An atmosphere of fresh country air, blent with tobacco smoke, surrounded him, as we like to think it surrounded Parson Adams. He saluted Geff with that nice mixture of personal reserve and general expansiveness which among a bygone generation was called breeding. He bestowed a partial smile on Marjorie (‘those Bartrand company smiles,’ as she used to bemoan, when she was a younger child. ‘Counters that I must make believe are sixpences until the visit is over, until the round game melts back into our grim duel at solitaire’).
‘Mr. Arbuthnot, I presume? Welcome to Tintajeux, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ He shook Geff’s hand with a distant affability. ‘Glad always to see a man from the Alma Mater in our little island. Oxford is not the Oxford of my days, still——’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot hails from Cambridge, grandpapa,’ shrieked Marjorie with energy in the Seigneur’s deafer ear.
‘Then, in one sense, Mr. Arbuthnot is to be congratulated, for Cambridge is nearer to Newmarket. A bitter blow to the talent that victory of Mademoiselle Ninette’s in the One Thousand, last April, was it not?’
‘The proverbial uncertainty of fillies retaining their form,’ said Geoffrey. ‘The usual reason for strong fielding. Still, the performance of Maydew in the Two Thousand was so good that the odds seemed legitimate.’
Geff Arbuthnot cared as much for horse-racing as for the native industries of Japan. But the tastes of a man of fourscore must be respected. And with a glance at the Seigneur of Tintajeux you could detect the sporting element, softened, not ungracefully, through a course of sixty years by the learning of the scholar and the quiet life of the priest.
‘You come over to England, of course, sir, for the big events of the year?’
‘Not I, not I. When you arrive at the age of a hundred you will find yourself content with newspaper reports of most human goings on, great or small. I have my books about me here, my farm, my dogs, a horse or two, and my cure of souls. Marjorie, small witch, where are you? Did you not say Mr. Arbuthnot was to take Holy Orders?’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot is to cure bodies, not souls.’
Marjorie’s answer was given in a tone of altissimo derision.
Geff put himself through a little exercise of moral arithmetic; the result required being the precise sum of dislike which a man of his age could feel towards a scoffing girl of seventeen, a girl with eyes like Marjorie’s, silken black hair, and exquisite hands. It was not, perhaps, so large an amount as one might have looked for. ‘An Æsculapius,’ observed the Reverend Andros. ‘You know the parable, Mr. Arbuthnot? Two stalwart men, Nature and Disease, are fighting. A third man, the Doctor, seizes his club and rushes into the melée, sometimes hitting Disease and sometimes Nature. You are to be the man with the club.’
‘I am to be the man with the club,’ answered Geff, relishing the old Seigneur’s manner. ‘As long as I confine myself to the setting of broken bones, sir, I hope to do as little harm as may be.’
‘The doctors kill us no quicker than they used,’ admitted Andros Bartrand liberally. ‘When I was an undergraduate they relied on their brains, as you do now on your finger-tips, and I believe killed us no quicker. You are an honours’ man, of course? At a hundred years old one is naturally ignorant as to the University regulations of the times. I know next to nothing of your Cambridge Triposes. You won your laurels, I assume, among bones and minerals?’
The Seigneur’s prejudices were mellow and crusted as his own port. A born and passionate lover of classic literature, he regarded the admission of natural science into the Universities as a mistake, a sort of shuffle among examiners and Liberal Governments that enabled lowly-born classes of men to take high degrees.
‘Unfortunately for myself, I did not,’ said Geff. ‘When my real college life was over I saw bread and cheese in a remote perspective, and had to begin bones and minerals from their ABC. In my day I came out eighth,’ and being exceedingly human, Geff’s face flushed a bit, ‘in the Classical Tripos.’
The Seigneur put his hand within the young man’s arm.
‘Come for a walk with me, Mr. Arbuthnot. Eighth in the Classical Tripos—eh! I will point out the limits of my vast estate to you. Marjorie, small witch, go and set ready the tea-table. Mr. Arbuthnot will spend the remainder of the evening with us.’
