‘He might be fifty, to look at him,’ Mary Rampion was thinking. ‘And yet, what is his age?’ She made calculations and decided that he couldn’t be more than thirty-two or thirty-three. Just the right age for settling down.
‘A changed man,’ she repeated.
‘But I don’t particularly want to be changed.’
Mark Rampion nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with you, Spandrell. You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice. You don’t want to be made healthy. You enjoy your unwholesomeness. You’re rather proud of it, even.’
‘Marriage would be the cure,’ persisted Mary, indefatigably enthusiastic in the cause of the sacrament to which she herself owed all her life and happiness.
‘Unless, of course, it merely destroyed the wife,’ said Rampion. ‘He might infect her with his own gangrene.’
Spandrell threw back his head and laughed profoundly, butt, as was his custom, almost inaudibly, a muted explosion. ‘Admirable!’ he said. ‘Admirable! The first really good argument in favour of matrimony I ever heard. Almost thou persuadest me, Rampion. I’ve never actually carried it as far as marriage.’
‘Carried what?’ asked Rampion, frowning a little. He disliked the other’s rather melodramatically cynical way of talking. So damned pleased with his naughtinesses! Like a stupid child, really.
‘The process of infection. I’d always stopped this side of the registry office. But I’ll cross the threshold next time.’ He drank some more brandy. ‘I’m like Socrates,’ he went on. ‘I’m divinely appointed to corrupt the youth, the female youth more particularly. I have a mission to educate them in the way they shouldn’t go.’ He threw back his head to emit that voiceless laugh of his. Rampion looked at him distastefully. So theatrical. It was as though the man were overacting in order to convince himself he was there at all.
‘But if you only knew what marriage could mean,’ Mary earnestly put in. ‘If you only knew…’
‘But, my dear woman, of course he knows,’ Rampion interrupted with impatience.
‘We’ve been married more than fifteen years now,’ she went on, the missionary spirit strong within her. ‘And I assure you…’
‘I wouldn’t waste my breath, if I were you.’
Mary glanced enquiringly at her husband. Wherever human relationships were concerned, she had an absolute trust in Rampion’s judgment. Through those labyrinths he threaded his way with a sure tact which she could only envy, not imitate. ‘He can smell people’s souls,’ she used to say of him. She herself had but an indifferent nose for souls. Wisely then, she allowed herself to be guided by him. She glanced at him. Rampion was staring into his coffee cup. His forehead was puckered into a frown; he had evidently spoken in earnest. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said and lit another cigarette.
Spandrell looked from one to the other almost triumphantly. ‘I have a regular technique with the young ones,’ he went on in the same too cynical manner. Mary shut her eyes and thought of the time when she and Rampion had been young.
CHAPTER IX
‘What a blotch!’ said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley. Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke. The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach. The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows. ‘Our poor view! It oughtn’t to be allowed. It really oughtn’t.’
‘Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,’ quoted her brother George.
The other young man was more practically minded. ‘If one could plant a battery here,’ he suggested, ‘and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place…’
‘It would be a good thing,’ said Mary emphatically. ‘A really good thing.’
Her approval filled the military young man with happiness. He was desperately in love. ‘Heavy, howitzers,’ he added, trying to improve on his suggestion. But George interrupted him.
‘Who the devil is that?’ he asked.
The others looked round in the direction he was pointing. A stranger was walking up the hill towards them.
‘No idea,’ said Mary, looking at him.
The stranger approached. He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind—for he wore no hat. He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey flannel trousers. His tie was red; he walked without a stick.
‘Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,’ said George.
And indeed, the young man was coming straight towards them. He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important business.
‘What an extraordinary face!’ thought Mary, as he approached. ‘But how ill he looks! So thin, so pale.’ But his eyes forbade her to feel pity. They were bright with power.
He came to a halt in front of them drawing up his thin body very rigidly, as though he were on parade. There was defiance in the attitude, an earnest defiance in the expression of his face. He looked at them fixedly with his bright eyes, turning from one to the other.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. It was costing him an enormous effort to speak. But speak he must, just because of that insolent unawareness in their blank rich faces.
