Brown on Resolution (3 page)

Samarez hesitated for one regretted second; he was sure that it was unwise to tell one’s name to a strange woman, but this woman was so different.

“It’s a very long one,” he said, “but it begins with Richard.”

“Of course it would,” said Agatha bewilderingly, “and they call you Dickie, don’t they?”

“They used to,” admitted Samarez, “but they mostly call me Sammy nowadays, men do.”

“Then I shall call you Dickie,” said Agatha decidedly, and she finished her coffee as though to seal the bargain.

So dinner was Hnished, and the room was beginning to throng with more sensible people dining at a more reasonable hour. They had no possible excuse for lingering on, and yet they both of them were most desperately unwilling to part. Their eyes met again and again across the table, and conversation died a fevered death, and neither could voice what each had most in mind. Agatha simply did not know the usual gambits leading up to the making of a new appointment; Samarez with an odd touch of sensitiveness felt that it would be banal and discordant to speak about it—this was not an ordinary woman. The restaurant was growing crowded; the waiter brought his bill unasked, and hovered round the table with the unmistakable intention of showing them that the management would prefer to see them make way for fresh comers. Fate simply forced them, with sinking hearts, to rise from the table with the words unspoken. Samarez waited for her in the foyer in a really restless and unsettled state of mind.

And Agatha, adjusting her veil in the cloakroom, felt on the verge of tears. She had been mostly wildly unladylike; she had talked with strange men in the gilded halls of vice; it was past seven o’clock and she really must reach Ealing and the Burtons’ by nine at the latest; and she did not want to leave Dickie. Most emphatically she did not want to. But she had not the faintest idea of what she did want.

At the door circumstances forced them further towards separation.

“Cab, I suppose?” Said Samarez huskily.

They climbed into a four-wheeler, and Samarez, still retaining a grain of sanity, directed the driver to Charing Cross Station. Agatha had clean forgotten the luggage left there. The cab wormed its way through the clattering traffic and turned into Chandos Street dim-lighted and quiet. Restlessly Samarez took off his hat and wiped his fretted forehead. A passing street lamp showed up his boyish face and his rumpled hair.

“Oh,” said Agatha uncontrollably. One hand went to his shoulder, the other fumbled for his lean brown hand in the darkness. Samarez turned clumsily with his arms out to her, and all their unhappiness melted away under their wild kisses.

I
T WAS THE
lights of the Strand and of the courtyard entrance at Charing Cross which brought them back momentarily to reality. Agatha’s face was wet with tears, her hat hung by one hatpin, as their embrace came to an end. The cab halted outside the station and a porter tore open the door.

“I—I can’t get out,” stammered Agatha, shrinking away into a corner.

Samarez climbed out and shut the door.

“Wait!” he flung at the driver, and pelted into the station, dragging out the luggage receipt from his pocket as he hastened to the cloakroom with fantastic strides, blinded by the lights. By the grace of Providence there was no one there awaiting attention; it was only a matter of seconds before he came back, suitcase and kit-bag in hand. He opened the door of the cab, and Agatha came to life again out of her mazed dream..

“Where to, sir?” asked the cab driver.

“Where to?” echoed Samarez stupidly.

“I don’t know—Ealing, I suppose,” said a little voice from the depths of the cab.

“Ealing,” said Samarez to the cab driver.

“Ealing, sir? Ealing Broadway, sir? Right, sir,” said the cab driver, and round came the horse and the door slammed to, with Samarez and Agatha in blessed solitude once more, happily ignorant of the meaning wink of the cab driver and the broad grins of the porters. It was quite several seconds before hand met hand and lip met lip again in the velvet darkness of the cab, while the horse’s hoofs clip-clopped solidly onwards towards Ealing.

Passion had them greatly in thrall. Agatha’s hat was off by now, and the tears flowed freely from her eyes as she pressed against Samarez with all the abandon her corseted waist permitted. Agatha had forgotten she was twenty-nine, of strict Wesleyan upbringing. Twenty-nine years of bottled-up emotion were tearing her to pieces; some faint, unknown cause had obscurely begun the explosion—perhaps even before she had met Samarez—and there was no power on earth that could check it now before it had run its course. She gave herself up to him in an ecstasy of giving.