The daylight by now had gone into odorous dew-freshened dusk; a big solitary planet looked down upon the woods of Tintajeux. Geff felt himself in a new world, a thousand miles removed from pale, work-a-day, prosaic England. The affluence of air and sea, the largeness of sky, took possession of him, played in his blood, evoked that precise condition of mind and body which is so often at four-and-twenty the prelude to human passion.
The talk of Andros Bartrand accorded well with the scene and moment. They spoke of men, measures, books—of books chiefly.
‘I belong, really, to the eighteenth century,’ said the Seigneur, as, with his hand on Geff’s arm, they paced the lawn’s goodly limits. Old Andros had the vanity of his age in seeking to exaggerate it. He had been known, or so Marjorie would affirm, to speak of himself as alive at the dawn of the French Revolution. Perhaps you appreciated his real age best when you reflected that the bride of his youth might have been a contemporary of Emma Woodhouse! ‘I was born before moral pulse-feeling came into fashion. This modern verse—“singing, maugre the music”—don’t please me. I never mix my wines. I like to take my verse and my philosophy separate. Hand-made paper, rough edges, vellum, constitute poetry nowadays, don’t they!’
‘The æsthetic fever is on us still, sir, I fear.’
‘In regard to Church matters, I was middle-aged, mind, when Tract 90 decimated the country. Tractarian or Evangelical, Theist or Pantheist—the Church went on quite as profitably before parsons began calling each other by such a variety of names.’
‘Names that all mean the same thing,’ Geoffrey suggested, ‘if men had temper enough to examine them coolly.’
‘Possibly. Let me direct your attention to my young wheat. You see it in the enclosure, just between that red stable roof and the orchard. I mean to cut my wheat with the Guernsey sickle, Mr. Arbuthnot, the same pattern of sickle, it is believed, that was used under Louis XI. I mean to get more for my wheat per quarter than any grower in England. There is the advantage of being a Channel Island farmer. One may not only be a Conservative, but, like certain great statesmen, make one’s Conservatism pay.’
A resonant call from Marjorie summoned them before long to the tea-table—a meal at which old Andros with his grand-seigneur air made his guest pleasantly welcome. The dinner-hour at Tintajeux was five, the ‘late dinner’ of Andros Bartrand’s youth. By half-past eight, in this keen Atlantic air, broiled mullet, hot potato scones, with other indigenous Guernsey dishes, were adjuncts to the tea-table which no healthily-minded person could afford to despise. Afterwards came a cigar smoked just inside the open French windows. ‘At a hundred years old,’ the Seigneur apologised, ‘there was one thing a man might not brave with impunity—night air.’ And then Geoffrey Arbuthnot prepared to take his leave.
Business-like, he reverted to pounds, shillings, and pence. It was a settled thing that he should read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand on three mornings of the week, at the sum (happily the darkness veiled the blushes on Marjorie’s face) of six francs an hour.
‘Classics and mathematics!’ cried old Andros, assenting to the money part of the transaction with suave courtesy. ‘What will the little witch do with classics and mathematics when she has got them?’
‘Enter Newnham or Girton with them, in the first place,’ answered Marjorie unhesitatingly.
‘Newnham or Girton!’
The unfavourable summing-up of all arguments that have been put forth on the subject of woman’s higher education was in Andros Bartrand’s enunciation of the words.
‘Newnham and Girton send forth good men,’ remarked Geoffrey Arbuthnot. ‘In the future, sir, when the girls shall “make Greek Iambics, and the boys black-currant jams,” we look forward confidently to seeing Girton head of the river.’
‘At my age I am unmoved by new theories,’ said old Andros. ‘New facts I am not likely to confront. There has never yet been a great woman poet.’
‘Mrs. Browning, grandpapa.’
‘Nor a great woman painter.’
‘Rosa Bonheur.’
‘Nor a discoverer in science.’
‘Mrs. Somerville.’
‘Nor a solitary musical composer.’
The girl was silent.
‘Yet all these fields have been as open to them as to men, have they not, witch?’
Marjorie Bartrand had passed into the garden. She stood impatiently tapping a slender foot on the turf and looking up, her arms folded, an expression on her face curiously like that of old Andros, at a strip of crescent moon that showed between the cedar branches.
