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Island Thinking
Suffolk Stories of
Landscape, Militarisation
and Identity
Sophia Davis
Island Thinking
“In this thoughtful and illuminating book, Sophia Davis asks us to consider
the imaginative appeal of what it means to be an island. Taking in the view
from the shores of the Suffolk coast, Island Thinking looks at how ideas of
nationhood, identity, defence and nature become bound together in place.
This book uncovers the stories of how this small, seemingly isolated part of
England became significant to emerging national narratives about Englishness,
its rural inheritance and its future military technological prowess.”
—Rachel Woodward, Professor of Human Geography, School of Geography,
Politics & Sociology, Newcastle University, UK, and author of Military
Geographies
“Island Thinking expertly takes the reader into the secrets of the Suffolk coun-
tryside in a way that no other study has. Adeptly guiding the reader through
the historical layers of its twentieth century landscape, Davis exposes the
deeper roots of how the nation relates to itself, using Suffolk to trace the
broader themes of isolation, defense, heritage, and nostalgia. Anyone with a
fascination with the countryside will enjoy the way that the county’s traditions
of silence and secrecy were punctuated by pioneering conservationists, return-
ing avocets, ex-servicemen, and the rewilding of abandoned ruins. Beautifully
researched and written, the reader can discover in Island Thinking a parable for
our times as we seek an understanding of how this landscape has done so much
to create a sense of “Englishness”. This superb scholarly researched study marks
an invaluable new contribution to British landscape history.”
—Michael Bravo, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute,
University of Cambridge
Sophia Davis
Island Thinking
Suffolk Stories of Landscape,
Militarisation and Identity
Sophia Davis
Berlin, Germany
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making. It is largely based on a
Ph.D. that I completed back in 2010, and it finally reaching the world
owes a lot to Professor Nick Jardine, one of my mentors at Cambridge,
who periodically and encouragingly nudged me in this direction. Nick
was a wonderful support during writing the thesis, and an inspiring
role model in the department, with his enduring capacity to find things
fascinating and his devotion to teaching. I am also hugely indebted
to Helen Macdonald for sparking my interest in the history of nature
conservation and natural history and their weird entwining with mil-
itary themes. Working with Helen during my M.Phil. both propelled
my analytical and writing abilities and emboldened me to do the Ph.D.,
and it was a joy to have her energy, encouragement and guidance
throughout the process of creating that thesis. Although I was based
in history and philosophy of science, my work encroached increasingly
on the territory of cultural geography, and I benefited greatly from
discussions with Michael Bravo over in the geography department at
Cambridge. Another cultural geographer to whom I am deeply thank-
ful is Professor Hayden Lorimer, who examined the thesis and gave me
a lot of time and support in developing postdoc ideas. Back on home
v
vi Acknowledgements
1 Island Stories 1
8 Conclusions 277
Index 295
ix
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Fig. 1 Map of coastal Suffolk 17
Chapter 2
Fig. 1 Shingle Street (Photograph by the author, May 2008) 35
Fig. 2 River Alde at the Snape Maltings at dawn (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 45
Fig. 3 Anti-erosion measures near Shingle Street (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 51
Fig. 4 Martello tower with pillbox near Shingle Street (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 64
Fig. 5 Martello towers from Shingle Street towards Bawdsey
(Photograph by the author, May 2008) 65
Chapter 3
Fig. 1 Anti-invasion structures known as “devil’s teeth”
on Minsmere beach, 1949 (Photograph courtesy of the Eric
Hosking Trust, www.erichoskingtrust.com) 79
xi
xii List of Figures
Chapter 4
Fig. 1 Bawdsey’s transmitter masts in the 1940s (Photograph
courtesy of the late Gordon Kinsey’s family, originally
appearing in his Bawdsey: Birth of the Beam [1983]) 130
Fig. 2 Observation tower and pillbox at Bawdsey (Photograph
by the author, May 2008) 131
Chapter 5
Fig. 1 RSPB logo from 1970 162
Fig. 2 Photograph of avocets by Eric Hosking, appearing
