Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship
scout ushered in Mrs. Glamorys. She was bewitchingly dressed in white,
and stood in the open doorway, smiling--an embodiment of the summer he
was neglecting. He rose, but his tongue was paralysed. The dunce became
suddenly important--a symbol of the decorum he had been outraging. His
soul, torn so abruptly from history to romance, could not get up the
right emotion. Why this imprudence of Winifred's? She had been so
careful heretofore.
'What a lot of boots there are on your staircase!' she said gaily.
He laughed. The spell was broken. 'Yes, the heap to be cleaned is rather
obtrusive,' he said, 'but I suppose it is a sort of tradition.'
'I think I've got hold of the thing pretty well now, sir.' The dunce
rose and smiled, and his tutor realized how little the dunce had to
learn in some things. He felt quite grateful to him.
'Oh, well, you'll come and see me again after lunch, won't you, if one
or two points occur to you for elucidation,' he said, feeling vaguely a
liar, and generally guilty. But when, on the departure of the dunce,
Winifred held out her arms, everything fell from him but the sense of
the exquisite moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for an
instant. He had scarcely time to realize that this wonderful thing had
happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves and
was examining a Thucydides upside down.
'How clever to know Greek!' she exclaimed. 'And do you really talk it
with the other dons?'
'No, we never talk shop,' he laughed. 'But, Winifred, what made you come
here?'
'I had never seen Oxford. Isn't it beautiful?'
'There's nothing beautiful _here_,' he said, looking round his sober
study.
'No,' she admitted; 'there's nothing I care for here,' and had left
another celestial kiss on his lips before he knew it. 'And now you must
take me to lunch and on the river.'
He stammered, 'I have--work.'
She pouted. 'But I can't stay beyond tomorrow morning, and I want so
much to see all your celebrated oarsmen practising.'
'You are not staying over the night?' he gasped.
'Yes, I am,' and she threw him a dazzling glance.
His heart went pit-a-pat. 'Where?' he murmured.
'Oh, some poky little hotel near the station. The swell hotels are
full.'
He was glad to hear she was not conspicuously quartered.
'So many people have come down already for Commem,' he said. 'I suppose
they are anxious to see the Generals get their degrees. But hadn't we
better go somewhere and lunch?'
They went down the stone staircase, past the battalion of boots, and
across the quad. He felt that all the windows were alive with eyes, but
she insisted on standing still and admiring their ivied picturesqueness.
After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce's punt. The necessities
of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit
labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the
uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were
accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel
uncomfortable again. But Winifred, piquant under her pink parasol, was
singularly at ease, enraptured with the changing beauty of the river,
applauding with childish glee the wild flowers on the banks, or the
rippling reflections in the water.
'Look, look!' she cried once, pointing skyward. He stared upwards,
expecting a balloon at least. But it was only 'Keats' little rosy
cloud', she explained. It was not her fault if he did not find the
excursion unreservedly idyllic.
'How stupid,' she reflected, 'to keep all those nice boys cooped up
reading dead languages in a spot made for life and love.'
'I'm afraid they don't disturb the dead languages so much as you think,'
he reassured her, smiling. 'And there will be plenty of love-making
during Commem.'
'I am so glad. I suppose there are lots of engagements that week.'
'Oh, yes--but not one per cent come to anything.'
'Really? Oh, how fickle men are!'
That seemed rather question-begging, but he was so thrilled by the
implicit revelation that she could not even imagine feminine
inconstancy, that he forebore to draw her attention to her inadequate
logic.
So childish and thoughtless indeed was she that day that nothing would
content her but attending a 'Viva', which he had incautiously informed
her was public.
'Nobody will notice us,' she urged with strange unconsciousness of her
loveliness. 'Besides, they don't know I'm not your sister.'
'The Oxford intellect is sceptical,' he said, laughing. 'It cultivates
philosophical doubt.'
But, putting a bold face on the matter, and assuming a fraternal air, he
took her to the torture-chamber, in which candidates sat dolefully on a
row of chairs against the wall, waiting their turn to come before the
three grand inquisitors at the table. Fortunately, Winifred and he were
the only spectators; but unfortunately they blundered in at the very
moment when the poor owner of the punt was on the rack. The central
inquisitor was trying to extract from him information about Becket,
almost prompting him with the very words, but without penetrating
through the duncical denseness. John Lefolle breathed more freely when
the Crusades were broached; but, alas, it very soon became evident that
the dunce had by no means 'got hold of the thing'. As the dunce passed
out sadly, obviously ploughed, John Lefolle suffered more than he. So
conscience-stricken was he that, when he had accompanied Winifred as
far as her hotel, he refused her invitation to come in, pleading the
compulsoriness of duty and dinner in Hall. But he could not get away
without promising to call in during the evening.