‘A new moon. I curtsey to her, twice, thrice, and I wish a wish!’
‘Did you hear my question, witch? In poetry, art, music, have women not had just as ample chances as men?’
‘Spanish women have had no chances at all,’ cried Marjorie, raising her tone, as she adroitly shifted her ground, after the manner of her sex. ‘For their sake I mean to work—yes, to get to the level of a B.A., grandpapa, in spite of your most withering contempt.’
‘For the sake of Spain, benighted Spain!’ remarked the Seigneur genially. ‘My granddaughter’s blood is half Spanish, Mr. Arbuthnot. I had a son once—an only son——’ Could it really be that Andros Bartrand’s firm voice for a second faltered? ‘When he was no longer a young man he went to Cadiz, for health’s sake, and married, poor fellow, a Spanish girl who died at the end of the year. Marjorie has stayed a few times among her mother’s family, and has gone Spain-crazed, as you will soon find out for yourself.’
‘Crazed!’ rang Marjorie’s tuneful voice through the night. ‘I want to hold my hands out to my own people, yes, to teach, if I ever know anything myself, among the girls of our poor benighted Spain. And I am proud of my craziness. I thank you for the word, grandpapa. It is the prettiest compliment.’
The complexion of the family talk was threatening; Geoffrey Arbuthnot hastened his adieux. But Andros had still a farewell shot to discharge against the little witch.
‘Our poor benighted Spain is the one country in Europe with a decent peasantry of its own. Get Mr. Arbuthnot, get anyone who understands the matter, to talk to you about the English ploughman, and compare the two pictures. The Spanish peasant’s wife sews, knits, embroiders, reads her Mass-book and can cook a capital stew. Her drink is water. Infanticide is unknown. The men are hospitable, courteous, dignified. Among benighted people like these, Marjorie Bartrand proposes to preach the benefits of a liberal pauper education as exhibited in England.’
By the time the Seigneur’s ironies came to an end Marjorie’s small figure had vanished among the deepening shadows of the lawn. Fearful of losing sight of her altogether—for, indeed, Marjorie Bartrand was suggestive of something weird, sprite-like, and of a nature to take other form at an hour when owls do fly—Geff bade his host a hasty good-night and followed.
The girl herself was invisible, but a clear childish voice chanted the old ditty of Roland somewhere in the neighbourhood, ‘Like steel among weapons, like wax among women.’ Or, as Marjorie sang with spirit:
‘Fuerte qual azero entre armas,
Y qnal cera entre las damas.’
‘I have found my gardening scissors, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she cried, emerging through the schoolroom window, a basket on her arm. ‘Flowers smell sweetest that are cut with the dew on them. I mean to cut some roses and cherry-pie for—for——’
‘Your wife,’ was on Marjorie’s lips, but she stopped herself abruptly, all Cassandra Tighe’s warnings about Geoffrey’s domestic embarrassments coming back to her.
‘Let me help you,’ said Geoffrey. A minute later Marjorie, on tiptoe, was vainly endeavouring to catch a bough of swaying yellow briar. ‘You are just one foot too short to reach those roses, Miss Bartrand.’
Marjorie sprang up in air. She plunged with bold final grasp among the thorns, and succeeded in getting scratches destined to mark her right hand for some weeks to come; scratches that might, perhaps, recall this moment to both of them in the pauses of some tough mathematical problem, some arid point in Latin grammar or Greek delectus.
‘The result of over-vaulting ambition.’ Thus from his calm altitude of six-foot-one Geff moralised. ‘How many roses am I to pick?’
‘You are to pick three beauties!’ said Marjorie, somewhat crestfallen. ‘Won’t you have the scissors? These briars prick cruelly.’
But Geff wanted no scissors; his skin, so he told her, was of about the same texture as a stout dog-skin glove. When the briar-roses were duly laid in Marjorie’s basket he put on the grave manner of his profession. It was his duty as a surgeon to make immediate inspection of her injuries.
‘You are losing a good deal of blood, Miss Bartrand.’ Taking both her hands, he held them up, in the streak of moonlight, not very distant from his lips. ‘But while there is life there is hope. Three, four, deep wounds! For my sake, don’t faint, if you can help it.’
