The Cathedral Part 12

Sometimes he had a word with her. He knew that they must all be speaking of it. Maybe the whole town was chattering. He could not think of that. He had no plans, no determination, no resolve--and he was desperately unhappy....

Into this strange dark confusion the thought of his mother drove itself.

He had from the very beginning been aware of his father in this connection. In his own selfish way he loved his father, and he shared in his pride and self-content. He was proud of his father for being what he was, for his good-natured contempt of other people, for his handsome body and his dominance of the town. He could understand that his father should feel as he did, and he did honestly consider him a magnificent man and far above every one else in the place. But that did not mean that he ever listened to anything that his father said. He pleased himself in what he did, and laughed at his father's temper.

He had perceived from the first that this connection of his with Annie Hogg might do his father very much harm, and he did not want to harm him.

The thought of this did not mean that for a moment he contemplated dropping the affair because of his father--no, indeed--but the thought of the old man, as he termed him, added dimly to his general unhappiness. He appreciated the way that his father had taken his return from Oxford. The old man was a sportsman. It was a great pity that he should have to make him unhappy over this business. But there it was--you couldn't alter things.

It was this fatalistic philosophy that finally ruled everything with him.

"What must be must." If things went wrong he had his courage, and he was helped too by his contempt for the world....

He knew his father, but he was aware now that he knew nothing at all about his mother.

"What's _she_ thinking about?" he asked himself.

One afternoon he was about to go to Seatown when, in the pa.s.sage outside his bedroom, he met his mother. They both stopped as though they had something to say to one another. He did not look at all like her son, so fair, tall and aloof, as though even in his own house he must be on his guard, prepared to challenge any one who threatened his private plans.

"She's like a little mouse," he thought to himself, as though he were seeing her for the first time, "preparing to run off into the wainscot" He was conscious, too, of her quiet clothes and shy preoccupied timidity--all of it he seemed to see for the first time, a disguise for some purpose as secret, perhaps, as his own.

"Oh, Falk," she said, and stopped, and then went on with the question that she so often asked him:

"Is there anything you want?"

"No, mother, thank you. I'm just going out."

"Oh, yes...." She still stayed there nervously looking up at him.

"I was wondering----Are you going into the town?"

"Yes, mother. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"No, thank you." Still she did not move.

"Joan's out," she said. Then she went on quickly, "I wish you'd tell me if there were anything----"

"Why, of course." He laughed. "What exactly do you mean?"

"Nothing, dear. Only I like to know about your plans."

"Plans? I haven't any."

"No, but I always think you may be going away suddenly. Perhaps I could help you. I know it isn't very much that I can do, but anything you told me I think I could help you about.... I'd like to help you."

He could see that she had been resolving for some time to speak to him, and that this little appeal was the result of a desperate determination.

He was touched.

"That's all right, mother. I suppose father and you think I oughtn't to be hanging around here doing nothing."

"Oh, your father hasn't said anything to me. I don't know what he thinks.

But I should miss you if you went. It is nice for us having you, although, of course, it must seem slow to you here."

He stood back against the wall, looking past her out through the window that showed the grey sky of a misty day.

"Well, it's true that I've got to settle about doing something soon. I can't be home like this for ever. There's a man I know in London wants me to go in for a thing with him...."

"What kind of a thing, dear?"

"It's to do with the export trade. Travelling about. I should like that.

I'm a bit restless, I'm afraid. I should want to put some money into it, of course, but the governor will let me have something.... He wants me to go into Parliament."

"Parliament?"

"Yes," Falk laughed. "That's his latest idea. He was talking about it the other night. Of course, that's foolishness. It's not my line at all. I told him so."

"I wouldn't like you to go away altogether," she repeated. "It would make a great difference to me."

"Would it really?" He had a strange mysterious impulse to speak to her about Annie Hogg. The thought of his mother and Annie Hogg together showed him at once how impossible that was. They were in separate worlds. He was suddenly angry at the difficulties that life was making for him without his own wish. "Oh, I'll be here some time yet, mother," he said. "Well, I must get along now. I've got an appointment with a fellow."

She smiled and disappeared into her room.

All the way into Seatown he was baffled and irritated by this little conversation. It seemed that you could not disregard people by simply determining to disregard them. All the time behind you and them some force was insisting on places being taken, connections being formed. One was simply a bally p.a.w.n...a bally p.a.w.n....

But what was his mother thinking? Had some one been talking to her?

Perhaps already she knew about Annie. But what could she know? Girls like Annie were outside her ken. What could his mother know about life? The day did not help his dissatisfaction. The fog had not descended upon the town, but it had sent as its forerunner a wet sea mist, dim and intangible, depressing because it removed all beauty and did not leave even challenging ugliness in its place.

On the best of days Seatown was not beautiful. I have read in books romantic descriptions of Glebeshire coves, Glebeshire towns with the romantic Inn, the sanded floor, fishermen with gold rings in their ears and strange oaths upon their lips. In one book I remember there was a fine picture of such a place, with beautiful girls dancing and mysterious old men telling mysterious tales about ghosts and goblins, and, of course, somewhere in the distance some one was singing a chanty, and the moon was rising, and there was a nice little piece of Glebeshire dialect thrown in.

