The Good Comrade Part 34

CAPTAIN POLKINGTON

Captain Polkington was watching a pan of jam. It was the middle of the day and warm; too warm to be at work out of doors, as Johnny was, at least so the Captain thought. He also thought it too warm to watch jam in the back kitchen and that occupation, though it was the cooler of the two, had the further disadvantage of being beneath his dignity.

The dignity was suffering a good deal; was it right, he asked himself, that he, the man of the house, should have the menial task of watching jam while Julia talked business with some one in the parlour? He did not know what business this person had come on; he had seen him arrive a few minutes back, had even heard his name--Mr. Alexander Cross--but that was all he knew about him; Julia had taken him into the parlour and shut the door. Naturally her father felt it and was annoyed.

There was a door leading into the parlour from the front kitchen. It was fast closed but the Captain, leaving the jam to attend to itself, went and looked at it. While he was standing there he heard three words spoken on the other side by the visitor; they were--"your new daffodil."

So that was the business this man had come on! He was trying to buy Julia's ugly streaked flower. The Captain's weak mouth set straight; he felt very strongly about the daffodil and his daughter's refusal to sell it. He knew she might have done so; she had had a good many letters about it since it was exhibited in London. She said little about the offers they contained, but he knew she refused them all; he had taxed her with it and argued the question to no purpose. Now, to-day, it seemed there was a man so anxious to buy the thing that he had actually come to see her; and she, of course, would refuse again.

The Captain sat down in the easy-chair; he was overcome by the thought of Julia's contrary stupidity.

The chair was near the door, but he would have scouted the idea that he was listening; he was a man of honour, and why should he wish to hear Julia refuse good money? Also it was impossible to hear all that was said unless the speakers were close to the door. Apparently they must have been near for no sooner had he sat down than he heard the man say, "Haven't I had the pleasure of seeing you somewhere before, Miss Snooks? Your face seems familiar though I can't exactly locate it."

"We met at Marbridge," Julia answered; "at a dance, a year and a half ago."

"At Marbridge? Oh, of course! Funny I shouldn't have remembered when I heard your name the other day!"

Captain Polkington did not think it at all funny; he did not know who Mr. Cross might be, n.o.body important he judged by his voice and manner--hostesses at Marbridge often had to import extra nondescript men for their dances. But whoever he was, if he had been there once he might go there again and carry with him the tale of Julia's doings and home and other things detrimental to the Polkington pride. The Captain listened to hear one of the two in the other room refer to the change of name which had prevented an earlier recognition. But neither did; she saw no reason for it, and he had forgotten her original name if he ever knew it.

"I remember all about you now," he was saying; "you danced with me several times and asked me about the Van Heigens' blue daffodil"--he paused as if a new idea had occurred to him. "You were not in the line then, I suppose?" he asked.

"No, I knew nothing about flower growing or selling," she answered.

"What you told me of the value of the blue daffodil was a revelation to me."

He laughed a little. "But one you'll try to profit by," he said.

The Captain moved in his chair. He could have groaned aloud at the words, which represented precisely what Julia would not do.

Unfortunately his movement had much the same effect as his groan would have done, some one on the other side of the door moved too, and in the opposite direction. It must have been Julia, her father was sure of it; it was like her to do it; she must have gone almost to the window; he could not make out what was said. The man was no doubt trying to buy the bulb; a stray word here and there indicated that, but it was impossible to hear what offer was made. It was equally impossible to hear what Julia said; her father only caught the inflection of her voice, but he was sure she was refusing.

In disgust and anger he rose and, having pulled the jam to the side of the fire, went into the garden. There he took the hoe and started irritably to work on a bed near the front door; it was some relief to his feelings to scratch the ground since he could not scratch anything else.

In a little while Cross came out. "Well, if you won't, you won't," he was saying as Julia opened the door. "I think you are making a mistake; in fact, if you weren't a lady I should say you were acting rather like a fool; but, of course, you must please yourself. If you think better of it you can always write to me. Just name the price, a reasonable price, that's all you need do. We understand one another, and we can do business without any fuss--you have my address?"

He gave her a card as he spoke, although she a.s.sured him she should not want it; then he took his leave.

She watched him go, tearing up the card when he had set off down the road. Captain Polkington watched her.

"What did he want?" he asked, remembering that he was not supposed to know.

"The bulb," she answered.

"And you would not sell it?"

"No."

She had come from the doorstep now to pull up some weeds he had overlooked.

"I can't understand you, Julia," he said resting on his hoe, and speaking as much in sorrow as in anger. "You seem to have so little sense of honour--women so seldom have--but I should have thought that you would have had a lesson on the necessity, the obligation of paying debts. When you come to think of the efforts we are making to pay those debts, how I am straining every nerve, giving almost the whole of my income, doing without everything but the barest necessaries, without some things that are necessaries in my state of health, what your mother is doing, how she has given up her home, her husband, to live almost on charity in her son-in-law's house. When you think of all that, I say, and of what your sisters have done, it does seem strange that you should grudge this bulb, simply and solely because it was given you by some people for whom you care nothing."

