The room

URSULA’S husband waited for her to speak. But she laughed instead. Just a low, thrilled, secret little laugh, very peculiarly hers. It made Doug uncomfortable. Because by all the laws of commonplace she ought to have been working up for a scene. And he was quite ready to call himself a despicable brute, and had taken off his coat to do so—he always felt bigger and more virile and primitive in his shirt sleeves, than in a sober dinner-jacket. Doug Barrison had roughed it so much, that, metaphorically, he still swung a perpetual axe with which to build a log cabin for his woman.

“By God, Teddy, it’s hot tonight. I’d like—I’d like to be beating down the Channel, with the deck lifting and straining under my feet.”

She dismissed the deck as momentarily unimportant. “Doug——”

He sat on the edge of the bed; it creaked under his weight. Ursula leant back against the pillows, hands clasped behind her head.

“If I were you, and you were me, what would you do about it, Doug?”

“I’ve been a vile, hulking, despicable brute,” he began.

“Oh, no, dear, nothing as powerful as that. Because you can’t help it, can you?”

“Not in this world full of girls,” he confessed, with sudden understanding that she understood.

How mischievously attractive she was, with that wise little smile flickering round her lips, and her profound mermaid eyes. Teddy—Ursula—his teddy-bear—the nickname was obvious. She was so much more to him than Monica and Kate and—and Doreen—oh, all the procession!

But his flirtation with Doreen ended tonight by the sudden—and, he must admit it, sensible action of the girl’s parents. They had simply left the boarding-house during the day, while he was doing his duty as Secretary to the Knapsack Club. Ursula had broken the news to him while they were dressing for dinner.

“And play up to me at dinner, Doug, and afterwards. All those hateful intimate strangers looking on, and they’ve nothing else to be excited about, most of them.”

He knew she detested the boarding-house. They had only moved into it when the seven years’ lease of their flat had expired, while they had hunted for another. But somehow the hunting had become desultory. Doug declared that he did not want to anchor himself again; the old rover mood was once more upon him—so they had stayed for nearly twelve months at the boarding-house. For presently had come Doreen Jones, and he had talked to her about the glorious adventure of having no anchorage, but obeying an invisible call to the South Seas or to Persia, just the very instant it sounded. He talked to her—as, perhaps, he had once talked to the little schoolgirl Ursula Maxwell.

His own sister, Gwen, was at Regina Hall with Ursula, and had coaxed her big brother, just home from a trip to Chile, to come to the annual fancy-dress dance. Among the cowgirls, Pierrettes and Dutch peasants, was a glowing, radiant Cinderella, in faded rags certainly, and carrying a broom, but behaving with a wild abandon very far from the original modest and obedient maiden of the fairy-tale. Ursula, indeed, was wildly over-excited. Tonight, at any rate, she would retrieve the humiliation of her one previous attempt to “sparkle in the throng”.... Tonight there was no question of making a fool of herself, even had Nina been there to say so. Success was like a rush of wine in her blood; she danced—well, Miss Luther had frequently to speak a few low, restraining words in her ear. The other girls swarmed round her, begging to introduce their brothers and cousins. Each hair of the gold which tumbled over her shoulders and down her back seemed to stand out and quiver with a separate vitality. There was no reason for all this—except for the stinging remembrance that she had come to the last day of her last term, and tomorrow ... she would be going back home, back to the Laburnums for good, to share a bedroom with Nina and sit at table with the family and Aunt Lavvy and Gums; with Aunt Lavvy and Gums and the family.... And she had never been popular with them since that unfortunate affair of the room.

[II]

SCHOOL, after the first hot indignation, had proved not so bad. It was a simple and more impersonal matter to share with a dozen than with one. Besides, expecting an atmosphere like warm clinging toffee, sweet and sentimental and tenacious, she had found instead a community of off-hand young women, encouraged by their mistresses to strive for fitness, hygiene and efficiency—a collection of embryo Ninas, in fact. Ursula adapted herself swiftly to these conditions, glad that too cloying intimacy was “not done.” She was not by any means the Favourite of the School nor the Queen of the Upper Fifth.... The night of the fancy-dress ball was the first time she was ever conspicuous at Miss Luther’s. When Douglas Barrison saw her again, she was sedate in navy blue and a white flannel shirt; Gwen’s little friend on a week’s visit to the house; very shy and unimportant; hair in a “door-knocker.” “Yes, thank you, Mr. Barrison, I enjoyed the dance very much——”

But no repetition of wild and vivid behaviour would have fascinated him like this sudden baffling change and withdrawal.

