As in the case of so many unions in which mutual attraction of a quite superficial nature has been mistaken for love, the marriage of Jim and Dolly was a complete disaster. Disquietude began to make itself felt within a few weeks, but many months elapsed before Jim faced the situation without any further attempt at self-deception. The revelation that he had nothing to say to his wife, no thought to exchange with her, had come to him early. At first he had tried to believe that it was due to some sort of natural reticence in both their natures; and one day, chancing to open a volume of the poems of Matthew Arnold which Dolly had placed upon an occasional table in the drawing-room (for the look of the thing) he had found some consolation in the following lines:—

Other lovers, then, had experienced that blank-wall feeling: it was just human nature. But soon he began to realize that in this case the trouble was more serious. He had nothing to say to her. She did not understand him, nor call forth his confidences.

For months he had struggled against the consciousness that he had made a fatal mistake; but at length the horror of his marriage, of his inheritance, and of society in general as he saw it here in England, became altogether too large a presence to hide itself in the dark corners of his mind. It came out of the shadows and confronted him in the daylight of his heart—an ugly, menacing figure, towering above him, threatening him, arguing with him, whithersoever he went. He attributed features to it, and visualized it so that it took definite shape. It had a lewd eye which winked at him; it had a ponderous, fat body, straining at the buttons of the black clothing of respectability; it had heavy, flabby hands which stroked him as though urging him to accept its companionship. It was his gaoler, and it wanted to be friends with him.

At length one autumn day, while he was sitting in the woods among the falling leaves, he turned his inward eyes with ferocious energy upon the monster, and set his mind to a full study of the situation it personified.

In the first place, Dolly held views in regard to the position and status of wife which offended Jim’s every ideal. She was firmly convinced that marriage was, first and foremost, designed by God for the purpose of producing in the male creature a disinclination for romance. It involved a mutual duty, a routine: the wife had functions to perform with condescension, the husband had recurrent requirements to be indulged in order that his life might pursue its way with the least possible excitement. The whole thing was an ordained and prescriptive business, like a soldier’s drill or a patient’s diet; nor did she seem to realize that there was no room for real love in her conception of their relationship, no sweet enchantment, no exaltation.

Then, again, he was very much disappointed that Dolly had no wish to have a child of her own. She had explained to him early in their married life how her doctor had told her there would be the greatest possible danger for her in motherhood; but it had not taken Jim long to see that a combination of fear, selfishness and vanity were the true causes of her disinclination to maternity. She was always afraid of pain and in dread of death; she always thought first of her own comfort; and she was vain of her youthful figure.

These two facts, that she asserted herself as his wife and that she shunned parenthood, combined to produce a condition of affairs which offended Jim’s every instinct. In these matters men are so often more fastidious than women, though the popular pretence is to the contrary; and in the case of this unfortunate marriage there was an appalling contrast between the crudity of the angel-faced little wife and the delicacy of the hardy husband.

A further trouble was that she regarded marriage as a duality incompatible with solitude or with any but the most temporary separation. One would have thought that she had based her interpretation of the conjugal state upon some memory of the Siamese Twins. When Jim was writing verses in the study—an occupation which, by the way, she endeavoured to discourage—she would also want to write there; when he was entertaining a male friend she would enter the room, and refuse to budge—not because she liked the visitor, but because she must needs assert her standing as wife and as partner of all her husband’s amusements; when he went into Oxford or up to London she would insist on going too; even when he was talking to the gardener she would come up behind him, slip her arm through his, and immediately enter the conversation.

At first, when he used to tell her that he was going alone into Oxford to have a drink and a chat in the public room at one of the hotels, she would burst into tears, or take offence less liquid but more devastating. Later she accused him of an intrigue with a barmaid, and went into tantrums when in desperation he replied: “No such luck.” For the sake of peace he found it necessary at last to give up all such excursions except when they were unavoidable, and gradually his life had become that of a prisoner.

