Chapter V: §

He kept her indoors for the rest of the day, and decided that in future they would use the car as a means of getting well out of reach of St. Mawes, and then, leaving it in some obscure village, take the necessary exercise undisturbed. The boat would have done for getting away in, but the fisherman wouldn’t let them have it without him, and he too stared persistently at Sally. His ridiculous name was Cupp. ‘Serve him right,’ thought Jocelyn, who disliked him intensely.

These difficulties considerably interfered with the peace of the honeymoon. Having to take precautions, and scheme before doing ordinary things such as go out for a walk, seemed perfectly monstrous to Jocelyn. He was inclined, though he struggled against it, to blame Sally. He knew it was grossly unfair to blame her, but then it was outside his theories that a modest woman, however lovely, shouldn’t be able in England to proceed on her lawful occasions unmolested. There must be, he thought, something in Sally’s behaviour, though he couldn’t quite see what.

He took her away the next morning for the whole day in the car, and, leaving it at a lonely wayside inn, marched her off for the exercise they both needed. He needed it, he knew, for he was getting quite livery, and so, he dared say, was she; though it would have been as easy to imagine a new-born flower having a liver as Sally. Anyhow, she must be exercised; her health was now his concern, Jocelyn told himself. Everything of hers was now his concern. The lovely child had been miraculously handed over to him by Destiny--thus augustly did he dub Mr. Pinner--and there was no one but him to protect and guide and teach her. No one but him jolly well should, either, said Jocelyn to himself, baring his teeth at the mere thought, savagely possessive, strongly resembling a growling dog over a newly-acquired bone.

But it was trying, having to hide her like this. It came to that, that he had to hide her if he was to have any peace. Well, when he took her to London, and settled down there seriously, there wouldn’t be this trouble, because he intended to live in the slums. Slums were the places, he felt sure, for being let alone in. Not, of course, the more cut-throat kind, but obscure streets where everybody was too busy being poor to be interested in a girl’s beauty. To be interested in that, Jocelyn thought he knew, you have to have had and be going to have a properly filling dinner every day. No dinners, no love. One only had to think a little to see this must be so. In such a street, how peaceful they would be, he in one room writing, she in another room not writing. Nor would there be any servant difficulty for them either, because Sally was used to housework, and knew no other conditions than those in which she had to do it herself. He and she were going to lead simple lives, irradiated by her enchanting loveliness; and presently, when she had begun to profit by the lessons he would give her in the art of correct speech, she would be more of a companion to him, more able to--well, converse.

For the moment, he couldn’t disguise from himself, she was weak in conversation. To look at her, to look at her strangely noble little head, with everything there that is supposed to go with mind--the broad sweep of the brow, the beautifully moulded temples, the radiance in the eyes, the light that seemed to play over the vivid face with its swiftly changing expressions, each one more lovely than the last, and the whole amazing creature a poem of delicate colouring, except where colour had caught fire and become the flaming wonder of her hair--to look at this, and then hear the meagre, the really most meagre and defective observations that came out of it all, was a surprise. A growing surprise. Frankly, a growingly painful surprise. Somehow he hadn’t noticed it before, but now he every hour more plainly perceived a grave discrepancy between Sally’s appearance and her reality. Or was what he saw her reality, and what he heard mere appearance?

At night he was sure this was so. Next morning he was afraid it wasn’t. In any case, she didn’t match.

§

Curious, thought Jocelyn a day or two later, how completely Sally didn’t match. Perhaps he was getting livery, and beholding her with a jaundiced eye. It wouldn’t be surprising if this were so, seeing the reversal of his ordinary habits that marriage had made. His life till then had been one of excessive intellectual activity, and excessive sexual inactivity. Now it was just the opposite. It seemed to him that he was living entirely on his emotions and his nerves, doing nothing but make love, and never thinking a single thought worth thinking. This preoccupation with Sally’s discrepances, for instance--what, after all, were a girl’s discrepances compared to the importance, the interest, of his brain work till he met her?

He would come down to breakfast, to the sober facts of bacon and grey morning light, in a highly critical mood, feeling very old, and wise, and mature, and of course--there could be no two opinions as to that--in everything, except just physical beauty, Sally’s superior. Then she would come down, and, cautiously saying nothing, smile at him; and he would be forced, in spite of himself, to wonder, as he gazed at her in a fresh surprise, whether there could be anything in the world superior to such beauty. Not himself, anyhow, he thought, with his little inky ambitions, his desire to express and impress himself, his craving to find out and do. Sally had no cravings that he could discover; she was mere lovely acquiescence, content--and with what exquisiteness--to be.

Still, in this world one couldn’t just sit silent, and serene, and wonderful; and the minute circumstances obliged her to say something her discrepances worried him again. It really was surprising: pure perfection outside, and inside--he hated to think it, but more and more feared he recognised--pure Pinner. He must take her in hand. He must teach her, train her in the manners expected in her new sphere of life.

He pulled himself together, and took her in hand. During the second week after their marriage she was, as it were, almost constantly in hand; and towards its end Jocelyn’s consciousness of his responsibility and duty, which at first had faded away in the evening and disappeared entirely at night, stretched further and further across the day like a lengthening shadow, till at last it reached right into his very bed. The image of his mother had begun to loom nearer,--his mother, whom he had forgotten in the first fever of passion, but to whom he would undoubtedly soon now have to show Sally. Show her? Nothing so easy and sure of its effect as showing Sally, but it was what would happen immediately after she had been shown that Jocelyn, daily more able to contemplate Sally objectively as his honeymoon grew longer, began to consider.