He won her on scenery, mainly. Big lonely romantic scenery. Wide Pacific seas, the Southern Cross overhead.... She thought he found difficulty in talking about it all—“Civilization’s all right—but sometimes a man feels he wants to be up against things ... to sleep on a bed of fern or the hard earth itself——”

When Doug stayed overnight with friends, he would nearly always, with his peculiarly jolly, open-air laugh, reject the comforts of the spare room. “Oh, I’m an old campaigner.... I can turn in anywhere ... on the floor—in a barn. Once, I remember, I slept——”

His sufferings when he wore a collar and trousers and such ordinary European raiment, and his relief when he could cast them off, seemed almost disproportionately exaggerated. “A loose shirt and a pair of old shorts’ll do me any time, thank you.”

He liked makeshifts in the midst of civilization: to find a door locked so that he had to enter by a window, genuinely pleased him. It was so virile. A row was virile, too.... It was disappointing to pugnacity when coal-heavers, navvies and bargees were civil.

Was he a romantic, then? Well ... a dependent romantic, dependent upon his setting. He could understand how a traveller, staying in safe, prosy, comfortable London because his old mother wanted him, would chafe and get restless for hard winds and bare horizons and the hot-coloured East. But a retired grocer fretful for his cheeses and balls of string again—“Not much romance about cheese, is there? What beats me, is how the poor little chap stuck to trade all those years. I’d have broken away...” it was a constant miracle to Doug, how few people did indeed by their bodies break away. The spirit which had broken away was invisible to him. It may have been by sheer luck that Douglas Barrison was tanned and hard-bitten, or it may have been that his desire for this type of looks was powerful enough to achieve them. Tall, burly—he would have preferred to be lean, though!—his hearty boyish voice contradicting a certain remote sadness in his deep-set eyes; hard brown skin and even a small white scar ... no wonder he impressed Ursula romantically. Ursula, at eighteen, was a baby still, proud that her notions of romance swung with free steps past the pale sentimentalities of an earlier generation of schoolgirls. Her definition of a man—after she had met Doug—was a massive and inarticulate being, who would rather be cold than warm, rather fighting than lapped in unperilous peace.

They confided in each other a craving for loneliness and adventure. “You’re the first girl I’ve met who understood all that. God, if I had you in ...” he became geographical.

De Vere Stacpoole, Robert Service, Jack London and Joseph Conrad were the four angels who ought to be grouped round the bed in any symbolic representation of Doug. Not that he ever read them much; big, simple, rolling-stone sort of men read their Bible and perhaps Shakespeare. They seem to find Shakespeare easy reading, even scenes in which the Fool makes conversation.

Ursula was not fond of reading, either. So that their courtship did not include enthusiastic quotations and miraculous discovery of mutual favourites.

Instead, he planned a love-scene in every setting that captivated by its distance from the actual verandah of the Barrison home.... And yet, it was not such a bad verandah. He won Ursula on scenery, and on his restlessness which leapt to hers and exultantly joined hands with it. Now they had been married eight years, and all their journeyings had been for “holidays,” Easter and Summer, tethered at one end by Pall Mall and the Knapsack Club. Doug liked his genial post as secretary there; the careless come and go; a drink with a fellow just back from Tibet, a chat with another over his plans for a toddle into the Amazon region—“Lucky devil, wish I could come with you!” from Doug.

Mind you, Doug did not pose as one of the world’s wayfarers, without justification. He had travelled, quite a lot, and beyond the ordinary tourist zone. And he had enjoyed it, too, though his relish for discomfort multiplied enormously in retrospect. No other post but secretary to the Knapsack would have held him faithful. But at the Knapsack he could absorb daily all his favourite atmosphere of travel—the talk of routes and equipments, the fantastic anecdotes, the society of the right sort of men, thin, cheerful, leathery fellows; without yielding his regular salary, his duties to his mother, or the pleasures of London, three meals a day, electric light, telephone and taxis. His qualifications of good temper, good breeding and competence made him popular with the members of the Club. It was travelling by proxy, certainly, and many evenings he came home to Ursula in the “break-away and be damned to my salary and this damned monotonous safety” mood ... but Ursula was always a little bit too ready to assent and encourage him and dare an uncharted future. She was eager for pain and horror, the tragedy of making mistakes—all the perils along the road that might break in sudden dazzle and glory. She was eager only to go and not to stay—never to stay. But Doug was very young at all his ages, and his resolutions needed resistance, as a puppy’s teeth need bone if they are to sharpen effectively.

