GEORGE SHAW - Collected Works

For a moment Henrietta seemed about to cry. Suddenly she exclaimed with enthusiasm: “I will stay with you, Sidney. I will share your work, whatever it may be. I will dress as a dairymaid, and have a little pail to carry milk in. The world is nothing to me except when you are with me; and I should love to live here and sketch from nature.”

He blenched, and partially rose, unable to conceal his dismay. She, resolved not to be cast off, seized him and clung to him. This was the movement that excited the derision of Wickens’s boy in the adjacent gravel pit. Trefusis was glad of the interruption; and, when he gave the boy twopence and bade him begone, half hoped that he would insist on remaining. But though an obdurate boy on most occasions, he proved complaisant on this, and withdrew to the high road, where he made over one of his pennies to a phantom gambler, and tossed with him until recalled from his dual state by the appearance of Fairholme’s party.

In the meantime, Henrietta urgently returned to her proposition.

“We should be so happy,” she said. “I would housekeep for you, and you could work as much as you pleased. Our life would be a long idyll.”

“My love,” he said, shaking his head as she looked beseechingly at him, “I have too much Manchester cotton in my constitution for long idylls. And the truth is, that the first condition of work with me is your absence. When you are with me, I can do nothing but make love to you. You bewitch me. When I escape from you for a moment, it is only to groan remorsefully over the hours you have tempted me to waste and the energy you have futilized.”

“If you won’t live with me you had no right to marry me.”

“True. But that is neither your fault nor mine. We have found that we love each other too much—that our intercourse hinders our usefulness—and so we must part. Not for ever, my dear; only until you have cares and business of your own to fill up your life and prevent you from wasting mine.”

“I believe you are mad,” she said petulantly. “The world is mad nowadays, and is galloping to the deuce as fast as greed can goad it. I merely stand out of the rush, not liking its destination. Here comes a barge, the commander of which is devoted to me because he believes that I am organizing a revolution for the abolition of lock dues and tolls. We will go aboard and float down to Lyvern, whence you can return to London. You had better telegraph from the junction to the college; there must be a hue and cry out after us by this time. You shall have my address, and we can write to one another or see one another whenever we please. Or you can divorce me for deserting you.”

“You would like me to, I know,” said Henrietta, sobbing.

“I should die of despair, my darling,” he said complacently. “Ship aho-o-o-y! Stop crying, Hetty, for God’s sake. You lacerate my very soul.”

“Ah-o-o-o-o-o-o-oy, master!” roared the bargee.

“Good arternoon, sir,” said a man who, with a short whip in his hand, trudged beside the white horse that towed the barge. “Come up!” he added malevolently to the horse.

“I want to get on board, and go up to Lyvern with you,” said Trefusis. “He seems a well fed brute, that.”

“Better fed nor me,” said the man. “You can’t get the work out of a hunderfed ‘orse that you can out of a hunderfed man or woman. I’ve bin in parts of England where women pulled the barges. They come cheaper nor ‘orses, because it didn’t cost nothing to get new ones when the old ones we wore out.”

“Then why not employ them?” said Trefusis, with ironical gravity. “The principle of buying laborforce in the cheapest market and selling its product in the dearest has done much to make Englishmen—what they are.”

“The railway comp’nies keeps ‘orspittles for the like of ‘IM,” said the man, with a cunning laugh, indicating the horse by smacking him on the belly with the butt of the whip. “If ever you try bein’ a laborer in earnest, governor, try it on four legs. You’ll find it far preferable to trying on two.”

“This man is one of my converts,” said Trefusis apart to Henrietta. “He told me the other day that since I set him thinking he never sees a gentleman without feeling inclined to heave a brick at him. I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons. Now I am going to carry you along this plank. If you keep quiet, we may reach the barge. If not, we shall reach the bottom of the canal.”

He carried her safely over, and exchanged some friendly words with the bargee. Then he took Henrietta forward, and stood watching the water as they were borne along noiselessly between the hilly pastures of the country.

“This would be a fairy journey,” he said, “if one could forget the woman down below, cooking her husband’s dinner in a stifling hole about as big as your wardrobe, and—”

“Oh, don’t talk any more of these things,” she said crossly; “I cannot help them. I have my own troubles to think of. HER husband lives with her.”

“She will change places with you, my dear, if you make her the offer.”

She had no answer ready. After a pause he began to speak poetically of the scenery and to offer her loverlike speeches and compliments. But she felt that he intended to get rid of her, and he knew that it was useless to try to hide that design from her. She turned away and sat down on a pile of bricks, only writhing angrily when he pressed her for a word. As they neared the end of her voyage, and her intense protest against desertion remained, as she thought, only half expressed, her sense of injury grew almost unbearable.

They landed on a wharf, and went through an unswept, deeply-rutted lane up to the main street of Lyvern. Here he became Smilash again, walking deferentially a little before her, as if she had hired him to point out the way. She then saw that her last opportunity of appealing to him had gone by, and she nearly burst into tears at the thought. It occurred to her that she might prevail upon him by making a scene in public. But the street was a busy one, and she was a little afraid of him. Neither consideration would have checked her in one of her ungovernable moods, but now she was in an abject one. Her moods seemed to come only when they were harmful to her. She suffered herself to be put into the railway omnibus, which was on the point of starting from the innyard when they arrived there, and though he touched his hat, asked whether she had any message to give him, and in a tender whisper wished her a safe journey, she would not look at or speak to him. So they parted, and he returned alone to the chalet, where he was received by the two policemen who subsequently brought him to the college.

The year wore on, and the long winter evenings set in. The studious young ladies at Alton College, elbows on desk and hands over ears, shuddered chillily in fur tippets whilst they loaded their memories with the statements of writers on moral science, or, like men who swim upon corks, reasoned out mathematical problems upon postulates. Whence it sometimes happened that the more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which few trustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

Agatha, not studious, and apt to shiver in winter, began to break Rule No. 17 with increasing frequency. Rule No. 17 forbade the students to enter the kitchen, or in any way to disturb the servants in the discharge of their duties. Agatha broke it because she was fond of making toffee, of eating it, of a good fire, of doing any forbidden thing, and of the admiration with which the servants listened to her ventriloquial and musical feats. Gertrude accompanied her because she too liked toffee, and because she plumed herself on her condescension to her inferiors. Jane went because her two friends went, and the spirit of adventure, the force of example, and the love of toffee often brought more volunteers to these expeditions than Agatha thought it safe to enlist. One evening Miss Wilson, going downstairs alone to her private wine cellar, was arrested near the kitchen by sounds of revelry, and, stopping to listen, overheard the castanet dance (which reminded her of the emphasis with which Agatha had snapped her fingers at Mrs. Miller), the bee on the window pane, “Robin Adair” (encored by the servants), and an imitation of herself in the act of appealing to Jane Carpenter’s better nature to induce her to study for the Cambridge Local. She waited until the cold and her fear of being discovered spying forced her to creep upstairs, ashamed of having enjoyed a silly entertainment, and of conniving at a breach of the rules rather than face a fresh quarrel with Agatha.