John Sherman and Dhoya

Sherman planted and dug and raked this pocket-handkerchief of a garden most diligently, rooting out the docks and dandelions and mouse-ear and the patches of untimely grass. It was the point of contact between his new life and the old. It was far too small and unfertile and shaded in to satisfy his love of gardener’s experiments and early vegetables.

Perforce this husbandry was too little complex for his affections to gather much round plant and bed. His garden in Ballah used to touch him like the growth of a young family.

Now he was content to satisfy his barbaric sense of colour; right round were planted alternate holyhock and sunflower, and behind them scarlet-runners showed their inch-high cloven shoots.

One Sunday it occurred to him to write to his friends on the matter of his engagement. He numbered them over. Howard, one or two less intimate, and Mary Carton. At that name he paused; he would not write just yet.

VII

One Saturday there was a tennis party. Miss Leland devoted herself all day to a young Foreign Office clerk. She played tennis with him, talked with him, drank lemonade with him, had neither thoughts nor words for any one else. John Sherman was quite happy. Tennis was always a bore, and now he was not called upon to play. It had not struck him there was occasion for jealousy.

As the guests were dispersing, his betrothed came to him. Her manner seemed strange.

“Does anything ail you, Margaret?” he asked, as they left the Square.

“Everything,” she answered, looking about her with ostentatious secrecy. “You are a most annoying person. You have no feeling; you have no temperament; you are quite the most stupid creature I was ever engaged to.”

“What is wrong with you?” he asked, in bewilderment.

“Don’t you see,” she replied, with a broken voice, “I flirted all day with that young clerk? You should have nearly killed me with jealousy. You do not love me a bit! There is no knowing what I might do!”

“Well, you know,” he said, “it was not right of you. People might say, ‘Look at John Sherman; how furious he must be!’ To be sure I wouldn’t be furious a bit; but then they’d go about saying I was. It would not matter, of course; but you know it is not right of you.”

“It is no use pretending you have feeling. It is all that miserable little town you come from, with its sleepy old shops and its sleepy old society. I would give up loving you this minute,” she added, with a caressing look, “if you had not that beautiful bronzed face. I will improve you. To-morrow evening you must come to the opera.” Suddenly she changed the subject. “Do you see that little fat man coming out of the Square and staring at me? I was engaged to him once. Look at the four old ladies behind him, shaking their bonnets at me. Each has some story about me, and it will be all the same in a hundred years.”

After this he had hardly a moment’s peace. She kept him continually going to theatres, operas, parties. These last were an especial trouble; for it was her wont to gather about her an admiring circle to listen to her extravagancies, and he was no longer at the age when we enjoy audacity for its own sake.

VIII

Gradually those bright eyes of his imagination, watching him from letters and from among the fourteen flies on the ceiling, had ceased to be centres of peace. They seemed like two whirlpools, wherein the order and quiet of his life were absorbed hourly and daily.

He still thought sometimes of the country house of his dreams and of the garden and the three gardeners, but somehow they had lost half their charm.

He had written to Howard and some others, and commenced, at last, a letter to Mary Carton. It lay unfinished on his desk; a thin coating of dust was gathering upon it.

Mrs. Leland called continually on Mrs. Sherman. She sentimentalized over the lovers, and even wept over them; each visit supplied the household with conversation for a week.

Every Sunday morning – his letter-writing time – Sherman looked at his uncompleted letter. Gradually it became plain to him he could not finish it. It had never seemed to him he had more than friendship for Mary Carton, yet somehow it was not possible to tell her of this love-affair.

The more his betrothed troubled him the more he thought about the unfinished letter. He was a man standing at the cross-roads.

Whenever the wind blew from the south he remembered his friend, for that is the wind that fills the heart with memory.

One Sunday he removed the dust from the face of the letter almost reverently, as though it were the dust from the wheels of destiny. But the letter remained unfinished.

IX

One Wednesday in June Sherman arrived home an hour earlier than usual from his office, as his wont was the first Wednesday in every month, on which day his mother was at home to her friends. They had not many callers. To-day there was no one as yet but a badly-dressed old lady his mother had picked up he knew not where. She had been looking at his photograph album, and recalling names and dates from her own prosperous times. As she went out Miss Leland came in. She gave the old lady in passing a critical look that made the poor creature very conscious of a threadbare mantle, and went over to Mrs. Sherman, holding out both hands. Sherman, who knew all his mother’s peculiarities, noticed on her side a slight coldness; perhaps she did not altogether like this beautiful dragon-fly.

“I have come,” said Miss Leland, “to tell John that he must learn to paint. Music and society are not enough. There is nothing like art to give refinement.” Then turning to John Sherman – “My dear, I will make you quite different. You are a dreadful barbarian, you know.”

“What ails me, Margaret?”

“Just look at that necktie! Nothing shows a man’s cultivation like his necktie. Then your reading! You never read anything but old books nobody wants to talk about. I will lend you three every one has read this month. You really must acquire small talk and change your necktie.”

Presently she noticed the photograph-book lying open on a chair.