in The Times, 1950 (Courtesy of the Eric Hosking Trust,
www.erichoskingtrust.com) 163
Fig. 3 Nesting avocets as pictured in Brown’s Avocets in England
(1950) (Courtesy of the RSPB) 170
Fig. 4 Illustrations from Allsop’s Adventure Lit Their Star,
by Anthony Smith (Courtesy of Tristan Allsop) 180
Fig. 5 Illustrations from Adventure Lit Their Star, by Anthony
Smith (Courtesy of Tristan Allsop) 181
Chapter 6
Fig. 1 Bulldozer transporting soil at Minsmere in October 1969
(RSPB 1976) (Courtesy of the RSPB) 210
List of Figures xiii
Chapter 7
Fig. 1 Pagoda laboratories from Orford harbour (Photograph
by the author, October 2008) 243
Fig. 2 Building entrails seen from the path (Photograph courtesy
of Boris Jardine) 244
Fig. 3 Concrete circle and shingle ridges (Photograph courtesy
of Boris Jardine) 246
Fig. 4 AWRE laboratories in the shingle, and a sign warning
of unexploded ordnance (Photograph by the author,
May 2006) 246
Fig. 5 Laboratory 1 (Photograph by the author, May 2006) 248
Fig. 6 Laboratory 1 (Photograph courtesy of Boris Jardine) 249
Fig. 7 WE177 (Photograph by the author, May 2006) 249
1
Island Stories
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, a new urgency has come to asking
questions about developments in British identity. This book explores
the imaginative appeal of the island, which has always resonated
strongly in Britain, dealing with developments in local and national
identity broadly concerning the period 1930–1969, with a final c hapter
on 1995 to the present. Whilst considering the national and global
scales is always relevant, the book focuses on a very local scale, using
a regional study to unravel the motif of the island, and showing how
deeply embedded this island thinking has been both on micro-scales
and at the level of the nation. My focus is on coastal Suffolk in the
east of England, a mostly flat land leading to heaths, marshes, rivers
and the North Sea. This little patch of the country is closed in on the
south by the River Orwell, on the west by the road from Ipswich, on
the north by the River Blyth and the village of Southwold, and on the
east by the sea. Referred to as an “island within an island”, this corner of
England provides fascinating stories of a nation looking both o utwards
and inwards, trying to understand itself. As the countryside was given
greater importance in mapping out Englishness during the twentieth
century, this area was characterised as giving a glimpse into a more
authentic, older version of England. It was also home to the early devel-
opments in radar, the project to “make Britain an island again” after
the early twentieth-century advances in aerial warfare had raised fears
of Britain’s vulnerability to aerial attack. Post-war narratives of radar’s
development there extended the motif of the “island nation” and the
myth of the “hero’s war”.
Following the Second World War, the tendency to look to the skies
for invaders carried on in another guise, as a craze in amateur studies
of bird migration saw the nation’s coast become dotted with bird obser-
vatories in a chain reminiscent of the wartime chain of radar stations.
Described as “the heritage we are fighting for” during the war, birds
and their watchers provide interesting insights into contemporary cul-
tural imagination and identity. In another intermingling of war and
birds, wartime flooding prompted the return of the avocet to this area
of the country, the protection of which sparked a key episode in the
history of British nature conservation. The avocet’s protection in the late
1940s was full of ex-servicemen and behaviour that seemed to reenact
wartime watching and guarding and the recovery from violent wartime
experience through reorientation to local nature. The project of creating
British nature reserves took off in earnest in the post-war years, raising
questions about exactly which “nature” was seen as in need of setting
aside as islands of conservation. The reserves created for the avocets on
the Suffolk coast, Minsmere and Havergate Island, provide a window
into the changing attitudes to nature in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally,
ideas of conservation and heritage took another form much later in
this same area, when a former military-scientific research site became
a National Trust nature reserve in 1995. Referred to by locals as “the
Island”, Orford Ness and the experiences there allow us to trace con-
temporary formulations of wildness, war and nation.
