The Literary Sense

"Give me your hand!" he said. "This path's not safe for you."

It was not. She gave him her hand, and they went down into the wood together.

The picnic was gay as an August garden. After a life of repression – to meet someone to whom one might be oneself! It was very good.

She said so. That was when he did kiss her hand.

When lunch was over they sat on the sloped, short turf and watched the rabbits in the warren below. They sat there and they talked. And to the end of her days no one will know her soul as he knew it that day, and no one ever knew better than she that aspect of his soul which he chose that day to represent as its permanent form.

The hours went by, and when the shadows began to lengthen and the sun to hide behind the wood they were sitting hand in hand. All the entrenchments of her life's training, her barriers of maidenly reserve, had been swept away by the torrent of his caprice, his indolently formed determination to drink the delicate sweet cup of this day to the full.

It was in silence that they went back along the wood-path – her hand in his, as before. Yet not as before, for now he held it pressed against his heart.

"Oh, what a day – what a day of days!" he murmured. "Was there ever such a day? Could there ever have been? Tell me – tell me! Could there?"

And she answered, turning aside a changed, softened, transfigured face.

"You know – you know!"

So they reached the stile at the top of the wood – and here, when he had lent her his hand to climb it, he paused, still holding in his her hand.

Now or never, should the third volume begin – and end. Should he? Should he not? Which would yield the more perfect memory – the one kiss to crown the day, or the kiss renounced, the crown refused? Her eyes, beseeching, deprecating, fearing, alluring, decided the question. He framed her soft face in his hands and kissed her, full on the lips. Then not so much for insurance against future entanglement as for the sound of the phrase, which pleased him – he was easily pleased at the moment – he said —

"A kiss for love – for memory – for despair!"

It was almost in silence that they went through lanes still and dark, across the widespread park lawns and down the narrow road to the station. Her hand still lay against his heart. The kiss still thrilled through them both. They parted at the station. He would not risk the lessening of the day's charming impression by a railway journey. He could go to town by a later train. He put her into a crowded carriage, and murmured with the last hand pressure —

"Thank God for this one day. I shall never forget. You will never forget. This day is all our lives – all that might have been."

"I shall never forget," she said.

In point of fact, she never has forgotten. She has remembered all, even to the least light touch of his hand, the slightest change in his soft kind voice. That is why she has refused to marry the excellent solicitor who might have made her happy, and, faded and harassed, still teaches to High School girls the Euclid and Algebra which they so deeply hate to learn.

As for him, he went home in a beautiful dream, and in the morning he wrote a song about her eyes which was so good that he sent it to the Athenæum, and got two guineas for it – so that his holiday was really not altogether wasted.

THE FORCE OF HABIT

FROM her very earliest teens every man she met had fallen at her feet. Her father in paternal transports – dignified and symbolic as the adoration of the Magi, uncles in forced unwilling tribute, cousins according to their kind, even brothers, resentful of their chains yet still enslaved, lovers by the score, persons disposed to marriage by the half-dozen.

And she had smiled on them all, because it was so nice to be loved, and if one could make those who loved happy by smiling, why, smiles were cheap! Not cheap like inferior soap, but like the roses from a full June garden.

To one she gave something more than smiles – herself to wit – and behold her at twenty, married to the one among her slaves to whom she had deigned to throw the handkerchief – real Brussels, be sure! Behold her happy in the adoration of the one, the only one among her adorers whom she herself could adore. His name was John, of course, and it was a foregone conclusion that he should be a stock-broker.

All the same, he was nice, which is something: and she loved him, which is everything.

The little new red-brick Queen Anne villa was as the Garden of Eden to the man and the woman – but the jerry builder is a reptile more cursed than the graceful serpent who, in his handsome suit of green and gold, pulled out the lynch-pin from the wedding chariot of our first parents. The new house – "Cloudesley" its name was – was damp as any cloud, and the Paradise was shattered, not by any romantic serpent-and-apple business, but by plain, honest, every-day rheumatism. It was, indeed, as near rheumatic fever as one may go without tumbling over the grisly fence.

The doctor said "Buxton." John could not leave town. There was a boom or a slump or something that required his personal supervision.

So her old nurse was called up from out of the mists of the grey past before he and she were hers and his, and she went to Buxton in a specially reserved invalid carriage. She went, with half her dainty trousseau clothes – a helpless invalid.