Julia agreed; she never saw the purpose of contradicting when conviction was out of the question. "It does seem strange," she said; "but there is one comfort, the worst of the debts will be cleared off by the end of the year. Uncle William knows that and has arranged for it in his own mind; I really think it would be almost a pity to disturb the business plans of any one so exact."

"Are we," the Captain returned scornfully, "to pinch and save to the end of the year? Am I to do without the few comforts that might make life tolerable? Am I to work like a farm labourer and live like one till then, because you choose to keep this bulb?"

Julia thought it was very probable things would go on as they were for some time, but she did not say so; she only said, "I am sorry you find it so trying."

"Trying!" her father said, and stopped, as if he found the word and most others very inadequate. "After all, it does not much matter," he remarked in a tone of gloomy resignation. "I shan't be here, in any one's way, much longer; there is not the least chance that I shall live till the end of the year, and when I am gone you can do what you please, what you must, with your bulb. I own I should like to see you a little more comfortable and better off now. I hate to have you doing servant's work and going shabby as you have to. I should like you to be decently dressed, taking your proper place in society, but if you think it right to go on as you are and to keep your bulb, of course I have nothing to say."

It was as well he had nothing, for Julia remembered the jam and went indoors, so he would have had no one to say it to. She went into the back kitchen, thinking, but not of the jam. Once again the temptation to sell the daffodil beset her; not to Cross, he was the last man to whom she would have sold it, but to some collector who would care for it as the Van Heigens would. She could easily find such a one with or without a.s.sistance from Cross; little harm would be done to the Van Heigens by it; indeed Joost had expected her to do no less, and if she did it she could pay--not the debts her father had mentioned--but the one he had not. She had thought this all out before, seen the arguments on both sides, and arrived at her conclusion; but there are some things that are not content with this treatment once, nor even twice, but demand it a good many more times than that. So she thought it out again and came again to the old conclusion. Joost had given her the bulb because he loved her; he had made no conditions because he believed in her; he had even professed himself content that she should sell it because, in his humbleness and generosity, he wanted only that she should get what ease she could. He was content to make what was to him a great sacrifice for no other reason than that she should have a little more money on mere caprice, the very nature of which he did not know. And so she could not do it, that was the end of the whole matter. She could not take the gift of the man who loved her to pay a debt to the man she loved.

She went to fetch jam pots, without calling herself to order for the last admission. It was the one luxury she had at that time; daily and nightly she could admit to herself that she loved him and he loved her. Not exactly pa.s.sionately--they were not pa.s.sionate people, she told herself--but in an odd companionable equal sort of way which was the best in the world. Nothing would ever come of it, even in the remote future when her father was dead and the debt paid. By that time both of them would have grown old and set in their far separate ways, and even if he ever heard that she was free he would have become wiser and changed his mind. So there was no end to this thing, no awakening and disillusioning, none of the disappointment and dreariness which is likely to attend the translating of a dream into work-a-day life. For that reason it should have been possible to be content, even with the thing which stood between her and realisation--sometimes it almost was, at least she persuaded herself so. At others there were things harder to control; brief moments when crushing down all opposition and obliterating other thoughts, came the memory of how she had crouched behind the chopping-block, how hidden her tears in his coat. There was no reason or common-sense in that, no friendship or good-fellowship in the clasp of his arms; it was the natural man and the natural woman, and absence could not change it, nor time take it away; it had been, it might be again, it obeyed no law and answered to no argument in the world. It was something which made her ashamed and afraid and yet glad with a rare incommunical gladness that was pointed with pain.

Just then the jam boiled over, and she had to leave her pots to run and save it.

It is a great thing to have your mind under fair control; the Polkington training, wherein the advisable and advantageous were compelled to rank high even in matter of emotion, is not without use in bringing this about. But it is also a great thing, almost, perhaps, a more important one for some people, to have plenty to do even if it is only making jam.

While Julia made her jam Captain Polkington hoed; at least he did for a little while, then he gradually ceased and stood leaning upon his hoe, lost in unhappy thought. At last he moved, and, gathering the withering weeds that lay beside the path, carried them to an old basket which he had left beside the garden wall. With the weeds he picked up the torn fragments of card which Julia had dropped beside the doorstep; he let them fall into the basket with the other rubbish, but when he saw them gleaming white among the green they arrested his attention. For a moment he looked at them, then he carefully picked them out; he had some thought of appealing to Julia once more, or telling her that he had saved the man's address for her and she had one last chance. He sat down on the wall; would it be any good to appeal? he asked himself despondently. Would anything be any good? Was not everything a failure? No one regarded him; Cross, the man whose card he held, had not even glanced in his direction when he went down the path. A miserable bargain-driving tradesman had pa.s.sed him and paid no more attention to him than if he had been a gardener! Gillat, his own friend, did not regard him, thought nothing of his comforts; he was all for Julia; thought of nothing and no one else. As for Julia herself, she had not the slightest regard for him, no consideration, not even filial respect and obedience.