In John Gillis’ book, Islands of the Mind (2004), he explores how
islands have occupied a central place in the collective imagination and
history of the Western world. As he claims, “western culture not only
thinks about islands, but thinks with them” (Gillis 2004, 1). Focusing
specifically on the island-as-nation metaphor, Fiona Polack writes
that “an island’s boundaries provide the sort of fixed limits that make
it a perfect microcosm of … national concerns” that are “less easily
1 Island Stories
3
1 Island Nation
In 1940, Graham Clark wrote that “We are so accustomed to think of
ourselves as islanders that we sometimes tend to forget that Britain is
part of the European continent from which she has at certain intervals
in her history become temporarily detached” (Clark 1940, 1). This was
not part of a political text, but the beginning of a book on Prehistoric
England, one of the new “British Heritage Series” that the publisher
Batsford had begun the year before. Literature about the countryside
had grown in popularity in the 1930s in what geographer Catherine
Leyshon (see Brace 2003) has called the popular discovery of the coun-
tryside. During the Second World War, the countryside focus grew to
encompass the nation’s heritage and its nature, and the English country-
side was presented as what the “people’s war” fought to protect. The spe-
cial importance of the countryside during the Second World War can be
seen in J. B. Priestley’s popular “Postscript” broadcasts, many of which
referred to the countryside. In a particular broadcast in June 1940, he
spoke of a “powerful and rewarding sense of community” experienced
in the countryside, when he spent a night with the local village guard
helping keep “watch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields
4
S. Davis
going on to discuss the feelings of ownership and control over the place:
“a kingdom of our own set in the silver sea” (Lockley 1945, 8).
Sea is as important as land for the island concept, as Beer observes—
land surrounded by sea, offering a vast extension of the island, and
allowing the psychic size of the body politic to expand, bumping into
others’ territory. From the early twentieth century and through the
period considered by this book, the “island” of Britain was seen anew in
two important aspects. With the rise of the aeroplane, it was seen from
above, challenging the notion of the sea’s extension. As H. G. Wells
commented in 1927, you cannot fly to dominions around the empire
without “infringing foreign territory”, whereas it had been possible in
the steam-ship era to sail from England around the empire through
international waters, which are requisitioned as part of the island (Wells
1928, 131). Seen from the perspective of the aeroplane, the island
seemed suddenly much more fragile. As Wells’ quote reminds us, along
with the sea, the empire was the second great extension of the island
nation, and the second to be lost in the twentieth century. Vulnerable,
and reduced in size, what would happen to the island nation’s view of
itself, an England that was suddenly centre without periphery?
Islands have long captured the Western imagination, and have for a
long time been a space for exploration, self-inquiry and satire of writers’
own cultures. The variations in figurations of the island form, whilst rel-
evant to considering the nation’s view of itself, also necessarily interact
with Britain’s imperial history. Discussing the anxiety bound up with
Britain’s smallness in contrast to its vast empire, historian Linda Colley
(2003) observes that up to the early nineteenth century, there were per-
vasive fears that Britain was too small to accomplish great things, and
despair that its small population was draining to the colonies and to its
woefully small army and navy. Arguing that Britishness was “forged”
between 1707 and 1837 in conflict with an external “other”, Colley
(2005) observes that even when they were winning, there was often a
fear that the British imperium was inherently unnatural. This changed
during the nineteenth century, partly due to the late eighteenth-century
emergence of new racial, scientific, political and religious attitudes (Said
1994). In addition to the subsequent notions of European or British
6
S. Davis
superiority, another factor was the shift at home in both real popula-
tion levels and how the population was perceived following the work
of Thomas Malthus and the first census in 1801. The fearfully small
British population suddenly appeared staggeringly large, and in need of
spilling over into the colonies. Britain’s sense of smallness at this time
was also soothed by its accession of a very large, cheap and seemingly
tractable Indian army. Britain’s empire, it should not be forgotten,
always rested in fact on the backs, bayonets and taxes of those living
outside the “island” of Great Britain.