‘Faint!’ Marjorie’s laugh was a thing good to hear; a thing fresh as the chatter of birds in April, pungent as the smell of new-turned earth. ‘I wonder whether any of the old Bartrands ever fainted. I mean, before they were guillotined! Confess, we are queer specimens, grandpapa and I, are we not, sir?’ Asking Geff this question, she left her hands in his simply until he should choose to let them go. The first ineffable coldness of girlhood was on her. She knew no more of passion than did her own roses. ‘Not very pleasant people to live with—say! in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir.’
‘So much must depend on the taste of him who survived the ordeal.’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot quietly surrendered the slim hands resting unresponsively in his. ‘At the present moment life in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir seems to me—endurable.’
A stronger word was very near escaping Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s lips.
‘You are taken in by our picturesqueness,’ said Marjorie with decision. ‘England must be an astonishing ugly country, judging from the effect our bit of Channel rock appears to make upon English people. Now, to me, who have seen Spain, it is all so cramped, so sea-weedy. Look away to the left there—sea. To the right—sea. Move a little step nearer—close here, don’t be afraid, and look where I point across the moor—sea again. Let an out-and-out big wave come some day, and the whole nation would be submerged, like Victor Hugo’s hero.’
The glimpse of silver-gray tranquil moor brought back before Geoffrey the thyme-grown bank, the falcon high poised, the tuft of wood-rush—associated with the last rose visions of the squalid Barnwell pavements, of the men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who dragged out their span of human existence there.
‘I should like to know what you are thinking about,’ Marjorie asked, noting with a child’s acumen the changed expression of his face.
‘I am thinking about England, about the hard battles some English men and women have to go through with. A night like this,’ said Geff, ‘brings sharp thoughts before one of one’s own life, one’s own uselessness.’
In an instant Marjorie was softened. Tears almost rushed to her eyes. Her thoughts, true to her better self, followed Geoffrey’s as if by instinct. Then the good impulse passed. It entered her wilful head that this excellent young gentleman from Cambridge meant to sermonise her. She resolved to shock him.
‘I used to feel goody-goody myself, very long ago. You would not believe it, sir, but as a child I was pious.’
‘I believe it thoroughly,’ answered Geff, grave of countenance.
‘When I wanted my lettuce-seed to come up I would perform little acts of propitiatory contrition to Pouchée, the poor old Pouchée who lives in Cambridge now. When grandpapa went out shooting I carried his game-bag, and used to offer fervent prayers, whenever the dogs came to a point, that he might kill his bird. Facts undermined my faith. Sometimes the point was false. Sometimes grandpapa missed his aim. Chaffinches and slugs ate my lettuce-seed. I turned infidel. I have remained one. Grandpapa says I have the hardest flint soul in, or out of, Christendom. Still, that is one Bartrand judging of another.’
‘I am not a Bartrand,’ remarked Geff Arbuthnot. ‘I do not think you have a hard flint soul. You believe in wishes addressed to a strip of new moon, for instance?’ They were standing at the highest point of Tintajeux; a small plateau, the approach to which was fashioned on the exploded system of puzzle or maze. Long before Marjorie’s lifetime this plateau—who shall say on what morning of youthful human hope—had been christened Arcadia! The country-folk around Tintajeux called it Arcadia still. Cool draughts of air were stirring from the moorland. They brought fragrance of distant hayfields, honeyed whiffs of the syringa hedges that formed the maze. Would Marjorie ever curtsey to future moons without the scent of hay, the over-sweetness of blown syringa returning on her senses?
‘Some day,’ observed Geff, as she maintained a caustic silence, ‘I mean you to tell me what you wished for, a quarter of an hour ago, under the cedars.’
Marjorie Bartrand turned from him, the determination of a long lineage of dead, high-tempered Bartrands on her face. To command, implied or spoken, had she never yet bowed, during her seventeen years of life, without asking the reason why.
She asked nothing now. Her cheeks—happily, the starlight betrayed no secrets—were glowing damask. For the girl knew, deep in her fiery heart, what the wish was; a wish by no means unconnected with her feelings towards Geoffrey Arbuthnot.