Presently his performance of a stern, rugged spirit clenched against the call of lagoons and mountains and bronchos, the lure of the Far East and the Far West and small animal-whimpers through primeval forests at night—were played to other audiences than Ursula; audiences who would not say: “Oh yes, let’s!”—audiences of Monica and Kitty and—and Doreen.

Nobody, not even Doug himself, had thought it worth while to warn little schoolgirl Ursula from loving and marrying a man who was beyond everything else, and beyond laughter and tears, and beyond cure, susceptible. Monstrously, grotesquely susceptible.

Being married made him more susceptible than before, because it gave him a reason why he must not be—a reason with hard bone in it. Lord! how he renounced them, Monica and Kitty and—no, not Doreen; he was just going to renounce her, when her people took her away from the boarding-house, which was disconcerting. How he began to tell them about lagoons, etc., and where he would like to take them—and then abruptly was silent, mouth set, jaw squared, but blue eyes still narrowed and dreamy with inward vision of two tiny figures alone together in the Sudan or on a coral island.... “Look here, my dear, shut me up when I get talking ... like this. It isn’t good for either of us. I’m getting soft, that’s the trouble. But for a man to know eternally where his next meal’s coming from—He ought to sling it home on his shoulders, while his mate——”

“Hush, Doug—we mustn’t.”

“No. We mustn’t. Give us this day our daily round.... Don’t you ever get sick for freedom? To chuck the whole code and get away ... ride away” (when it wasn’t the ship and the straining deck!). “Oh—riding—the steady thud and gallop of your horse’s feet under you, miles and miles and miles....”

And so Doug went on for miles and miles and miles. And years and years and years.

[III]

TILL now, at last, he and Ursula were talking about it. It was amazing to Doug that she did not cry, and cling to him, and attempt to win a promise of no more Doreens. He said so.

“Dear old boy, I’ve learnt from King Canute that I may sit in a chair and forbid the waves to wet my feet, and they’ll blandly roll up all the same. No more Doreens? There will be dozens of Doreens. Dozens—and I love you. What am I to do about it, Doug? Can you suggest anything?”

“Let’s go away, then—where there are no waves—no Doreens. Darling—you take matches away from a child, because he’s not to be trusted. I’m a child. Take the matches away from me. Take me away from the matches.” He was speaking honestly now.

“Animal, vegetable, mineral,” murmured Ursula—“Doreen, waves, matches. Never mind. We can’t cut clean away from things as they are, unless you give up the Knapsack, Doug.”

“I’ve been wanting to for a long time”—two and a half minutes precisely. “I’m getting much too fat and contented.” He strolled to the looking-glass, humming: “Put me on an island where the girls are few!”—“Yes, I’m in rotten condition. Look at this arm. I’ll hand in my resignation tomorrow. I expect they’ll get up a subscription for a present, as I’ve been there so long. Mr. Barrison all unobservant as the list goes round! I’m rather keen on a decent pocket-flask. Useful when I’m riding round to have a look at the crops.”

“Dear, we’re not going into the Bush, are we?”

“We’re going to the other end of nowhere!” shouted Doug, swinging out his arm and hitting it against the bed-post. “We’re buccaneers—soldiers of fortune. The horizon ... how it pulls and pulls——”

“And beyond it, the warm dim lagoons, where a man and a woman can bathe their hot bodies, naked and unashamed,” Ursula reeled off with wicked fluency. “God—and the maddening smell of the hibiscus blossom in the blue night air. Why does any one stay this side of the Equator, I wonder? Just wait till you see the Southern Cross flaming above our heads—I’ve been pent up long enough. Oh, I’m talking damned rot, perhaps, but convention—it’s nothing but a strait-waistcoat. Let’s burst it and be off! I want to show you the warm dim lagoons——” Ursula broke off from imitation “And here the same tune comes round again on the barrel-organ,” she finished, in her soft, sedate fashion.

Doug was staring at her, bewildered as a puppy before whom a mirror is held up.

“Don’t you want to go to the tropics?”

“They’re so—tropical,” sighed Ursula. “Insects and miasma.”

“North-West, then? Canada? It’ll be a new land to me——”

“Doug-land! cowboy sombreros and log-cabins and biting blizzards and leagues of glittering white snow ... the red fox ... or is it the Red Indian? Never mind, we needn’t be accurate in Doug-land!”

Her husband remained good-tempered. Good temper under provocation was, indeed, one of his attractions: “I can’t quite get the hang of that. But it looks as though any place I took you to would be Doug-land, as you call it.”