All very pretty.... Seatown cannot claim such prettiness. Perhaps once long ago, when there were only the Cathedral, the Castle, the Rock, and a few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown, in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little nest. And the time came when it was disturbed....

Even the Pol, a handsome river enough out beyond the town in the reaches of the woods, was no pretty sight at low tide when there was nothing to see but a thin, sluggish grey stream filtering through banks of mud to its destination, the sea. At high tide the river beat up against the crazy stone wall that bordered Pennicent Street; and on the further side there were green fields and a rising hill with a feathery wood to crown it. From the river, coming up through the green banks, Seatown looked picturesque, with its disordered cottages scrambling in confusion at the tail of the rock and the Cathedral and Castle n.o.bly dominating it. That distant view is the best thing to be said for Seatown.

To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were broken, their panes stuffed with paper; washing hung from house to house.

The windows that were not broken were hermetically sealed and filled with grimy plants and ferns, and here and there a photograph of an embarra.s.sed sailor or a smiling married couple or an overdressed young woman placed face outward to the street. Bridge Street tumbled with a dirty absent- mindedness into Pennicent Street. This, the main thoroughfare of Seatown, must have been once a handsome cobbled walk by the river-side. The houses, more than in Bridge Street, showed by their pillared doorways and their faded red brick that they had once been gentlemen's residences, with gardens, perhaps, running to the river's edge and a fine view of the meadows and woods beyond. To-day all was shrouded in a mist that was never stationary, that seemed alive in its shifting movement, revealing here a window, there a door, now a chimney-pot, now steps that seemed to lead into air, and the river, now at full tide and lapping the stone wall, seemed its drunken bewildered voice.

"Bally p.a.w.ns, that's what we are," Falk muttered again. It seemed to be the logical conclusion of the thoughts that had worried him, like flies, during his walk. Some one lurched against him as he stayed for a moment to search for the inn. A hot spasm of anger rose in him, so sudden and fierce that he was frightened by it, as though he had seen his own face in a mirror. But he said nothing. "Sorry," said a voice, and shadow faded into shadow.

He found the "Dog and Pilchard" easily enough. Just beyond it the river was caught into a kind of waterfall by a ridge of stone that projected almost into mid-stream. At high tide it tumbled over this obstruction with an astonished splash and gurgle. Even when the river was at its lowest there was a dim chattering struggle at this point. Falk always connected this noise with the inn and the power or enchantment of the inn that held him--"Black Enchantment," perhaps. He was to hear that struggling chatter of the river until his dying day.

He pushed through the pa.s.sage and turned to the right into the bar. A damp day like this always served Hogg's trade. The gas was lit and sizzled overhead with a noise as though it commented ironically on the fatuity of the human beings beneath it. The room was full, but most of the men-- seamen, loafers, a country man or two--crowded up to the bar. Falk crossed to a table in the corner near the window, his accustomed seat. No one seemed to notice him, but soon Hogg, stout and smiling, came over to him.

No one had ever seen Samuel Hogg out of temper--no, never, not even when there had been fighting in the place and he had been compelled to eject men, by force of arms, through the doors and windows. There had not been many fights there. Men were afraid of him, in spite of his imperturbable good temper. Men said of him that he would stick at nothing, although what exactly was meant by that no one knew.

He had a good word for every one; no crime or human failing could shock him. He laughed at everything. And yet men feared him. Perhaps for that very reason. The worst sinner has some kind of standard of right and wrong. Himself he may not keep it, but he likes to see it there. "Oh, he's deep," was Seatown's verdict on Samuel Hogg, and it is certain that the late Mrs. Hogg had not been, in spite of her husband's good temper, a happy woman.

He came up to Falk now,--smiling, and asked him what he would have. "Nasty day," he said. Falk ordered his drink. Dimly through the mist and thickened air the Cathedral chimes recorded the hour. Funny how you could hear them in every nook and corner of Polchester.

"Likely turn to rain before night," Hogg said, as he turned back to the bar. Falk sat there watching. Some of the men he knew, some he did not, but to-day they were all shadows to him. Strange how, from the moment that he crossed the threshold of that place, hot, burning excitement and expectation lapped him about, swimming up to him, engulfing him, swamping him body and soul. He sat there drowned in it, not stirring, his eyes fixed upon the door. There was a good deal of noise, laughter, swearing, voices raised and dropped, forming a kind of skyline, and above this a voice telling an interminable tale.

Annie Hogg came in, and at once Falk's throat contracted and his heart hammered in the palms of his hands. She moved about, talking to the men, fetching drinks, unconcerned and aloof as she always was. Seen there in the mist of the overcrowded and evil-smelling room, there was nothing very remarkable about her. Stalwart and resolute and self-possessed she looked; sometimes she was beautiful, but not now. She was a woman at whom most men would have looked twice. Her expression was not sullen nor disdainful; in that, perhaps, there was something fine, because there was life, of its own kind, in her eyes, and independence in the carriage of her head.

Falk never took his eyes from her. At that moment she came down the room and saw him. She did not come over to him at once, but stopped and talked to some one at another table. At last she was beside him, standing up against his table and looking over his head at the window behind him.