Another crucial factor in Britain’s changing image of itself was the
Industrial Revolution, fuelled by the nation’s easy access to coal, iron
and water power, making Britain’s global power seem more practicable,
even inevitable. Early modern industries were all, to quote Robinson
Crusoe, “island industries”, the British Industrial Revolution being
enmeshed with revolutionary developments in seaborne trade, naval
power, and their sciences and technologies. Advances in transport and
communications addressed some of the challenges of a small set of
islands attempting to handle a global empire, with trains, ships and tel-
egraphs moving people, ideas, goods, information and profits at unprec-
edented rates. Industrialisation thus seemed to quell concerns about
Britain’s inadequate base, through increasing productivity and allowing
its population to boom. Nineteenth-century Britain seemed less a frag-
ile dot on the map than a spider at the centre of a global web, an octo-
pus with tentacles in every part of the globe.
Returning to the notion of islands bringing with it the dual ele-
ments of land and water, one surrounded by the other, literary scholar
Samuel Baker (2010) argues in his Written on the Water that Britain’s
insular situation shaped not only British culture, but also the very con-
cept of “culture” that the British Romantics developed, framing their
picture of human life as a whole within the horizon of a common
experience of the sea. Thus Wordsworth and others who pioneered
culture talk referred to islands, shores, oceans and systems of aquatic
circulation when doing so, and the British Romantics developed a new
architectonic for modern poetic practice by embarking on an intense
involvement with the sea. Shifting from the water back to the land,
geographer Robert Peckham (2003) argues that during the nineteenth
1 Island Stories
7
those at the centre could no longer grasp what Gertrude Stein referred
to in the 1930s as “the daily island life”. Politically, such an elegiac
tenderness towards a vanishing cultural integrity at the core of a mul-
tinational British Empire was expressed as Little Englandism, exem-
plified by the writing of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Jed
Esty describes England’s lost insular wholeness in the course of British
expansion as a hallowing and hollowing of Englishness; empire hal-
lowed Englishness by virtue of its projection onto (and invention for)
the colonies, and simultaneously hollowed Englishness by splitting its
being into core and periphery (Esty 2004, 26).
2 Shrinking Islands
If the notion of English islandness has been at once alluring and prob-
lematic, as this sketch suggests, then the period from around 1930
brought a new intensity to the motif of the island. It was becom-
ing clear by the late 1930s that England’s global domain would not
grow any further, and if anything, it would shrink (Darwin 1991).
The converging crises of economic disaster, imperial overextension
and totalitarian threat pointed to the inevitability of British contrac-
tion. Anticolonial nationalisms were building strength on the imperial
periphery, particularly in Egypt and India, and the dominions (Canada,
South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) began seeking and gain-
ing autonomy from British authority in the 1920s and 1930s. As the
challenges in 1930s Europe started diverting resources away from the
empire, colonial unrest became more important and alarming (Barnett
1986). Jed Esty’s brilliant A Shrinking Island describes the intellectual
and artistic projects of the 1930s as not so much pro- or anti-empire,
but rather post-empire, littered with signs of British imperial contrac-
tion as both an anticipated crisis and a burgeoning historical reality. By
the time the European war became imminent, England (with Scotland
and Wales in tow) was already on its way to an insular status it had not
experienced in hundreds of years (Esty 2004, 38).
Already earlier in the century, the island had seemed to come under
question through the impact of air power, with the phrase “Britain is
1 Island Stories
9
disrupts their efforts, acting as the final burst of music and ensuring
that only fragments remain. Gillian Beer describes Woolf as particularly
acute in her understanding of the aeroplane in relation to the cultural
form of the island (Beer 1990, 267). As the audience discuss the play
and the Clergyman, Mr. Streatfield’s words—“And if one spirit animates
the whole, what about the aeroplanes?” (Woolf 1941, 230)—Woolf
deepens her use of the island to explore the difficult relationship of air
power to the island nation. Woolf ’s use of the island form also recalls
John Brannigan’s (2014) argument that “archipelagic modernism”
turned to the “peripheral” spaces of islands, coasts and the sea to rein-
vent the Irish and British archipelago as a plural and connective space.