He looked gloomily before him for a little, then his eye fell on the white fragments he held, the address of the man who was anxious to buy the daffodil which Julia in her obstinate folly and selfish unreasonableness, would not sell. If it only were sold! He thought over all the good things that could then be done; they were the same as those excellent reasons that he had himself given a little while back. Some people might have said they were rather diverse and not all mutually inclusive, but no such idea troubled him; he was sure all could easily have been done if the daffodil were sold. He felt that he could have done it all quite well, he did not stop to think how--if he had had the handling of the money he could have been a benefactor to his whole family, especially Julia. It was hard that he should be prevented, bitterly hard; it had so often happened in his life that he had been prevented from doing what was good and useful by want of means and opportunity or the stupid obstinacy of other people. He grew more and more depressed as he sat on the wall thinking of these things and wondering if there were many men so useless, so unfortunate and misunderstood as he.

This depression lasted all that day and on into the next; indeed, for some time longer. It lifted a little once in the course of a week, but not much, and soon settled down again, making the Captain very miserable, disinclined for work, and decidedly bad company. Johnny thought he was not well, but Julia fancied his trouble had something to do with annoyance and the daffodil. He did not confide in either of them, maintaining a proud and gloomy silence and nursing his grievance so that it grew. For days he cherished his sense of injury and wrong, until it became large and took a good hold upon him. Then, all at once, for no reason that one can give, a change came, and his mind, as if smitten by a gust of wind, began to veer about, to stir and lighten. Why, he suddenly asked himself, was it that Julia would not sell the bulb? Because--the answer was so absurdly simple he wondered it had not occurred to him before--because it was the Van Heigens'

present, and one cannot sell presents. He perfectly understood the scruple, honoured it even; but he also saw quite plainly that, though it prevented her from selling the daffodil, it did not stand in the way of its being sold. She could not, of course, authorise the sale, any more than she could conduct it; but that was no reason why she should not be very pleased to have it sold. Indeed, not only was this a probability, practically a certainty, but more than likely she had had some such idea in her mind when she spoke of the matter to her father--in all likelihood she was wondering now why he had not taken the hint.

Thus Captain Polkington reasoned, seeing light at last in the dimness of the depression which had possessed him. Quite how much he really believed, or even if he were capable of real reasonable belief at this stage of his career, it is not easy to say. It is possible he may have thought he was right for the time being; his conscience was capable of remarkable gymnastic feats at times. It is also possible that he, like some others of the human race, was not really able to think at all.

Anyhow the depression that weighed upon him lifted, and he remembered with satisfaction that he had kept the torn fragments of Cross' card.

In the early part of the summer the hyacinths, tulips, and finer narcissus had been taken out of the ground and put to dry. Julia hoped by this means to get more and better flowers from them next year than is the case when they are left in the earth. They took some time to dry and were not really ready till the summer was far advanced; but that did not matter to her, however it may have inconvenienced her father; she was too busy to attend to them earlier. By the middle of August they were ready, and she set to cleaning them in her spare time with Johnny to help her. He was proud and pleased to do so, and did not in the least mind the extreme irritation of the skin which befalls those who rub off the old loose husks. A place was prepared for the bulbs in one of the sheds, the wide shelf cleared and part.i.tions made in it by Mr. Gillat, who also spent some time in writing labels for each of the divisions. Julia told him this was unnecessary as she knew by the shape which were hyacinths and which tulips; still he did it.

Captain Polkington did not offer any a.s.sistance; he merely looked on with indifferent interest; the matter did not seem to concern him.

But one day, towards the end of the month, but before the bulbs were all done, Julia went into the town.

Captain Polkington saw her start; then he wandered to the shed where Johnny was at work. For a little he stood watching, then he walked leisurely round the place looking at this and that.

"You will never be able to tell which is which of these things," he remarked at last.

Johnny looked at his somewhat conspicuous labels. "I've named them, don't you see 'Tulips?'"

"But you don't say what sort of tulips, which are red and which yellow. Nor what sort of narcissus, which are daffodils and which the bunchy things."

"No," Mr. Gillat admitted; "no, they got mixed in the digging up; I forgot, and put them all in the barrow together; that's how it happened."

"What? The whole lot?" the Captain inquired. "The streaked daffodil and all? What did Julia say?"

"She said it did not matter," Johnny told him; "they'll be all the more surprise to us when they come up next year."

"She didn't mind, not even about the streaked daffodil?"

"Oh, that was not there," Mr. Gillat said, serenely unconscious that the fate of that bulb was the only interest. "We have got that by itself."

He showed a little piece of shelf penned off from the rest and carefully covered with wire netting for fear of rats. Three different shaped bulbs were there in a row.