“Oh!” she cried, “I must have another look at John’s beauties.”

It was a habit of his to gather all manner of pretty faces. It came from incipient old bachelorhood, perhaps.

Margaret criticized each photo in turn with, “Ah! she looks as if she had some life in her!” or, “I do not like your sleepy eyelids,” or some such phrase. The mere relations were passed by without a word. One face occurred several times – a quiet face. As Margaret came on this one for the third time, Mrs. Sherman, who seemed a little resentful about something, said —

“That is his friend, Mary Carton.”

“He told me about her. He has a book she gave him. So that is she? How interesting! I pity these poor country people. It must be hard to keep from getting stupid.”

“My friend is not at all stupid,” said Sherman.

“Does she speak with a brogue? I remember you told me she was very good. It must be difficult to keep from talking platitudes when one is very good.”

“You are quite wrong about her. You would like her very much,” he replied.

“She is one of those people, I suppose, who can only talk about their relatives, or their families, or about their friends’ children: how this one has got the hooping-cough, and this one is getting well of the measles!” She kept swaying one of the leaves between her finger and thumb impatiently. “What a strange way she does her hair; and what an ugly dress!”

“You must not talk that way about her – she is my great friend.”

“Friend! friend!” she burst out. “He thinks I will believe in friendship between a man and a woman.”

She got up, and said, turning round with an air of changing the subject, “Have you written to your friends about our engagement? You had not done so when I asked you lately.”

“I have.”

“All?”

“Well, not all.”

“Your great friend, Miss – what do you call her?”

“Miss Carton. I have not written to her.”

She tapped impatiently with her foot.

“They were really old companions – that is all,” said Mrs. Sherman, wishing to mend matters. “They were both readers; that brought them together. I never much fancied her. Yet she was well enough as a friend, and helped, maybe, with reading, and the gardening, and his good bringing-up, to keep him from the idle young men of the neighbourhood.”

“You must make him write and tell her at once – you must, you must!” almost sobbed out Miss Leland.

“I promise,” he answered.

Immediately returning to herself, she cried, “If I were in her place I know what I would like to do when I got the letter. I know who I would like to kill!” – this with a laugh as she went over, and looked at herself in the mirror over the mantlepiece.

PART III.
JOHN SHERMAN REVISITS BALLAH

I

The others had gone, and Sherman was alone in the drawing-room by himself, looking through the window. Never had London seemed to him so like a reef whereon he was cast away. In the Square the bushes were covered with dust; some sparrows were ruffling their feathers on the side-walk; people passed, continually disturbing them. The sky was full of smoke. A terrible feeling of solitude in the midst of a multitude oppressed him. A portion of his life was ending. He thought that soon he would be no longer a young man, and now, at the period when the desire of novelty grows less, was coming the great change of his life. He felt he was of those whose granaries are in the past. And now this past would never renew itself. He was going out into the distance as though with strange sailors in a strange ship.

He longed to see again the town where he had spent his childhood: to see the narrow roads and mean little shops. And perhaps it would be easier to tell her who had been the friend of so many years of this engagement in his own person than by letter. He wondered why it was so hard to write so simple a thing.

It was his custom to act suddenly on his decisions. He had not made many in his life. The next day he announced at the office that he would be absent for three or four days. He told his mother he had business in the country.

His betrothed met him on the way to the terminus, as he was walking, bag in hand, and asked where he was going. “I am going on business to the country,” he said, and blushed. He was creeping away like a thief.

II

He arrived in the town of Ballah by rail, for he had avoided the slow cattle steamer and gone by Dublin.

It was the forenoon, and he made for the Imperial Hotel to wait till four in the evening, when he would find Mary Carton in the schoolhouse, for he had timed his journey so as to arrive on Thursday, the day of the children’s practice.

As he went through the streets his heart went out to every familiar place and sight: the rows of tumble-down thatched cottages; the slated roofs of the shops; the women selling gooseberries; the river bridge; the high walls of the garden where it was said the gardener used to see the ghost of a former owner in the shape of a rabbit; the street corner no child would pass at nightfall for fear of the headless soldier; the deserted flour store; the wharves covered with grass. All these he watched with Celtic devotion, that devotion carried to the ends of the world by the Celtic exiles, and since old time surrounding their journeyings with rumour of plaintive songs.

He sat in the window of the Imperial Hotel, now full of guests. He did not notice any of them. He sat there meditating, meditating. Grey clouds covering the town with flying shadows rushed by like the old and dishevelled eagles that Maeldune saw hurrying towards the waters of life. Below in the street passed by country people, townspeople, travellers, women with baskets, boys driving donkeys, old men with sticks; sometimes he recognized a face or was recognized himself, and welcomed by some familiar voice.

“You have come home a handsomer gentleman than your father, Misther John, and he was a neat figure of a man, God bless him!” said the waiter, bringing him his lunch; and in truth Sherman had grown handsomer for these years away. His face and gesture had more of dignity, for on the centre of his nature life had dropped a pinch of experience.

At four he left the hotel and waited near the schoolhouse till the children came running out. One or two of the elder ones he recognized but turned away.

