None Other Gods - Robert Hugh Benson (e book reader for pc .txt) 📗

felt he was acting in some ridiculous dream; but his sense of humor saved him. The girl gave a little awkward bow in response, and dropped her eyes. Certainly she was very like Jenny, and very unlike.

"And a name?" asked Frank. "We may as well have one in case of difficulties."

The Major considered.

"What do you say to Trustcott?" he asked. "Will that do?"

"Perfectly," said Frank. "Major and Mrs. Trustcott.... Well, shall we be going?"

* * * * *


Frank had no particular views as to lodgings, or even to roads, so long as the direction was more or less northward. He was aiming, generally speaking, at Selby and York; and it seemed that this would suit the Major as well as anything else. There is, I believe, some kind of routine amongst the roadsters; and about that time of the year most of them are as far afield as at any time from their winter quarters. The Major and Mrs. Trustcott, he soon learned, were Southerners; but they would not turn homewards for another three months yet, at least. For himself, he had no ideas beyond a general intention to reach Barham some time in the autumn, before Jack went back to Cambridge for his fourth year.

"The country is not prepossessing about here," observed the Major presently; "Hampole is an exception."

Frank glanced back at the valley they were leaving. It had, indeed, an extraordinarily retired and rural air; it was a fertile little tract of ground, very limited and circumscribed, and the rail that ran through it was the only sign of the century. But the bright air was a little dimmed with smoke; and already from the point they had reached tall chimneys began to prick against the horizon.

"You have been here before?" he said.

"Why, yes; and about this time last year, wasn't it, Gertie? I understand a hermit lived here once."

"A hermit might almost live here to-day," said Frank.

"You are right, sir," said the Major.

* * * * *


Frank began to wonder, as he walked, as to why this man was on the roads. Curiously enough, he believed his statement that he had been in the army. The air of him seemed the right thing. A militia captain would have swaggered more; a complete impostor would have given more details. Frank began to fish for information.

"You have been long on the roads?" he said.

The Major did not appear to hear him.

"You have been long on the roads?" persisted Frank.

The other glanced at him furtively and rather insolently. "The younger man first, please."

Frank smiled.

"Oh, certainly!" he said. "Well, I have left Cambridge at the end of June only."

"Ah! Anything disgraceful?"

"You won't believe me, I suppose, if I say 'No'?"

"Oh! I daresay I shall."

"Well, then, 'No.'"

"Then may I ask--?"

"Oh, yes! I was kicked out by my father--I needn't go into details. I sold up my things and came out. That's all!"

"And you mean to stick to it?"

"Certainly--at least for a year or two."

"That's all right. Well, then--Major--what did we say? Trustcott? Ah, yes, Trustcott. Well, then, I think we might add 'Eleventh Hussars'; that's near enough. The final catastrophe was, I think, cards. Not that I cheated, you understand. I will allow no man to say that of me. But that was what was said. A gentleman of spirit, you understand, could not remain in a regiment when such things could be said. Then we tumbled downhill; and I've been at this for four years. And, you know, sir, it might be worse!"

Frank nodded.

Naturally he did not believe as necessarily true this terse little story, and he was absolutely certain that if cards were mixed up in it at all, obviously the Major had cheated. So he just took the story and put it away, so to speak. It was to form, he perceived, the understanding on which they consorted together. Then he began to wonder about the girl. The Major soon supplied a further form.

"And Mrs. Trustcott, here? Well, she joined me, let us say, rather more than eighteen months ago. We had been acquainted before that, however. That was when I was consenting to serve as groom to some--er--some Jewish bounder in town. Mrs. Trustcott's parents live in town."

The girl, who had been trudging patiently a foot or two behind them, just glanced up at Frank and down again. He wondered exactly what her own attitude was to all this. But she made no comment.

"And now we know one another," finished the Major in a tone of genial finality. "So where are you taking us--er--Mr. Gregory?"


(III)

They were fortunate that night.

The part of Yorkshire where they were traveling consists chiefly of an innumerable quantity of little cottages, gathered for the most part round collieries. One has the impression--at any rate, from a motor--that there is nothing but villages. But that is not a fact. There are stretches of road, quite solitary at certain hours; and in one of these they noticed presently a little house, not twenty yards from the road, once obviously forming part of a row of colliers' cottages, of which the rest were demolished.