There was no time to lose. He took her in hand. He started by attacking her h’s, whose absence had early become acutely distressing to him. Every day he devoted an hour the first thing after breakfast to them, making her talk to him, to her regret, for she by then well knew that little good came of talk, and patiently, each time she dropped one, picking it up and handing it back to her, so to speak, with careful marginal comments.

He found her most obtuse. Ordinary talk wasn’t enough. He had to invent sentences, special sentences for her to learn by heart and practise on, with little pitfalls in their middles which she was to avoid.

She seemed incapable of avoiding anything. Into each pitfall Sally invariably fell; and unwilling to believe that she couldn’t keep out of them if she really tried, Jocelyn said the sentences over and over again to her, obstinately persevering, determined she should learn.

_Hefty Harry hurries after his hat._ Sally drew in long breaths, and blew them out again at the beginning of each word, hoping they would turn into h’s, though for the life of her she couldn’t see any difference between the way she rendered _Hefty Harry_ and the way Jocelyn did.

_Husbands inhabit heaven._ This was another one, worse than _Hefty Harry_, because it wasn’t enough to blow out her breath at the beginning of each word, but she had somehow to get it out in the middle of the middle one as well; besides, husbands didn’t inhabit heaven till they were dead, and Jocelyn’s habit of harping on heaven upset her, for heaven meant death first, and ever since her mother’s death, at which Sally had been present, she had had the poorest opinion of the whole thing.

During the lesson Jocelyn carefully gazed out of the window, keeping his eyes off her, because this was serious, this was important, and mustn’t be interfered with by her face. There he sat, patient but determined, holding her hand so as to reassure her, saying the sentences slowly and distinctly, while Sally, moist with effort, diligently blew. Why was it so important? she vaguely wondered. He seemed to love her a lot, especially in the evenings, and kept on telling her at the times when his ears were red how happy he was, so what more did he want? What was the use of bothering over things like h’s, which he declared were there but of which she could see no sign? She and her father, they had never worried about them, and they had got along all right. But Sally was docile; Sally was obedient and goodnatured; Sally earnestly wished to give people what they wanted; and if what Husband wanted was h’s, then she would try her utmost to provide them. If only she were quite clear as to what they were! Perhaps, by plodding, she would some day discover.

She plodded; and the nearest she got to criticism of this new development in her life was occasionally, when after breakfast Jocelyn called her over to the window, where he had placed two chairs in readiness for the lesson and pulled down the blind below the level of her head, occasionally, very occasionally, to murmur to herself, ‘Them h’s.’

§

But it wasn’t only her h’s, it wasn’t only the way she pronounced the few words that seemed to be at her disposal; there were other things that disquieted Jocelyn, as he awoke more and more from the wild first worship of her beauty. He appeared to be surrounded, out of doors and in, by an increasing number of difficulties. There was that business of not being able to go out without becoming the instant centre of the entire attention of St. Mawes,--most painful to Jocelyn, who had a fixed notion, implanted in him early in the decent cover of Almond Tree Cottage, that the truly well-bred were never conspicuous. How unpleasant, how extraordinarily unpleasant when, the morning lesson over and the need for exercise imperative, he went round to the garage to fetch the car, to find on his return the sea-wall opposite their lodgings black with expectant loungers; how unpleasant, how extraordinarily unpleasant to have to hurry Sally into the thing, as if she were the centre figure of a _cause célèbre_ leaving the Law Courts; and the car, being an old one bought second-hand, sometimes wouldn’t start--twice that happened--and then to see how those loungers sprang into life and flocked across to help! Jocelyn, used only to quiet comings and goings and no one taking the least notice of anything he did, used, in fact to being what his mother described as well-bred, felt as if he had suddenly turned into a circus.

And indoors, too, he had difficulties, apart from and in addition to the difficulties at the lessons, for Sally showed a tendency, mild but unmistakable, to coalesce with the Cupps. She wanted to help Mrs. Cupp make the bed in the morning, she tried to clear away the breakfast, so as to save her feet, as she put it, and once, on some excuse or other, she actually left Jocelyn by himself in the parlour and got away into the kitchen, where he found her presently, on going to look, kissing a fat and hideous child that could only be a little Cupp.

To do her justice Mrs. Cupp in no way that Jocelyn could see encouraged this; on the contrary, she seemed a particularly stand-offish sort of woman, who not only knew her own place but knew Sally’s as well, and wished to keep her in it. Unfortunate that Sally should be, apparently, so entirely without that knowledge.

Jocelyn did his best to impart it. ‘You belong to me now, Sally,’ he explained, ‘and my place and sphere is your place and sphere, and my relations and friends your relations and friends. I don’t go and sit in kitchens, nor am I friends, beyond what every one is in regard to that class, with the Cupps. I don’t, and therefore you mustn’t.’

Was this speech snobbish? He hoped not; he trusted not. He despised snobbishness. His mother had most carefully taught him to. She would shudder at the mere word, and the shudder had got into his childhood’s bones.

Sally gave herself great pains to understand, looking at him attentively while he spoke and coming to the conclusion that what Usband was driving at was that she had got to sit quiet and remember she was now a lady. She sat quiet, remembering it. She made no attempt at any further budging from her place, even when Mrs. Cupp dropped things off the overloaded tray at her very feet, and her fingers itched to pick them up. She managed not to; she managed to take no notice whatever of them, and, bending her head over the paper Jocelyn had written her lesson out on in a fair round hand, would bury herself in it instead, saying it out loud as he had bidden her, conning it diligently.

The room re-echoed with _Hefty Harry_, and the deep preliminary drawings in and blowings out of breaths that were meant to become h’s, and never did.