She carried this assertion of her wifely rights to galling and intolerable lengths. She would look over his shoulder when he was writing letters, and would be offended if he did not let her do so, or if he withheld the letters he received. On two or three occasions she had come to him, smiling innocently, and had handed him some opened envelope, and had said: “I’m so sorry, dear; I opened this by mistake. I thought it was for me.”

He could keep nothing from her prying eyes; and yet, in contrast to this curiosity, she showed no interest whatsoever in his life previous to his marriage, a fact which indicated clearly enough that her concern was solely in regard to her relationship with him, and was not prompted by any desire to enter into his personality. At first he had wanted to tell her of his early wanderings; but she had been bored, or even shocked, by his narrations, and had told him that his adventures did not sound very “nice.” Thus, though now she watched his every movement, she had no idea of his early travels, nor knew, except vaguely, what lands he had dwelt in, nor was she aware that in those days he had passed under the name of Easton.

Now Jim enjoyed telling a story: he was, in fact, a very interesting and vivacious raconteur; and he felt, at first, sad disappointment that his roaming life should be regarded as a subject too dull or too unrespectable for narration. “It’s a funny thing,” he once said to himself, “but that girl, MonimÉ, at Alexandria knows far more about me than my own wife, and I only knew her for a few hours!”

And then her poses and affectations! He discovered early in their married life that her offers to teach the cook her business, or to knit him waistcoats, were entirely fraudulent. She had none of the domestic virtues—a fact which only troubled him because she persisted in seeing herself in the rÔle of practical housewife: he had no wish for her to be a cook or a sewing woman. She went through a phase in which she pictured herself as a sun-bonneted poultry-farmer. She bought a number of Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons; she caused elaborate hen-houses to be set up; and she subscribed to various poultry fanciers’ journals. But it was not many weeks before the pens were derelict and their occupants gone. For some months she played the part of the Lady Bountiful to the village, and might have been seen tripping down the lanes to visit the aged cottagers, a basket on her arm. This occupation, however, soon began to pall, and her apostacy was marked by a gradual abandonment of the job to the servants. Later she had attached herself to the High Church party in Oxford, and had added new horrors to the state of wedlock by regarding it as a mystic sacrament....

The most recent of her phases had followed on from this. She had asked Jim to allow her to bring to the house the orphaned children of a distant relative of her mother’s: two little girls, aged four and five. “It will be so sweet,” she had said, “to hear their merry laughter echoing about this old house. It will be some compensation for my great sorrow in not being allowed to have babies of my own.”

Jim had readily consented, for he was very fond of children; and soon the mites had arrived, very shy and tearful at first, but presently well content with their lot. Dolly declared that no nurse would be necessary, as she would delight in attending to them herself, and for two weeks she had played the little mother with diminishing enthusiasm. But the day speedily came when help was found to be necessary, and now a good-natured nursery-governess was installed at the manor.

Having thus regained her leisure, she bought a notebook, and labelling it “The Tiny Tot’s Treasury,” spent several mornings in dividing the pages into sections under elaborate headings written in a large round hand. Jim chanced upon this book one day—it lay open upon a table—and two section-headings caught his eye. They read:—

The book was abandoned within a week or two; but the recollection of its futility, its pose, remained in Jim’s memory for many a day.

The presence of these two little girls, while being a considerable pleasure to Jim in itself, had been the means of irritating him still further in regard to his wife. Sometimes, when she remembered it, she would go up to the nursery to bid them “good-night” and to hear their prayers; and when he accompanied her upon this mission his spontaneous heart was shocked to notice how her attitude towards them was dictated solely by the picture in her own mind which represented herself as the ideal mother. There was a long mirror in the nursery, and, as she caressed the two children, her eyes were fixed upon her own reflection as though the vision pleased her profoundly.

And then, only a few days ago, a significant occurrence had taken place which had led to a painful scene between Dolly and himself. One morning at breakfast the elder of the two little girls had told him that she had had an “awfully awful” dream.

“It was all about babies,” she had said, and then, pausing shyly, she had added: “But I mustn’t tell you about it, because it’s very naughty.”