The prospect of this visit was with him all through dinner, at once
tempting and terrifying. Assuredly there was a skeleton at his feast, as
he sat at the high table, facing the Master. The venerable portraits
round the Hall seemed to rebuke his romantic waywardness. In the
common-room, he sipped his port uneasily, listening as in a daze to the
discussion on Free Will, which an eminent stranger had stirred up. How
academic it seemed, compared with the passionate realities of life. But
somehow he found himself lingering on at the academic discussion,
postponing the realities of life. Every now and again, he was impelled
to glance at his watch; but suddenly murmuring, 'It is very late,' he
pulled himself together, and took leave of his learned brethren. But in
the street the sight of a telegraph office drew his steps to it, and
almost mechanically he wrote out the message: 'Regret detained. Will
call early in morning.'
When he did call in the morning, he was told she had gone back to London
the night before on receipt of a telegram. He turned away with a bitter
pang of disappointment and regret.
IV
Their subsequent correspondence was only the more amorous. The reason
she had fled from the hotel, she explained, was that she could not
endure the night in those stuffy quarters. He consoled himself with the
hope of seeing much of her during the Long Vacation. He did see her once
at her own reception, but this time her husband wandered about the two
rooms. The cosy corner was impossible, and they could only manage to
gasp out a few mutual endearments amid the buzz and movement, and to
arrange a _rendezvous_ for the end of July. When the day came, he
received a heart-broken letter, stating that her husband had borne her
away to Goodwood. In a postscript she informed him that 'Quicksilver was
a sure thing'. Much correspondence passed without another meeting being
effected, and he lent her five pounds to pay a debt of honour incurred
through her husband's 'absurd confidence in Quicksilver'. A week later
this horsey husband of hers brought her on to Brighton for the races
there, and hither John Lefolle flew. But her husband shadowed her, and
he could only lift his hat to her as they passed each other on the
Lawns. Sometimes he saw her sitting pensively on a chair while her lord
and thrasher perused a pink sporting-paper. Such tantalizing proximity
raised their correspondence through the Hove Post Office to fever heat.
Life apart, they felt, was impossible, and, removed from the sobering
influences of his cap and gown, John Lefolle dreamed of throwing
everything to the winds. His literary reputation had opened out a new
career. The Winifred lyrics alone had brought in a tidy sum, and though
he had expended that and more on despatches of flowers and trifles to
her, yet he felt this extravagance would become extinguished under daily
companionship, and the poems provoked by her charms would go far towards
their daily maintenance. Yes, he could throw up the University. He would
rescue her from this bully, this gentleman bruiser. They would live
openly and nobly in the world's eye. A poet was not even expected to be
conventional.
She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged
against the world's law, the injustice by which a husband's cruelty was
not sufficient ground for divorce. 'But we finer souls must take the law
into our own hands,' she wrote. 'We must teach society that the ethics
of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.' But
somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get
itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in
October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed,
Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few
actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or
Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of
express letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the situation
from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her
romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of
time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.
But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable
Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose
apophthegm, 'It is of no use trying to change a changeable person.'
V
But at last she astonished him by a sketch plan of the elopement, so
detailed, even to band-boxes and the Paris night route _via_ Dieppe,
that no further room for doubt was left in his intoxicated soul, and he
was actually further astonished when, just as he was putting his
hand-bag into the hansom, a telegram was handed to him saying: 'Gone to
Homburg. Letter follows.'
He stood still for a moment on the pavement in utter distraction. What
did it mean? Had she failed him again? Or was it simply that she had
changed the city of refuge from Paris to Homburg? He was about to name
the new station to the cabman, but then, 'letter follows'. Surely that
meant that he was to wait for it. Perplexed and miserable, he stood with
the telegram crumpled up in his fist. What a ridiculous situation! He
had wrought himself up to the point of breaking with the world and his
past, and now--it only remained to satisfy the cabman!
He tossed feverishly all night, seeking to soothe himself, but really
exciting himself the more by a hundred plausible explanations. He was
now strung up to such a pitch of uncertainty that he was astonished for
the third time when the 'letter' did duly 'follow'.
* * * * *
'Dearest,' it ran, 'as I explained in my telegram, my husband became
suddenly ill'--('if she _had_ only put that in the telegram,' he
groaned)--'and was ordered to Homburg. Of course it was impossible to
leave him in this crisis, both for practical and sentimental reasons.
You yourself, darling, would not like me to have aggravated his illness
by my flight just at this moment, and thus possibly have his death on my
conscience.' ('Darling, you are always right,' he said, kissing the