As for Samarez there is less to be said. He at least had known kisses before, and the encirclement of a woman’s arms was not quite new to him. Even purchased caresses ought to have given him sufficient experience to have told him whither they were straying, but reaction from loneliness and the fierce insistent urge of his sex had swept him away. Agatha’s sweet flesh in his arms and the touch of her unpractised lips on his mouth were all the facts of which he was conscious at the moment. He never dreamed of discretion while he let his instincts carry him away in the darkness, and he pressed her hotly.

Somehow or other Agatha found herself speaking, her hands on his breast and her face lifted to his.

“Of course, I’ve
got
to go to Ealing,” she said. It was a statement doomed to extinction at birth, made automatically in an automatic hope of contradiction.

“What are you going to do there?” asked Samarez.

“I’m going to stay with friends. They’re expecting me.”

The little voice whispering in the darkness added fresh fuel to the flames of Samarez’s passion. Into the back of his mind leapt the sudden realization that in the cab with them, beside them on the other seat lay her luggage and his, all their necessaries for days.

“Can’t you put them off?” he asked, hardly realizing what he was saying. “Send them a wire. Don’t go.”

“Oh, my
dear
,” came the answering whisper.

Let it not be imagined that Agatha acted in ignorance. At twenty-nine, when one is an old maid and busy with Chapel work, one hears things. Married women say things just as if one were married oneself, and Chapel work sometimes brings one into contact with illegitimate motherhood and even sometimes undisguised adultery. Agatha knew quite well what happened when a man ‘stayed with’ a woman—at least, she had a general idea of it even if she were hazy as to detail. So that her wordless consent to Samarez’s fierce suggestion, and her acquiescence when Samarez leaned out of the window and redirected the cabman, were absolutely inexcusable, so her fellow-workers would think. But her fellow-workers had never known, perhaps would never know, the careless, happy stupefaction of sudden passion.

The hotel porter was discreet; the hotel reception clerk was friendly; in fact, no one in the hotel thought twice about them, because Agatha looked the last person in the world to share a bedroom with a man who was not her husband, and her glove concealed the absence of a wedding ring. In the dignified seclusion of the hotel bedroom Samarez’s enforced calm fell away from him like a discarded garment. He opened his arms to her and she came gladly to them, giving herself with a delicious, cool relaxation. She felt fantastically motherly towards this tousle-headed boy even during his greediest caresses, and when he sighed out his content with his face upon her bosom she clasped him against it with the same gesture as she would have used to a child.

And the next day, and the day after, and the day after that this maternal attitude became more and more marked. She was so many years older than he, she felt. The sheer physical longing she had felt for him had given way to a stranger, calmer affection. She seemed to have grown suddenly used to him. It was odd, but true. No twinge of conscience came to ruffle the serenity of her soul; she was flooded with a sense of well-being that was not diminished by the necessity for practical arrangements, such as writing to Adeline Burton a careful letter explaining that an unforeseen domestic crisis had compelled her reluctantly to postpone her visit at such brief notice as to prevent her even from letting her know. Agatha would come some other time, as soon as she could, if Adeline did not mind. The lies which Agatha wrote flowed so naturally from her pen that she did not give them a thought—to Agatha’s mind the aged aunt suddenly stricken with mortal illness and demanding immediate nursing seemed to be an actual living character. She did not even feel relieved that Greenwich and Ealing should be so far apart as to render it quite impossible for Adeline to discover by a casual call that no such lady existed.

Samarez, on the other hand, was very puzzled and almost uncomfortable of conscience on those occasions when it occurred to him to think what he was doing, and to make deductions from the somewhat meagre data presented to him. Agatha had never ‘been there before’; he was sure of that for more reasons than one. No one could have been, anyway, and still retained the blossoming innocence which she displayed at every moment. She clearly had not even toyed with the idea of dallying with men. Her underclothing proved that, if nothing else did. It was exquisitely neat, with a myriad tucks and gatherings, but it was not to be called frivolous. It was even pathetic in its lack of sex appeal. Just the sort of white, longcloth underclothing a nun would wear, if (Samarez had no information on the point) nuns wore underclothing. Samarez’s knowledge of underclothing was limited; but in those days it was only daughters of joy who wore garments other than virgin white and strove after ornament as well as utility. And Agatha’s pathetically severe nightgown, high-buttoned and severe and undecorated, settled that matter to Samarez’s mind. So that Agatha was a respectable member of a respectable family, who had bestowed her virginity on him just as she might have given half a crown to a beggar. It made Sarnarez queerly uncomfortable. And yet, after three days’ intimacy, she was far less attainable than ever before. Samarez could feel no thrill of pride of possession while he was with her, not even in the most triumphant moments of intimacy. Something was still out of reach, beyond attainment, and he was piqued in consequence. He tried to buy presents for her, to lavish money on her for clothes and jewellery, but whenever he tried she put the suggestion aside with a smiling irresistible negative. Poor Samarez was not to know that Agatha’s main reason for refusal was the impossibility of subsequently explaining away these gifts to her family.