He was alone in the room with them at the time, and he had questioned the round-eyed little girl, and had eventually extracted from her the startling information that on the previous evening Dolly had been telling them “how babies grew,” but had warned them that it would be naughty to talk about it.

He was furious, and when his wife came downstairs at mid-morning—she always had her breakfast in bed—he had caught hold of her arm and had asked her what on earth she meant by talking in this manner to two infants of four and five years of age.

“It’s not your business,” was the reply. “You must trust a woman’s instinct to know when to reveal things to little girls.”

“Oh, rot” he had answered, angrily; and suddenly he had put into hot and scornful words his interpretation of Dolly’s untimely action. “The fact is, your motive is never disinterested. You are always picturing yourself in one rÔle or another. You didn’t even think what sort of impression you were making on the minds of those little girls: you were only play-acting for your own edification.”

“I don’t understand you,” she had stammered, shocked and frightened.

“You pictured yourself,” he went on, with bitter sarcasm, “as the sweet and wise mother revealing to the wide-eyed little girls the great secrets of Nature. I suppose some Oxford ass has been lecturing to a lot of you silly women about the duties of motherhood, and you at once built up your foolish picture, and thought it would make a charming scene—the gentle mother, the two little babies at your knee, their lisping questions and your pure, sweet answer, telling them the wonderful vocation of womanhood. And then you went upstairs and forced it on the poor little souls, just to gratify your vanity; but afterwards you were frightened at what you had done, and told them they mustn’t speak about it, because it was naughty. Naughty!—Good God!—That one word has already sown the seed of corruption in their minds. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He had not waited for her reply, but had left the room, and had gone with clenched fists into the woods, his usual refuge, sick at heart, and appalled that his life was linked to such a sham thing as his wife had proved herself to be.

He had longed to get away from her, away from Eversfield, back to his beloved high roads once more, out of this evil stagnation; and all the while the ponderous, black-coated creature of his imagination had leered at him and stroked him.

When next he saw his wife he had found her in the rock-garden playing a game with the two children, as though she were determined to make him realize her ability to enter into their mental outlook. “We are playing a game of fairies,” she had told him, evidently not desiring to keep up the quarrel. “All the flowers are enchanted people, and the rockery there is an ogre’s castle. We’re having a lovely time.”

The two little girls actually were standing staring in front of them, utterly bored; for the ability to play with children is a delicate art in which few “grown-ups” are at ease. But Dolly, as she crouched upon the ground, was not concerned with anybody save herself, and the game was designed for the applause of her inward audience and for the eye of her husband, and not at all for the entertainment of her charges.

“Well, when you’ve finished I want you to come and help me tidy my writing-table and tear things up,” he had said to the children; and thereat they had asked Dolly whether they might please go now, and had pranced into the house at his side, leaving her sighing in the rock-garden.

Thoughts and memories such as these paraded before his mind’s eye as he sat upon a fallen tree trunk, deep in the woods. The afternoon was warm and still, and the leaves which fell one by one from the surrounding trees seemed to drop from the branches deliberately, as though each were answering an individual call of the earth. Sometimes his heavy thoughts were interrupted by the shrill note of a bird, and once there was a startled scurry amongst the undergrowth as a rabbit observed him and went bounding away.

The wood was not very extensive, but, with the surrounding fields, it afforded a certain amount of shooting; and one of Jim’s tenants, Pegett by name, who lived in a cottage in a clearing at the far side, acted as a sort of gamekeeper, his house being given to him free of rent in return for his services.

The sun had set, and the haze of a windless twilight had gathered in the distant spaces between the trees when at length Jim rose to return to the manor. His ruminations had led him to no very definite conclusion, save only that he had made a horrible mistake, and that he must adjust his life to this glaring fact, even though he offend Dolly’s dignity in the process.