III

Mary Carton was locking the harmonium as he went in. She came to meet him with a surprised and joyful air.

“How often I have wished to see you. When did you come? How well you remembered my habits to know where to find me. My dear John, how glad I am to see you.”

“You are the same as when I left, and this room is the same, too.”

“Yes,” she answered, “the same, only I have had some new prints hung up – prints of fruits and leaves and bird-nests. It was only done last week. When people choose pictures and poems for children they choose out such domestic ones. I would not have any of the kind; children are such undomestic animals. But, John, I am so glad to see you in this old schoolhouse again. So little has changed with us here. Some have died and some have been married, and we are all a little older and the trees a little taller.”

“I have come to tell you I am going to be married.”

She became in a moment perfectly white, and sat down as though attacked with faintness. Her hand on the edge of the chair trembled.

Sherman looked at her, and went on in a bewildered, mechanical way – “My betrothed is a Miss Leland. She has a good deal of money. You know my mother always wished me to marry some one with money. Her father, when alive, was an old client of Sherman and Saunders. She is much admired in society.” Gradually his voice became a mere murmur. He did not seem to know that he was speaking. He stopped entirely. He was looking at Mary Carton.

Everything around him was as it had been some three years before. The table was covered with cups and the floor with crumbs. Perhaps the mouse pulling at a crumb under the table was the same mouse as on that other evening. The only difference was the brooding daylight of summer and the ceaseless chirruping of the sparrows in the ivy outside. He had a confused sense of having lost his way. It was just the same feeling he had known as a child, when one dark night he had taken a wrong turning, and instead of arriving at his own house, found himself at a landmark he knew was miles from home.

A moment earlier, however difficult his life, the issues were always definite; now suddenly had entered the obscurity of another’s interest.

Before this it had not occurred to him that Mary Carton had any stronger feeling for him than warm friendship.

He began again, speaking in the same mechanical way – “Miss Leland lives with her mother near us. She is very well educated and very well connected, though she has lived always among business people.”

Miss Carton, with a great effort, had recovered her composure.

“I congratulate you,” she said. “I hope you will be always happy. You came here on some business for your firm, I suppose? I believe they have some connection with the town still.”

“I only came here to tell you I was going to be married.”

“Do you not think it would have been better to have written?” she said, beginning to put away the children’s tea-things in a cupboard by the fireplace.

“It would have been better,” he answered, drooping his head.

Without a word, locking the door behind them, they went out. Without a word they walked the grey streets. Now and then a woman or a child curtseyed as they passed. Some wondered, perhaps, to see these old friends so silent. At the rectory they bade each other good-bye.

“I hope you will be always happy,” she said. “I will pray for you and your wife. I am very busy with the children and old people, but I shall always find a moment to wish you well in. Good-bye now.”

They parted; the gate in the wall closed behind her. He stayed for a few moments looking up at the tops of the trees and bushes showing over the wall, and at the house a little way beyond. He stood considering his problem – her life, his life. His, at any rate, would have incident and change; hers would be the narrow existence of a woman who, failing to fulfil the only abiding wish she has ever formed, seeks to lose herself in routine – mournfulest of things on this old planet.

This had been revealed: he loved Mary Carton, she loved him. He remembered Margaret Leland, and murmured she did well to be jealous. Then all her contemptuous words about the town and its inhabitants came into his mind. Once they made no impression on him, but now the sense of personal identity having been disturbed by this sudden revelation, alien as they were to his way of thinking, they began to press in on him. Mary, too, would have agreed with them, he thought; and might it be that at some distant time weary monotony in abandonment would have so weighed down the spirit of Mary Carton, that she would be merely one of the old and sleepy whose dulness filled the place like a cloud?

He went sadly towards the hotel; everything about him, the road, the sky, the feet wherewith he walked seeming phantasmal and without meaning.

He told the waiter he would leave by the first train in the morning. “What! and you only just come home?” the man answered. He ordered coffee and could not drink it. He went out and came in again immediately. He went down into the kitchen and talked to the servants. They told him of everything that had happened since he had gone. He was not interested, and went up to his room. “I must go home and do what people expect of me; one must be careful to do that.”

Through all the journey home his problem troubled him. He saw the figure of Mary Carton perpetually passing through a round of monotonous duties. He saw his own life among aliens going on endlessly, wearily.

From Holyhead to London his fellow-travellers were a lady and her three young daughters, the eldest about twelve. The smooth faces shining with well-being became to him ominous symbols. He hated them. They were symbolic of the indifferent world about to absorb him, and of the vague something that was dragging him inch by inch from the nook he had made for himself in the chimney corner. He was at one of those dangerous moments when the sense of personal identity is shaken, when one’s past and present seem about to dissolve partnership. He sought refuge in memory, and counted over every word of Mary’s he could remember. He forgot the present and the future. “Without love,” he said to himself, “we would be either gods or vegetables.”

The rain beat on the window of the carriage. He began to listen; thought and memory became a blank; his mind was full of the sound of rain-drops.