From the midst of the looming imperial contraction and grow-
ing sense of vulnerability, during the Second World War the British
propaganda machine battled to keep alive the island form. Churchill’s
speeches were full of references to the besieged “island fortress” and
our “island nation”. As part of the official “war culture” in Britain,
such rhetoric held a great deal of power. In his excellent Culture in
Camouflage, Patrick Deer discusses how the Ministry of Information
worked through various channels to create a vision of “a fully mobi-
lised island fortress, loyal empire, and modernised war machine ready to
wage a futuristic war of space and movement” (Deer 2009, 3). Within
this imagery existed a tension between the “island fortress”—England
standing alone—and the expansive empire standing there too, much of
which was being recruited in the war effort. Wartime media representa-
tions attempted to resolve this tension through inclusive imagery of a
“people’s war” at home and a “people’s empire”, as Wendy Webster
(2005) explores in Englishness and Empire. Attempting to address
diverse audiences across empire and metropolis, as well as to quell a
strong feeling of anti-imperialism in America, “people’s empire” imagery
portrayed a temperate empire through themes of welfare and partner-
ship, showing the common people of Britain and the “British world”
united across vast distances in a common cause. Togetherness was a
recurrent theme in empire imagery, and although there was a clear pref-
erence for the racial community of white Britons—the “sons of empire”
from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa—, the war
12
S. Davis
II
“I think that is all,” said the hurried, jaded doctor to the Northern
nurse. “The child is convalescent—you understand about the
nourishment?—and you know what to do for Mrs. Leroy? I shall bring
some one who will stay with her husband within the hour.”
Outside was the glare of sun upon white sand—a pitiless sun,
whose rising and setting seemed the only things done in due order in
all the hushed and fever-smitten city. Within was a shaded green
gloom and the anguished moaning of a sick woman.
Mildred Fabian, alone with her patients and the one servant who
had not deserted the house, faced her work and felt her heart rise
with exultation—a singular, sustaining joy that never yet had failed
her in the hour of need. The certainty of hard work, the
consciousness of danger, the proximity of death—these acted
always upon her like some subtle stimulant. If she had tried to
explain this, which she did not, she would perhaps have said that at
no other time did she have such an overwhelming conviction of the
soul’s supremacy as in the hours of human extremity. And this
conviction, strongest in the teeth of all that would seem most
vehemently to deny it, was to her nothing less than intoxicating.
She was not one of the women to whom there still seems much
left in life when love is gone. To be sure, she had the consolations of
religion and a certain sweet reasonableness of temperament which
prompted her to pick up the pieces after a crash, and make the most
of what might be left. But she was obliged to do this in her own way.
She was sorry, but she could not do it in her mother’s way.
When she told her family that her engagement was at an end, that
she did not care to explain how the break came, and that if they
meant to be kind they would please not bother her about it, she knew
that her mother would have been pleased to have her take up her
old life with a little more apparent enthusiasm for it than she had ever
shown before. To be a little gayer, a little more occupied, a little
prettier if possible, and certainly a little more fascinating—that was
her mother’s idea of saving the pieces. But Mildred’s way was
different, and after dutifully endeavoring to carry out her mother’s
conception of the conduct proper to the circumstances with a dismal
lack of success, she took her own path, which led her through a
training school for nurses first, and so, ultimately, to Jacksonville.
The long day wore slowly into night. The doctor had returned very
shortly with a man, whether physician or nurse she did not know,
whom he left with Mr. Leroy. The little maid, who had been dozing in
the upper hall, received some orders concerning the preparation of
food which she proceeded to execute. The convalescent child rested
well. The sick woman passed from the first to the second stage of
the disease and was more quiet. The doctor came again after
nightfall. He looked at her charges wearily, and told Mildred that the
master of the house would not rally.
“He is my friend, and I can do no more for him,” he said, almost
with apathy.
The night passed as even nights in sick-rooms will, and at last it
began to grow toward day. The nurse became suddenly conscious of
deadly weariness and need of rest. She called the servant and left
her in charge, with a few directions and the injunction to call her at
need, and then stole down the stairs to snatch, before she rested,
the breath of morning air she craved.
