Chapter XI

Anthony had no inner egoism; he did not make pictures in his mind of himself, nor did he try to make them to his advantage in the minds of other people. He was without that key to character that the desire to please others involves. Nobody had ever called him sympathetic or confided to him picturesque and inaccurate accounts of their lives. His desire to serve was evident; but it was roused only by those who were courageous sufferers, at the mercy of a stronger force. He took no interest in the aggrieved, and he always asked why a dog was lame before attempting to help it over a stile.

But he had made no such researches into the causes of Kitty’s ostracism. He swept into the back of his mind all adverse facts against her. Kitty was not to blame; everybody else was to blame: her father, for her upbringing, which was admittedly careless; the neighborhood, for its blind-eyed strictness; and, above all, other women. The women of Rochett became Anthony’s inveterate enemies. They were unappeasably at war with Kitty; but it was difficult for Anthony to fight them, because they did things which Anthony could not fight.

When they passed Mrs. Bucket, the clergyman’s wife, in the car, she deliberately turned her back and gazed through the hedge.

One cannot get out of a motor-car and fight with a lady for looking at a hedge; and yet Mrs. Bucket’s action was obviously hostile. There was nothing in the hedge, or through it, to look at except the silhouette of a preoccupied pig, and there was no dust in the road; there was only Kitty.

“A woman of that type,” Anthony exclaimed angrily, “disgusts me. Their religion is supposed to be love, and their practice is hate. They wouldn’t have been seen in the New Testament except behind the portliest of the Pharisees. None of them envisages a generous action, and they haven’t enough courage to face one of their own ugly thoughts. If she has anything against you, why doesn’t she stand up and say so? She belongs to a race of jackals that eat other people’s kill.”

“Rubbish!” said Kitty, lightly. “Poor old thing, she isn’t a bit like a jackal. She doesn’t like me, and I don’t like her; why should she bow to me?”

“_You_ wouldn’t have cut her,” said Anthony, a little crestfallen at this reception of his championship. “I saw you meant to bow to her.”

“It’s not in my interest to cut respectable women,” replied Kitty, coolly. “I don’t often get the chance; they turn their backs before I have time to do more than cock my tam-o’-shanter at them.”

“Even Daphne’s unfair to you,” went on Anthony, bitterly. “At least, I suppose she is. If she wasn’t unfair, you’d surely come to Merry Gardens.”

“Have you asked her why I don’t come?” replied Kitty, evasively, putting on speed with a jerk.

“Oh, she only says, ‘She can come if she likes, Tony; I sha’n’t stop her.’ But if she asked you, you’d come, wouldn’t you, Kitty? Not asking you is stopping you.”

“She won’t ask me,” said Kitty, dryly. “I should leave it alone if I were you, Anthony. I don’t believe Ishmael was a man. I believe he was a lady of certain attractions, living in a suspicious country neighborhood where nobody knew how to put on their clothes. But Daphne’s all right. I told you why she’s down on me before, but I didn’t tell you what she’d tried to do for me first.

“She came here to an awfully stiff and old-fashioned neighborhood, where the people were all friends of Jim’s, and had wanted him to marry one of their daughters, with her own way to make, and she tried to make mine instead. She saw me left out at a silly, frumpish, old school treat where they’d had to ask me to get a subscription; and from that moment she fought my battles in season and out of season, and it was mostly out of season with my battles. And what have I ever done for her? Nothing except try to turn her husband’s head.”

“Kitty!” exclaimed Anthony, aghast. “Old Jim?”

“Oh, well,” said Kitty, indifferently, “I did; and no thanks to _his_ superior morals that I didn’t succeed. I got fed up with his explaining potato crops to me, so I dropped him. Jim’s a nice fellow and he hates me like poison now. He thinks it’s virtue, but it isn’t: it’s pure funk. But Daphne was never afraid of me. She was nice to me, not pitying or superior or ‘you-poor-thing-ish,’ just nice. She thought I’d had no luck.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know about Jim,” suggested Anthony, who refused to see his favorite sister justified at Kitty’s expense.

“Oh, she knew,” said Kitty, calmly, “as quickly as she would have known if her first baby had cut a new tooth. Daphne’s no fool about men. She knew she could really hold Jim, and she wasn’t afraid of me; but she wasn’t going to be nasty either. She isn’t really nasty now; she’s merely holding off because I’m not playing the game. She’d be nice again to-morrow if I’d behave properly to you.”

“What do you call behaving properly to me?” asked Anthony, with amusement. “I’ve not complained so far.”

“Never seeing you again would be behaving properly to you,” said Kitty, with a curious gravity. “I see that now, but it’s too late.”