So it was with a queer mixture of pique and gentlemanly feeling that, after three days, Samarez proposed marriage to her. He did not want to; he held the strongest possible opinion regarding the unsuitability of marriage for naval officers, and he did not believe in marriage much, anyway. But he proposed, and as he did so he regarded her anxiously with expectant eyes, at the same moment annoyed with himself for throwing away his future and comforted by the knowledge that he was doing the ‘right thing’. And Agatha, her hands on his shoulders, looked deep into those anxious eyes before she slowly shook her head.

“No, Dickie,” she said, “it would be better if we didn’t. But it was awfully nice of you to ask me.”

Then she strained him impulsively to her, and kissed him hotly. She saw the unwisdom of marrying a man whom one only loved as one might love a pet St. Bernard, and who would never be able to claim that entire devotion and subservience which Agatha, in accordance with the ideas of the time, thought she ought to give to her husband. But she was keenly alive to the extent of the sacrifice Samarez had proposed making, and appreciative of it.

So that after five days the affair came to an end. Five days during which Agatha had had a glimpse of the sort of life led by women who are not greengrocers’ daughters; five days of theatres (an annual pantomime and an annual circus was the nearest Agatha had ever come to a theatre until then), of good food, of leisure, of ample spendings. Truth to tell, the waste of money and time, by the end of the five days, had so worked upon Agatha’s mind that she was quite glad of the prospect of returning home to economical housekeeping and domestic industry. And Samarez had begun to cease to interest her—he was not a tremendously interesting fellow, as a matter of fact.

Yet the parting was painful. Samarez did not want her to go; he clung to her as they kissed goodbye in the hotel bedroom, with his hand to her breast. He felt almost humble and subdued, almost frightened at the prospect of two days’ loneliness before rejoining his ship; and Agatha’s eyes were wet, too, although she realized she was doing the sensible thing, and it was very gently that she put his hands aside and turned away. He held her hand in the cab as they drove to Charing Cross, and he even tried to make one last appeal after she had boarded the train for Greenwich. She only shook her head and smiled, however, and two minutes later Samarez was alone on the platform, watching the train round the bend in the distance, trying obstinately not to feel relieved.

It was the end of the incident for him. In later years he forgot what his own attitude had been, and he only remembered it as a rather pleasant and unusual encounter, which he would like to repeat with someone else (he never did). Sometimes, years later, in expansive moments, he would tell other men of his strange meeting with ‘quite a nice, well-brought-up woman, a lady, you know’, with whom he had stayed five delightful days in Benjamin’s Hotel, who had refused all his presents except the wedding ring they had found it advisable to buy, and whose surname and address he had never known. The other men would be incredulous and envious, and Samarez, Commander Samarez or Captain Samarez or Admiral Samarez, as he came to be, would pull down his waistcoat and plume himself upon his unusual good fortune and dexterity.

A
GATHA ARRIVED HOME
to find everything quite normal, save for the inevitable deterioration of efficiency consequent upon the mistress’s absence. No hint had reached the Browns that she had not been staying with the Burtons, and she told one or two placid lies regarding these latter, which gave a little local colour to the idea that she had been there; and, as lying was unusual to her, she almost came to believe she had been there. For her exalted mood died away. Within a week it seemed incredible to her that she could have been guilty of such terrible conduct; she had forgotten the state of mind which had led her into it; she felt and hoped that it had only been a very vivid and shocking dream. She ceased in consequence to carry the ring Sarnarez had bought her on the ribbon round her neck.