18. XVIII
Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous "plans" that he
had neglected for a while the question of her transfer; but down at
Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their
recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of innumerable
pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but most orderly little
pocket-book, the distracting possible melted away--the fleeting absolute
ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply superseded, and it
was much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the pier and overlooked the
sea and the company, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes and to feel that
from moment to moment there was less left to cipher about. The week
proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at their lodgings--partly to her
embarrassment and partly to her relief--struck up
with the landlady an
alliance that left the younger couple a great deal of freedom. This
relative took her pleasure of a week at Bournemouth in a stuffy
back-kitchen and endless talks; to that degree even that Mr. Mudge
himself--habitually inclined indeed to a scrutiny of all mysteries and to
seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too much in things--made remarks on it
as he sat on the cliff with his betrothed, or on the decks of steamers
that conveyed them, close-packed items in terrific totals of enjoyment,
to the Isle of Wight and the Dorset coast.
He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the
importance of keeping his eyes open, and he made no secret of his
suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the roof
of his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time he
fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense, his
future mother-in law would have weighted them more by accompanying their
steps than by giving her hostess, in the
interest of the tendency they
considered that they never mentioned, equivalent pledges as to the tea-
caddy and the jam-pot. These were the questions--these indeed the
familiar commodities--that he had now to put into the scales; and his
betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet
pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become
conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to
retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for her
to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not be at
Cocker's and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait for
something--something in the key of the immense discussions that had
mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately to
crown the monument.
Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr.
Mudge's mind,
and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter
they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have
on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday, and
on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He had
moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what they
should have gone and have done if they hadn't been exactly as they were.
He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so
conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little with
her own. She liked to be as she was--if it could only have lasted. She
could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great that
the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be balanced
against other delights. The people at Ladle's and at Thrupp's had
their ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear Mr.
Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn't take a bath, or of the bath
he might take if he only hadn't taken something
else. He was always with
her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more than "hourly,"
more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she should do at Chalk
Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from the band and the
crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with her friend, who
reminded her often that they could have only in the thick of it the sense
of the money they were getting back. That had little effect on her, for
she got back her money by seeing many things, the things of the past
year, fall together and connect themselves, undergo the happy relegation
that transforms melancholy and misery, passion and effort, into
experience and knowledge.
She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had
practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the
procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become there,
in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far-away story, a picture
of another life.
If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked them at
Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or anywhere,
she learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual counting of
the figures that made them up. There were dreadful women in particular,
usually fat and in men's caps and write shoes, whom he could never let
alone--not that she cared; it was not the great world, the world of
Cocker's and Ladle's and Thrupp's, but it offered an endless field to his
faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She had never accepted him
so much, never arranged so successfully for making him chatter while she
carried on secret conversations. This separate commerce was with
herself; and if they both practised a great thrift she had quite mastered
that of merely spending words enough to keep him imperturbably and
continuously going.
He was charmed with the panorama, not knowing--or at any rate not at all
showing that he knew--what far other images peopled
her mind than the
women in the navy caps and the shop-boys in the blazers. His
observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show,
brought home to her the prospect of Chalk Farm. She wondered sometimes
that he should have derived so little illumination, during his period,
from the society at Cocker's. But one evening while their holiday
cloudlessly waned he gave her such a proof of his quality as might have
made her ashamed of her many suppressions. He brought out something
that, in all his overflow, he had been able to keep back till other
matters were disposed of. It was the announcement that he was at last
ready to marry--that he saw his way. A rise at Chalk Farm had been
offered him; he was to be taken into the business, bringing with him a
capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the
handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders. Therefore
their waiting was over--it could be a question of a near date. They
would settle this date before going
back, and he meanwhile had his eye on
a sweet little home. He would take her to see it on their first Sunday.