“You couldn’t, I fancy, even the two of you, dispose of me quite so easily,” observed Anthony.

Kitty made no answer to this statement. She said after a pause:

“Women are all right. Look at Peckham. Peckham would be cut into little bits to prevent my having a chilblain. I don’t quite know a man who would be, not even you, Tony. Oh, actual bits, perhaps. But you wouldn’t always want to take a back seat so as to give me a front one, would you? That’s what old Peckham wants: she’d be willing to be jolted off on to the road to see me safe and sound on the front seat.”

Anthony said something about the maternal instinct.

“You can call it what you like,” said Kitty, indifferently. “All I’m saying is, women do more for you than men sometimes, and don’t get anything out of it. There was a woman once who did a thing for me—an angel from heaven would have turned its nose up at—and she made no more fuss about it than if she had lent me a pocket-handkerchief. I appreciate that you’re paying me a left-handed compliment by having a shy at women; but you can take my word for it, there’s nothing in it.”

“You dislike them yourself,” urged Anthony, hotly; “you told me so.”

“Of course I do,” said Kitty. “Why not? I dislike them because they’re not anxious for me to amuse myself at their expense, and that’s the only form of amusement that happens to appeal to me. I dare say you like burglars—I don’t blame you for it—but it’s a peculiar taste that the police don’t share. As far as other women are concerned, I’m a burglar and, they’re the police. It’s not much use your trying to reconcile us, is it?”

Anthony ignored this metaphor. He did not believe that Kitty broke laws. She merely ignored conventionalities.

“What happened to the woman you say helped you?” he asked, instead, a little resentfully. “If she was really a good sort, why didn’t you keep hold of her and have a friend to fall back on?”

“We couldn’t meet again,” said Kitty, briefly. “That’s the hill over there beyond the windmill, with the row of beeches on the top. We get out there.”

Anthony frowned at the windmill. He hated mysteries, and above all he hated coming on a mystery in Kitty’s life. He suspected that there were things he would dislike to know in Kitty’s career, but he disliked even more not knowing them.

“I haven’t the right to ask you any questions, of course,” he said stiffly.

“No,” agreed Kitty, “you haven’t; but don’t let that worry you. I wouldn’t answer you even if you had. I don’t believe in rights about questions. Live and let live, that’s my motto. We dump the car here and climb up. Rather a nice hill, isn’t it?”

Anthony stood looking up at the soft, green incline above them. There were thickets of young hazel-bushes on the slopes, hollows full of may-blossom, and the sharpened green of very young leaves.

“‘The new-born leaves,’” Kitty quoted softly, touching them with her bared fingers. “That’s Dante, isn’t it? The woman I told you about said that to me once. Of course I never read myself except when it’s wet, and I shouldn’t read Dante in a blizzard. I prefer D’Annunzio.”

“I don’t believe you’ve read a word of D’Annunzio in your life,” said Anthony, crossly. “You just say that to tease me, because you know I hate decadent stuff, full of moonshine and mud. Why do you always try to make yourself out what you know I don’t like, Kitty?”

“Well, it does tease you, doesn’t it?” laughed Kitty. “Poor old Tony! You’re awfully easily teased. Never mind; that’s because you like me. I like you to like me, you know.”

“I wish you did,” said Anthony under his breath. He held a bramble back to let her pass. Kitty saw his arm tremble as she touched it.

“Oh, not like that,” she said lightly; “that’s a stupid, solemn way. Like me as if liking were a joke, not as if it were a state funeral and I were the corpse.”

Anthony stopped suddenly. He felt as if something had literally moved in his heart.

“For God’s sake! don’t talk like that!” he exclaimed harshly. “You’re not ill, are you?”

Kitty turned her head and opened wide eyes at him in which astonishment mixed with a curious look of resentment.

“Ill?” she said. “Why should I be ill? How just like a doctor! Of all the nonsense, Anthony!”

It wasn’t in the least like a doctor; it was the kind of statement that any doctor would have laughed at, and of course it was nonsense, only some stubborn instinct in Anthony remained unrelieved. He had felt one of those moments of panic that the heart never forgets.

Kitty’s lithe young figure stepped steadily on in front of him. She was beyond the copse of young trees and out on the open hillside. Anthony called to her to stop and watch the beauty of the expanding world at their feet, the line of may-blossoms like the crest of a breaking wave, beyond it the orchards, and a common covered with a burnished shield of gorse, flame upon golden flame.

But Kitty refused to do more than glance at it over her shoulder.

“It’s the same old view I’ve seen for years,” she said impatiently.

