CHAPTER 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hour, were simply superseded, and it was much of a rest to the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. _

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