As she stood at the veranda’s edge in the twilight coolness and
twilight hush watching the whitening sky, there came steps behind
her, and turning, she came face to face with Neil Hardesty. She
stared at him with unbelieving eyes.
“Yes, it is I,” he said.
“You were with Mr. Leroy?” she asked. “Are you going?”
“My work is over here,” he answered, quietly. “I am going to send
—some one else.”
She bent her head a second’s space with the swift passing
courtesy paid death by those to whom it has become a more familiar
friend than life itself, then lifted it, and for a minute they surveyed
each other gravely.
“This is like meeting you on the other side of the grave,” she said.
“How came you here? I thought you were in California.”
“I thought you were in Europe.”
“I was for awhile, but there was nothing there I wanted. Then I
came back and entered the training school. After this is over I have
arranged to join the sisterhood of St. Margaret. I think I can do better
work so.”
“Let me advise you not to mistake your destiny. You were surely
meant for the life of home and society, and can do a thousand-fold
more good that way.”
“You do not know,” she answered, simply. “I am very happy in my
life. It suits me utterly. I have never been so perfectly at peace.”
“But it will wear you out,” he murmured.
She looked at him out of her great eyes, surprisedly. It was a look
he knew of old.
“Why, I expect it to,” she answered.
There was a little silence before she went on, apparently without
effort:
“I am glad to come across you again, for there is one thing I have
wanted to say to you almost ever since we parted, and it has grieved
me to think I might never be able to say it. It is this. While I do not
regret anything else, and while I am sure now that it was best for
both of us—or else it would not have happened—I have always been
sorry that the break between us came in the way it did. I regret that.
It hurts me still when I remember of what I accused you. I am sure I
was unjust. No wonder you were bitter against me. I have often
prayed that that bitterness might pass out of your soul, and that I
might know it. So—I ask your forgiveness for my suspicion. It will
make me happier to know you have quite forgiven me.”
He did not answer. She waited patiently.
“Surely”—she spoke with pained surprise—“surely you can forgive
me now?”
“Oh, God!”
She looked at his set face uncomprehending. Why should it be
with such a mighty effort that he unclosed his lips at last? His voice
came forced and hard.
“I—I did it, Mildred. I was the coward that you thought me. I don’t
know what insensate fear came over me and took possession of me
utterly, but it was nothing to the fear I felt afterwards—for those two
weeks—that you might suspect me of it. And when I knew you did I
was mad with grief and anger at myself, and yet—it seems to me
below contempt—I tried to save my miserable pride. But I have
always meant that you should know at last.”
She looked at him with blank uncomprehension.
“I did it,” he repeated, doggedly, and waited for the change he
thought to see upon her face. It came, but with a difference.
“You—you did it?” for the idea made its way but slowly to her mind.
“Then”—with a rush of feeling that she hardly understood, and an
impetuous, tender gesture—“then let me comfort you.”
It was the voice of the woman who had loved him, and not of any
Sister of Charity, however gracious, that he heard again, but he
turned sharply away.
“God forbid,” he said, and she shrank from the misery in his voice;
“God forbid that even you should take away my punishment. Don’t
you see? It is all the comfort I dare have, to go where there is danger
and to face death when I can, till the day comes when I am not
afraid, for I am a coward yet.”
She stretched her hands out toward him blindly. I am afraid that
she forgot just then all the boasted sweetness of her present life, her
years of training, and her coming postulancy at St. Margaret’s, as
well as the heinousness of his offence. She forgot everything, save
that this was Neil, and that he suffered.
But all that she, being a woman and merciful, forgot, he, being a
man and something more than just, remembered.
“Good-by, and God be with you,” he said.
“Neil!” she cried. “Neil!”
But his face was set steadfastly toward the heart of the stricken
city, and he neither answered nor looked back.
The future sister of St. Margaret’s watched him with a heart that
ached as she had thought it could never ache again. All the hard-
won peace of her patient years, which she thought so secure a
possession, had gone at once and was as though it had not been;
for he, with all his weaknesses upon him, was still the man she
loved.