As he stood for a moment in silence, stretching his arms like one awaking from sleep, he was suddenly aware of the sound of cracking twigs and rustling leaves, and, looking in the direction from which it came, he caught sight of the red-faced Pegett, the gamekeeper, emerging, gun in hand, from behind a group of tree-trunks. The man ran forward, and then, recognizing him, paused and touched his cap.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, breathing heavily, “I’m after that there poaching thief, Smiley-face. ’E’s at it again: I seen ’im slip in with ’is tackle. I seen ’im from my window.”

“He’s not been this way,” Jim assured him. “I’ve been sitting here a long time.”

“’E’s a clever ’un!” Pegett muttered, “but I’ll get ’im one ’o these days, sir, I will; and I’ll put a barrel o’ shot into ’is legs.”

“He’s not quite right in his head, is he?” Jim asked.

“Oh, ’e’s wise enough,” the man replied; “wise enough to get ’is dinner off of your rabbits, sir. That’s been ’is game since ’e were no more’n a lad. And never done an honest day’s work in ’is life.”

Smiley-face, as has been said, was generally considered to be half-witted; but on the few occasions on which Jim had spoken to him he had answered intelligently enough, not to say cheekily, though there was something most uncanny about his continuous smile. Nobody seemed to know exactly how he lived. He slept in a garret in a lonely cottage belonging to an aged and witch-like woman known as old Jenny, and it was to be presumed that he did odd jobs for her in return for his keep; but she herself was a mysterious soul, not inclined to waste words on the passer-by, and her cottage, which stood midway between Eversfield and the neighbouring village of Bedley-Sutton, was superstitiously shunned by the inhabitants of both places.

Pegett was eager to track down the malefactor, and presently he disappeared among the trees, moving like a burlesque of a Red Indian, and actually making sufficient noise to rouse the woods for a hundred yards around. Jim, meanwhile, made his way towards the manor, walking quietly upon the moss-covered path, and pausing every now and then to listen to the distant commotion caused by the gamekeeper’s efforts to break a silent way through the brittle twigs and crisp, dead leaves.

He had just sighted the gate which led from the wood to the lower part of the garden of the manor when his eye was attracted by the swaying of the upper branch of an oak a short distance from the path. He paused, wondering what had caused the movement, which had sent a shower of leaves to the ground, and to his surprise he presently discerned a man’s foot resting upon it, the remainder of his body being hidden behind the broad trunk. He guessed immediately that he had chanced upon, and treed, Smiley-face, and, having a fellow feeling for the poacher, he called out to him, quite good-naturedly, to come down. He received no answer, however; and going therefore to the foot of the oak, he looked up at the man, who was now hardly concealed, and again addressed him.

“It’s no good pretending to be a woodpecker, Smiley-face,” he said. “Come down at once, or I’ll shy a stone at you.”

Smiley-face was a youngish man, with dirty red hair, puckered pink skin, and a smile which extended from ear to ear. His nose was snub, and his eyes were like two sparkling little blue beads, cunning and merry. He now thrust this surprising countenance forward over the top of a branch, and stared down at Jim with an expression of intense relief.

“Lordee!—it’s the Squire,” he muttered. “You did give I a fright, sir: I thought it was Mr. Pegett with ’is gun. Shoot I dead, ’e said he would. ’E said it to my face, up yonder at the Devil’s Crossroads: would you believe it?”

“Yes, he told me he’d let you have an ounce of small shot, but only in the legs of course.”

“Oo!” said Smiley-face. “And me that tender, what with thorn and nettle and the midges.”

“You’d better come down,” Jim advised. “He’s after you now; and you can see I myself haven’t got my gun with me, or I’d pepper you too.”

The man descended the tree, talking incoherently as he swung from branch to branch. Presently he dropped to the ground from one of the lower boughs, and stood grinning before Jim, a dirty, ragged creature without a point to commend him.

“Fairly cotched I am,” he declared. “But I knows a gen’l’man when I sees un. I knows when it’s safe and when it baint. If I was to run now, d’you reckon you could catch I, sir?”