Now I don't want to advertise Buxton waters as a cure for rheumatism, but I know for a fact that she had to be carried down to her first bath. It was a marble bath, and she felt like a Roman empress in it. And before she had had ten days of marble baths she was almost her own man again, and the youth in her danced like an imprisoned bottle-imp. But she was dull because there was no one to adore her. She had always been fed on adoration, and she missed her wonted food – without the shadow of a guess that it was this she was missing. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that her old nurse should have sprained a stout ankle in the very first of those walks on the moors which the Doctor recommended for the completion of the cure so magnificently inaugurated by the Marble Roman Empress baths.

She wrote to her John every day. Long letters. But when the letter was done, what else was there left to do with what was left of the day? She was very, very bored.

One must obey one's doctor. Else why pay him guineas?

So she walked out, after pretty apologies to the nurse, left lonely, across the wonder-wide moors. She learned the springy gait of the true hill climber, and drank in health and strength from the keen hill air. The month was March. She seemed to be the only person of her own dainty feather in Buxton. So she walked the moors alone. All her life joy had come to her in green elm and meadow land, and this strange grey-stone walled rocky country made her breathless with its austere challenge. Yet life was good; strength grew. No longer she seemed to have a body to care for. Soul and spirit were carried by something so strong as to delight in the burden. A month, her town doctor had said. A fortnight taught her to wonder why he had said it. Yet she felt lonely – too small for those great hills.

The old nurse, patient, loving, urged her lamb to "go out in the fresh air"; and the lamb went.

It was on a grey day, when the vast hill slopes seemed more than ever sinister and reluctant to the little figure that braved them. She wore an old skirt and an old jacket – her husband had slipped them in when he strapped her boxes.

"They're warm," he had said; "you may need them."

She had a rainbow-dyed neckerchief and a little fur hat, perky with a peacock's iridescent head and crest.

She was very pretty. The paleness of her illness lent her a new charm. And she walked the lonely road with an air. She had never been a great walker, and she was proud of each of the steps that this clear hill air gave her the courage to take.

And it was glorious, after all, to be alone – the only human thing on these wide moors, where the curlews mewed as if the place belonged to them. There was a sound behind her. The rattle of wheels.

She stopped. She turned and looked. Far below her lay the valley – all about her was the immense quiet of the hills. On the white road, quite a long way off, yet audible in that noble stillness, hoofs rang, wheels whirred. She waited for the thing to pass, for its rings of sound to die out in that wide pool of silence.

The wheels and the hoofs drew near. The rattle and jolt grew louder. She saw the horse and cart grow bigger and plainer. In a moment it would have passed. She waited.

It drew near. In another moment it would be gone, and she be left alone to meet again the serious inscrutable face of the grey landscape.

But the cart – as it drew near – drew up, the driver tightened rein, and the rough brown horse stopped – his hairy legs set at a strong angle.

"Have a lift?" asked the driver.

There was something subtly coercive in the absolute carelessness of the tone. There was the hearer on foot – here was the speaker in a cart. She being on foot and he on wheels, it was natural that he should offer her a lift in his cart – it was a greengrocer's cart. She could see celery, cabbages, a barrel or two, and the honest blue eyes of the man who drove it – the man who, seeing a fellow creature at a disadvantage, instantly offered to share such odds as Fate had allotted to him in life's dull handicap.

The sudden new impossible situation appealed to her. If lifts were offered – well – that must mean that lifts were generally accepted. In Rome one does as Rome does. In Derbyshire, evidently, a peacock crested toque might ride, unreproved by social criticism, in a greengrocer's cart. A tea-tray on wheels it seemed to her.

She was a born actress; she had that gift of throwing herself at a moment's notice into a given part which in our silly conventional jargon we nickname tact.

"Thank you," she said, "I should like it very much."

The box on which he arranged a seat for her contained haddocks. He cushioned it with a sack and his own shabby greatcoat, and lent her a thick rough hand for the mounting.

"Which way were you going?" he asked, and his voice was not the soft Peak sing-song – but something far more familiar.

"I was only going for a walk," she said, "but it's much nicer to drive. I wasn't going anywhere. Only I want to get back to Buxton some time."

"I live there," said he. "I must be home by five. I've a goodish round to do. Will five be soon enough for you?"

"Quite," she said, and considered within herself what rôle it would be kindest, most tactful, most truly gentlewomanly to play. She sought to find, in a word, the part to play that would best please the man who was with her. That was what she had always tried to find. With what success let those who love her tell.