Gardens were a bead mat of faces. There was not a whisper. Delyn was not stiller.

Unconscious that already he was black and torn and bleeding, he looked down from his girder upon the bead mat. He knew what, presently, if he came down alive, every bead there would be singing--his daring and his quixotry and his devotion, and the possession by June of a husband who would do this rather than suffer the lightest breath upon the mirror of her name---- He looked at them as he clung, scarce bigger than a speck, high in that webbed diadem of the Wheel---- And as he hung there, with only the guardian of the Trwyn light higher than he, and the rest of the descent still to make, he still could not decide, of the two things that oppressed his heart, which was the atonement and which the sin.

II.

ADIEU.

"You're leaving Llanyglo? Well, holidays must come to an end.--You'd like another walk up the Trwyn? Very well; but you've seen all there is to see....

"Here we are.... What's going on at the Light? Oh, that's the Board of Trade, experimenting with some new fog apparatus or other. By the way, the Light people are rather sore because of a new Regulation, that they mustn't have lodgers at the farm; and also because they'd like to grow roses up the look-out wall, and that's prohibited too; I suppose the authorities think they'd be spending the day looking at the roses instead of at the ships. They've moved the rocket apparatus farther along the coast; they found it wasn't much use here, and it's turned out very successfully at Abercelyn.--Eh? Yes, where the manganese comes from. They still get a certain quant.i.ty, but there's peace in the Balkans or wherever it is for the moment, so n.o.body's growing very rich out of the mines here....

"Hallo, that's rather a coincidence. Don't look round too quickly. You see that tallish man over there? I don't suppose you've even seen him before; as a matter of fact he hasn't been--er--to be seen. He got into trouble once; in plain English, they put him in prison. His name's Armfield, and his trouble was all about Llanyglo. Awkward things, meetings like these. I think Armfield's a capital chap, and I should like to go and talk to him; but prison's a cruel thing, and you never know how the poor fellow himself feels about it.... Ah! As I thought, he looks rather broken. If you don't mind we won't watch him. Come on to the Dinas and have a smoke....

"How's John Willie Garden? Perfectly rosy, if beginning to get a bit fat. Lucky dog! Four children, two boys and two girls, quite an amiable chatter-box of a wife, and rich enough to buy almost anything he wants. Lucky, lucky dog!--Did I tell you he was the adopted Conservative Free Trade candidate for one of the Manchester divisions? Not that he cares a snap about Free Trade politically; economically it merely happens to be a good part of his bread and b.u.t.ter; but then you have to be careful about what you say on platforms, and so John Willie talks like the editor of the Spectator himself. June Garden runs her two houses, one here and one in Manchester, like clockwork, and they go backwards and forwards between them in a really regal car. Every tramp and gipsy on the road knows that car. However fast he's driving, John Willie always pulls up and gives them a shilling. Just a foible of his. We all have 'em in one shape or form.

"Llanyglo's going in heartily for these new proposals for advertising the town out of the rates. A young man called Ithel Williams is very keen on it; he's a son of Tudor Williams, the Tudor Williams who used to be M.P. for this division. Young Ithel's got rather a nice billet here, as Librarian or something for the Council, and if this new thing goes through he'll be quite in clover.--Jobbery? Well, I suppose that's the name for it, but personally I'm not altogether against it. It seems to me that the only alternative is putting these berths up for compet.i.tive examination, which in my opinion's failed all along the line, so find the right man and then job him in, I say.--The right man's so frequently a relative? Well ... there you are. That is the weak spot. But there's always a crab somewhere....

"I wonder if Armfield's gone yet? Let's have a look.... No, he's still there....

"A good season? Yes, from all accounts it's been a very good season. There have been better from the purely money point of view, I should say, but after all everybody can't be everything, and every place can't get all there is. Llanyglo, like other places, has its natural limits of expansion. I don't think it will get any bigger yet awhile. There's no doubt the Wakes people were the people who flung the money about, and they've a little fallen off; but even if Llanyglo has to write down some of its obligations it will probably gain in the long run. A section of the Council's coming to see that, and is pressing for reconstruction (that's always rather wonderful to me, that they should construct things of solid materials and then reconstruct them by saying they cost less than they did); but that's the Council's business, or rather the powers behind the Council. Edward Garden isn't one of these any longer, at any rate not to the extent he was. He sits in Manchester and makes towns in Canada now. But he still looks at letters under his gla.s.ses, and over them, and backwards and forwards and upside down, and then looks mildly up at you and says the letter seems to be a letter....

"A last look at the place: there you are: bay, Promenade, Pier, the ring of mountains behind. It grew from a few fishermen's huts to over-capitalisation in a very few years. And there's Terry Armfield, still looking at it all, like a not very old Rip Van Winkle. I wonder what he's thinking! I suppose he couldn't keep away, but must come and remember it as it was and dream over it again as it was never, never to be.... Walk past quickly; he's sobbing, poor chap. His dream was of a place--I don't know how to describe it--all friendliness and loveliness and graciousness, fowl and flesh and good red-herring all in one, so to speak, what you might call a diaphanous sort of place, a jolly place to think of during those few minutes of the morning or evening when you're not quite asleep and not quite awake, but--hm!--I'm not so sure ... not in this imperfect world....

"Anyway, that down there is what he sees....

"I suppose the other wouldn't have done....

"Shall we go?"

THE END.