“It would. Oh, it would.”

“Ursula—aren’t we going to break away, then? by ourselves? to the back of nowhere?”

“We needn’t be quite so drastic, nor so picturesque about it, that’s all.” She sank to a more serious note: “We mustn’t be more than a day’s journey away from your mother, Doug, for the next few years.... Remember what the doctor told you about her heart.”

He nodded, contrite.

“Poor old Mater. England, then. How far can we trek from mankind. Jove—trekking—I’d like to have swept you off to a farm on the Transvaal, Teddy!”

“Grey felt sombrero exchanged for flopping straw, the same loose shirt as we used in the tropics and in Canada; patient lumbering oxen responsive to the slightest crack of your sjambok....”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t farm in the west of England,” reflected Doug; “there’d be moors and the sea and good rich soil—I’d have to look round a bit first and find my feet. My oath, it’s a topping notion of yours, Teddy. I’ve always been keen on farming, deep down. Good-bye to the artificial life and hurrah for Arcadia!”

“Doug, are there no Doreens in Arcadia?”

“Rustics, farm-girls. No, they don’t appeal to me. Honestly. It’s girls of our own class, with dainty minds and dainty bodies who are fatal. It’s queer, you know”—Doug was engrossed in the subject of his ego; and Ursula listened attentively, thinking that out of all his innocent misconceptions of himself, she might yet pick up an essential hint or two; “it’s queer that though I’m a primitive man, primitive to the very spine, yet the type of opposite sex that—that upset me, is delicate and puzzling and highly-finished—you don’t meet ’em often away from towns. Isn’t it queer, Ursula?”

She nodded absently, her mind a-swing upon some tiny thread of its own. “I don’t want to be a beast—and I don’t want to nag—but, Doug, if we go and live in the country, away from temptation, it’s not just for a change and a jolly adventure. It’s because I’m desperate. I don’t look it, I know, and I don’t behave like it, but I’m desperate all the same. Do you really want to be cured, Doug? I won’t force the experiment on you. I’m the last creature who ought to do that—I’m personally too much interested. But austerity isn’t half as romantic as you’re imagining it now. You’re still thinking about the hunting-flask....”

“No, I’m not. Anyway, they’ll most likely fork out with a cigarette-case instead. And I’ve got three already. Teddy darling, I solemnly swear I want to be cured. I mean to be cured. I owe you that. We’ll be all-in-all to each other, down in the country. Pretty desolate in winter, I expect ... all the better, cold and rain sharpen you up like blazes. I’m fed up with town people and their sallow, dingy faces. They’re helpless; they’re afraid, they’re hemmed in——”

His voice became resonant; and the old couple in the adjoining bedroom thumped the wall in peevish protest.

“Right!” said Doug, glaring at them through the paper and plaster and match-boarding, and highly pleased at this timely illustration to his arguments. “Right! Thump away! We’re off! We’ve done with being herded and packed. We’re going to where a fellow can bellow his lungs inside out at whatever time of night he pleases. You know, Teddy, the root of the trouble is, that living in town has made us too complex. If that old hag and her husband loved us, in the simple country fashion—love is really a very simple thing, Teddy,” and Doug’s voice was a little deeper than usual as he came to this conclusion.

“But surely it is a fairly simple thing, to bang at the wall when your neighbours are noisy at midnight. Mr. and Mrs. Cox would be far more complex if they loved us for it!”

Mr. and Mrs. Cox thumped again, urgently.

“Oh, be—— Teddy, why have we put up so long with this slummy dosshouse, that’s what I want to know?”

But Ursula was silent, thinking that enough had been said about Doreen, who had only left that day.

She did not sleep at once, but persistently chased the wheeling thought: “Will it be any good?” It was not that she wanted Doug to feel their future isolation as punishment—discipline—not with any such priggish quality attached to it. But his innocently chubby view of the idea as a jolly, buccaneering adventure, with shouts and banners—it was so exasperatingly like putting a naughty child to bed, only to see him at once rig up a tent with the sheets, and begin to play.

“Doug——”

“Wha’?”

Ursula recognized that he was too nearly asleep for further psychological discussion. And, after all, if she was cast for heroine of his latest muscular romance, was it not better than the grimmer rôle of chastiser to a penitent. So——

“Doug, I am longing for ... Arcadia.”

His arm strayed out at random, and lay heavily, possessively across her throat.... “Darling ... so glad ... thought you’d come round to the idea.... And we’ll be able to keep a dog in the country....”