Mary answered for the others. ‘Good afternoon.’
‘I’m trespassing here,’ said the stranger. ‘Do you mind?’ The seriousness of his defiance deepened. He looked at them sombrely. The young men were examining him from the other side of the bars, from a long way off, from the vantage ground of another class. They had noticed his clothes. There was hostility and contempt in their eyes. There was also a kind of fear. ‘I’m a trespasser,’ he repeated. His voice was rather shrill, but musical. His accent was of the country.
‘One of the local cads,’ George had been thinking.
‘A trespasser.’ It would have been much easier, much pleasanter to sneak out unobserved. That was why he had to affront them.
There was a silence. The military man turned away. He dissociated himself from the whole unpleasant business. It had nothing to do with him, after all. The park belonged to Mary’s father. He was only a guest. ‘I’ve gotta motta: Always merry and bright,’ he hummed to himself, as he looked out over the black town in the valley.
It was George who broke the silence.’Do we mind?’ he said, repeating the stranger’s words. His face had gone very red.
‘How absurd he looks!’ thought Mary, as she glanced at him. ‘Like a bull calf. A blushing bull calf.’
‘Do we mind?’ Damned insolent little bounder! George was working up a righteous indignation. ‘I should just think we do mind. And I’ll trouble you to…’
Mary broke out into laughter. ‘We don’t mind at all,’ she said. ‘Not in the least.’
Her brother’s face became even redder. ‘What do you mean, Mary?’ he asked furiously. (‘Always merry and bright,’ hummed the military man, more starrily detached than ever.) ‘The place is private.’
‘But we don’t mind a bit,’ she said, not looking at her brother, but at the stranger. ‘Not a bit, when people come and are frank about it, like you.’ She smiled at him; but the young man’s face remained as proudly serious as ever. Looking into those serious bright eyes, she too suddenly became serious. It was no joke, she saw all at once, no joke. Grave issues were involved, important issues. But why grave and in what way important she did not know. She was only obscurely and profoundly aware that it was no joke. ‘Goodbye,’ she said in an altered voice, and held out her hand.
The stranger hesitated for a second, then took it. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out of the park as quick as I can.’ And turning round, he walked rapidly away.
‘What the devil!’ George began, turning angrily on his sister.
‘Oh, hold your tongue!’ she answered impatiently.
‘Shaking hands with the fellow,’ he went on protesting.
‘A bit of a pleb, wasn’t he?’ put in the military friend.
She looked from one to the other without speaking and walked away. What louts they were! The two young men followed.
‘I wish to God Mary would learn how to behave herself properly,’ said George, still fuming.
The military young man made deprecating noises. He was in love with her; but he had to admit that she was rather embarrassingly unconventional sometimes. It was her only defect.
‘Shaking that bounder’s hand!’ George went on grumbling.
That was their first meeting. Mary then was twenty-two and Mark Rampion a year younger. He had finished his second year at Sheffield University and was back at Stanton for the summer vacation. His mother lived in one of a row of cottages near the station. She had a little pension—her husband had been a postman—and made a few extra shillings by sewing. Mark was a scholarship boy. His younger and less talented brothers were already at work.
‘A very remarkable young man,’ the Rector insisted more than once in the course of his sketch of Mark Rampion’s career, some few days later.
The occasion was a church bazaar and charitable garden party at the Rectory. Some of the Sunday School children had acted a little play in the open air The dramatist was Mark Rampion.
‘Quite unassisted,’ the Rector assured the assembled gentry.’ And what’s more, the lad can draw. They’re a little eccentric perhaps, his pictures, a little…ah..’ he hesitated.
‘Weird,’ suggested his daughter, with an upper middle-class smile, proud of her incomprehension.
‘But full of talent,’ the Rector continued. ‘The boy’s a real cygnet of Tees,’ he added with a selfconscious,