Anthony shut his lips. The view meant nothing to him if she would not share it. Kitty’s impatience stripped the woods of bloom and disallowed the beauty of the day. He wondered if he had been stupid to talk against women; perhaps Kitty had not realized that it was because she was different from all other women that all the other women must be in the wrong. Anthony couldn’t explain this to Kitty; he couldn’t really explain anything. For moment by moment he felt more aware of her and less aware of everything else.

He did not dream that Kitty was intentionally blinding him to everything but herself. She did not speak again until she had reached the group of beeches at the top of the hill. They stood silent and massive above her, as if their big brown trunks were the columns of a cathedral aisle.

“There’ll be thunder soon,” said Kitty under her breath. “I love storms.”

Anthony stood beside her as motionless as one of the tree trunks. He thought she did not realize what he was feeling. Perhaps she was thinking of the coming rain, while he stood tense with his struggle not to take her in his arms.

She turned and looked at him with eyes in which laughter brimmed over, seized him by the shoulders, and swiftly drawing his head down to hers, kissed him full on the lips.

Her action took Anthony completely by surprise. He caught her so close to him that she could not speak, and covered her face and eyes and hair with kisses. It was as if they ceased to be human beings, and became two wild creatures in the woods, full of magic and madness. Anthony slipped beyond her control and beyond his own.

All the years of his intense restraint fell from him; his whole being seemed to alter in her arms. He did not know what was left of him or what was Kitty.

Kitty said his name at last, over and over, very softly and steadily.

“Anthony! Anthony!” It seemed to him as if he were being called back out of another world. He let her go at last, forcing his will to answer hers.

She leaned, with her back against a tree, breathless and white, but laughing a little.

“I won’t scold you, Tony,” she said. “It was all my fault. I took you by surprise, and that was a little the way you took me. I didn’t know, you see, you would be that kind of lover.”

“I didn’t frighten you, did I?” he asked anxiously. “I’ll take the greatest care of you always, Kitty; I’ll never let anything hurt or frighten you again. I never dreamed you could, I never thought I might—”

“Don’t put too much weight on anything I do,” Kitty interrupted him quickly. “The woods are full of mischief. Poor old Anthony! You do look done. That’s because you think I am, isn’t it? Well, I’ll race you to the bottom of the hill to show you I’m not.”

She was off like a flash between the trunks of the trees, and Anthony after her. It was a breathless, absurd, confusing race.

Anthony felt as if he had got into a nightmare. He did not know the path, and Kitty was mercilessly aware of it. She took short cuts and avoided rough places, leaving him to stumble into pitfalls and be caught by unexpected brambles. He broke free at last, and before they reached the car he had caught her and seized her by the shoulders.

“Kitty, you’re a little devil,” he said breathlessly. “Are you all right?”

Kitty ignored his question.

“That’s better,” she said, with approving eyes. “I’m a little devil, and you’re no better than you should be—now. You can come home and dine with me—no, I won’t be kissed on the roadside; but just bear those two facts in mind, won’t you?”

She sprang away from him into the car. Anthony swung himself up beside her, taking the steering-wheel out of her hands.

“No, you don’t,” he said fiercely. “I’ve had enough of your initiative for one afternoon. I’m going to do the driving from now on.”

Kitty yielded lightly, with smiling eyes. She watched Anthony’s face as he steered the car out of the narrow lane and road by the windmill. His eyes had a queer, odd light in them—a light of intense, controlled excitement, and his rather heavy jaws were set firmly. She would not be able to take him by surprise so easily again. The clouds had darkened rapidly, and just as they turned into the open road the rain began. Thunder rolled down on them from the low hills, and all the may-trees and the golden gorse were blotted out in storm.

Kitty leaned back in the car and shut her eyes; a little smile still lingered round her lips. Anthony glanced at her from time to time to see that she was properly wrapped up and did not look as if she was too exhausted by her race.

He swore to himself that he would never again leave her to her own discretion or let her do things for which she had to pay.

He would pay for whatever she did himself, and guide those small, wilful hands of hers, and put his heart under her feet. He could not tell if he was happy or sad, but he was settled; he knew what he had to do.

She was his life now; there was no other uncertainty. Nothing that people said of her could alter his judgment. Daphne and Jim, his people at Pannell, must accept her or be blotted out.

There was nothing left but Kitty. Kitty, too, was silent. She sat muffled up in her Burberry, with the rain lashing against her face. She was quite comfortable and content, but she made no resolutions. Only, as they flashed past the wet fields and round the familiar corners, she remembered Peckham’s phrase, “A hair will turn him.” A hair had turned Anthony. That was why Kitty was smiling.