For answer Jim’s lean arm shot out, and his hand gripped hold of the handkerchief knotted around the man’s neck. Smiley-face swung his fist round, but the blow missed; and Jim, who had learnt a trick or two from a little Jap in California, tripped him up with ease, and the next moment was kneeling upon his chest.

“What about that, Smiley-face?” he asked, laughing.

“Wonderful!” replied the poacher. “I should never ha’ thought it.”

Jim rose to his feet. “Get up,” he said, “and let me hear what you’ve got to say for yourself.” Then, as the man did as he was bid, he added: “If Pegett comes along, you can slip through that gate and across my garden. Nobody will see you.”

Smiley-face grinned. “Thank’ee kindly, sir,” he said, touching his forelock. “I knew you was a kind gen’l’man.”

“Oh, cut that out,” Jim replied sharply. “What d’you mean by going after my rabbits?”

“O Lordee! Be they yours?” Smiley-face scratched his red head.

“You know very well they are. I own this place, don’t I?”

“And the rabbits, too?”

“Well, of course!”

“I reckon they don’t know it, sir,” Smiley-face muttered, still grinning broadly.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Jim.

The poacher held up his forefinger as though in reproach. “I’m a poor man, me lord,” he murmured.

“You’re a thief.”

“Oh, no,” replied Smiley-face with assurance. “Poachers isn’t thieves, your highness.”

“Well they’re my rabbits.”

“But I’m a poor man,” the other repeated.

“So you said,” Jim answered. “That’s no excuse.”

Smiley-face shook his head. “You wouldn’t be like to understand a poor man—not with a big ’ouse, and ’undreds o’ rabbits, you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, wouldn’t I!” said Jim. “I’ve been poor myself. I’ve known what it is not to have a cent in the world. I’ve slept in hedges; I’ve tramped the roads....”

“You ’ave?” The poacher was incredulous, and thrust his head forward, staring at his captor with cunning little eyes.

“Yes, I have,” Jim declared.

“Lordee!” exclaimed Smiley-face. “Then you know....”

“Know what?” asked Jim.

The man made a non-committal gesture. “It’s not for me to say what you know, your worship. But you do know.”

Jim made an impatient movement. “Look here now, if I let you go this time will you promise not to do it again?”

Smiley-face shook his head, and again touched his forelock. “Oh, I couldn’t do that, sir. It’s tremenjus sport; and old Jenny she do cook rabbit fine, sir; and eat un, too. Don’t be angry, your highness,” he added quickly, as Jim turned threateningly upon him.

“Don’t keep calling me ‘your highness’ and ‘my lord.’ I’m a plain man, the same as you.”

“So you be, sir,” the other smiled. “You’ve walked the roads; you’ve lain out o’ nights. You know. And now you’re a-askin’ o’ I not to poach! Oh, you can’t do that, sir....”

“Well, supposing I give you permission to poach every now and then?” Jim suggested.

“What?—and tell Mr. Pegett not to shoot I dead? Oh, no; there wouldn’t be no sport in that.”

Jim held out his hand. “Look here, Smiley-face,” he said. “You seem to be pulling my leg, but I rather like you. Let’s be friends.”

The man drew back. “Well, I don’t ’xactly ’old with friends, sir. Friends laughs at friends.”

Nevertheless, he grasped the proffered hand.

“Nonsense,” Jim replied. “Friends are people who stand by one another through thick and thin. Friends are people who have something in common which they both defend. You and I have something in common, Smiley-face.”

“And what be that?” the man asked.

“Why,” laughed Jim, “we’re both up against it. We’re both failures in life, tramps by nature. As you say, we both know.”

Smiley-face stared at him, not altogether understanding his words.

“You’d better come across the garden with me now,” said Jim.

The poacher shook his head. “No, sir, I reckon I’ll bide ’ere, and go back through the woods.”

“But Pegett’s there with his gun.”

Smiley-face grinned. “’E’ll not get I, never you fear!”

Jim turned and walked towards the gate; and presently his friend the poacher moved stealthily away into the gathering dusk, and soon was lost amongst the trees.