It was not far off from ruin itself, and was very plainly uninhabited. Across the front door were nailed deal props, originally, perhaps, for the purpose of keeping it barred, and useful for holding it in its place. The Major and Gertie kept watch on the road while Frank pushed open the crazy little gate and went round to the back. A minute later he called to them softly.

He had wrenched open the back door, and within in the darkness they could make out a little kitchen, stripped of everything--table, furniture, and even the range itself. The Major kicked something presently in the gloom, swore softly, and announced he had found a kettle. They decided that all this would do very well.

* * * * *


Tramps do not demand very much, and these were completely contented when they had made a small fire, damped down with a turf to prevent it smoking, had boiled a little water, stewed some tea, and eaten what they had. Even this was not luxurious. The Major produced the heel of a cheese and two crushed-looking bananas, and Frank a half-eaten tin of sardines and a small, stale loaf. The Major announced presently that he would make a savory; and, indeed, with cheese melted on to the bread, and sardines on the top, he did very well. Gertie moved silently about; and Frank, in the intervals of rather abrupt conversation with the Major, found his eyes following her as she spread out their small possessions, vanished up the stairs and reappeared. Certainly she was very like Jenny, even in odd little details--the line of her eyebrows, the angle of her chin and so forth--perhaps more in these details than in anything else. He began to wonder a little about her--to imagine her past, to forecast her future. It seemed all rather sordid. She disappeared finally without a word: he heard her steps overhead, and then silence.

Then he had to attend to the Major a little more.

"It was easy enough to tell you," said that gentleman.

"How?"

"Oh, well, if nothing else, your clothes."

"Aren't they shabby enough?"

The Major eyed him with half-closed lids, by the light of the single candle-end, stuck in its own wax on the mantelshelf.

"They're shabby enough, but they're the wrong sort. There's the cut, first--though that doesn't settle it. But these are gray flannel trousers, for one thing, and then the coat's not stout enough."

"They might have been given me," said Frank, smiling.

"They fit you too well for that."

"I'll change them when I get a chance," observed Frank.

"It would be as well," assented the Major.

* * * * *


Somehow or another the sense of sordidness, which presently began to affect Frank so profoundly, descended on him for the first time that night. He had managed, by his very solitariness hitherto, to escape it so far. It had been possible to keep up a kind of pose so far; to imagine the adventure in the light of a very much prolonged and very realistic picnic. But with this other man the thing became impossible. It was tolerable to wash one's own socks; it was not so tolerable to see another man's socks hung up on the peeling mantelpiece a foot away from his own head, and to see two dirty ankles, not his own, emerging from crazy boots.

The Major, too, presently, when he grew a trifle maudlin over his own sorrows, began to call him "Frankie," and "my boy," and somehow it mattered, from a man with the Major's obvious record. Frank pulled himself up only just in time to prevent a retort when it first happened, but it was not the slightest use to be resentful. The thing had to be borne. And it became easier when it occurred to him to regard the Major as a study; it was even interesting to hear him give himself away, yet all with a pompous appearance of self-respect, and to recount his first meeting with Gertie, now asleep upstairs.

The man was, in fact, exactly what Frank, in his prosperous days, would have labeled "Bounder." He had a number of meaningless little mannerisms--a way of passing his hand over his mustache, a trick of bringing a look of veiled insolence into his eyes; there were subjects he could not keep away from--among them Harrow School, the Universities (which he called 'Varsity), the regiment he had belonged to, and a certain type of adventure connected with women and champagne. And underneath the whole crust of what the Major took to be breeding, there was a piteous revelation of a feeble, vindictive, and rather nasty character. It became more and more evident that the cheating incident--or, rather, the accusation, as he persisted in calling it--was merely the last straw in his fall, and that the whole thing had been the result of a crumbly unprincipled kind of will underneath, rather than of any particular strain of vice. He appeared, even now, to think that his traveling about with a woman who was not his wife was a sort of remnant of fallen splendor--as a man might keep a couple of silver spoons out of the ruin of his house.

"I recommend you to pick up with one," remarked the Major. "There are plenty to be had, if you go about it the right way."

"Thanks," said Frank, "but it's not my line."


(IV)

The morning, too, was a little trying.

Frank had passed a tolerable night.