“Lord, give him back to me!” she cried, yet felt the cry was futile.
Slowly she climbed the stairs again, wondering where was the
courage and quiet confidence that had sustained her so short a time
ago.
Was it true, then, that heaven was only excellent when earth could
not be had? She was the coward now. In her mind there were but
two thoughts—the desire to see him again, and a new, appalling fear
of death.
She re-entered the sick-room where the girl was watching her
patients with awed eyes.
“You need not stay here,” she said, softly. “I cannot sleep now. I
will call you when I can.”
“THE HONOR OF A GENTLEMAN”
I
Because there was so little else left him to be proud of, he clung
the more tenaciously to his pride in his gentle blood and the spotless
fame of his forefathers. There was no longer wealth nor state nor
position to give splendor to the name, but this was the less sad in
that he himself was the sole survivor of that distinguished line. He
was glad that he had no sisters—a girl should not be brought up in
sordid, ignoble surroundings, such as he had sometimes had to
know; as for brothers, if there had been two of them to make the fight
against the world shoulder to shoulder, life might have seemed a
cheerier thing; but thus far he had gotten on alone. And the world
was not such an unkindly place, after all. Though he was a thousand
miles away from the old home, in this busy Northwestern city where
he and his were unknown, he was not without friends; he knew a few
nice people. He had money enough to finish his legal studies; if there
had not been enough, he supposed he could have earned it
somehow; he was young and brave enough to believe that he could
do anything his self-respect demanded of him. If it sometimes asked
what might seem to a practical world fantastic sacrifices at his
hands, was he not ready to give them? At least, had he not always
been ready before he met Virginia Fenley?
She reminded him of his mother, did Virginia, though no two
women in the world were ever fundamentally more different.
Nevertheless, there was a likeness between the little pearl-set
miniature which he cherished, showing Honora Le Garde in the
prime of her beauty, and this girl who looked up at him with eyes of
the self-same brown. Surely, Virginia should not be held responsible
for the fact that a slender, graceful creature with yellow hair and
dark-lashed hazel eyes, with faint pink flushes coming and going in
her cheeks, and the air of looking out at the world with indifference
from a safe and sheltered distance, was Roderick Le Garde’s ideal
of womanhood, and that he regarded her, the representative of the
type, as the embodiment of everything sweetest and highest in
human nature. Virginia’s physique, like Roderick’s preconceptions of
life and love and honor, was an inheritance, but a less significant
one; it required an effort to live up to it, and Virginia was not fond of
effort.
His feeling for her was worship. Virginia had not been looking on
at the pageant (Roderick would have called it a pageant) of society
very long, but she was a beautiful girl and a rich one; therefore she
had seen what called itself love before.
As an example of what a suitor’s attitude should be, she preferred
Roderick’s expression of devotion to that of any man she knew. He
made her few compliments, and those in set and guarded phrase;
except on abstract topics, his speech with her was restrained to the
point of chilliness; even the admiration of his eyes was controlled as
they met hers. But on rare occasions the veil dropped from them,
and then—Virginia did not know what there was about these
occasions that she should find them so fascinating; that she should
watch for them and wait for them, and even try to provoke them, as
she did.
Worship is not exactly the form of sentiment of which
hopelessness can be predicated, but Roderick was human enough
to wish that the niche in which his angel was enshrined might be in
his own home. He let her see this one day in the simplicity of his
devotion.
“Not that I ask for anything, you understand,” he added, hastily. “I
could not do that. It is only that I would give you the knowledge that I
love you, as—as I might give you a rose to wear. It honors the flower,
you see,” he said, rather wistfully.
She lifted her eyes to his, and he wondered why there should flash
across his mind a recollection of the flowers she had worn yesterday,
a cluster of Maréchal Niels that she had raised to her lips once or
twice, kissing the golden petals. She made absolutely no answer to
his speech, unless the faintest, most evanescent of all her faint
smiles could be called an answer. But she was not angry, and she
gave him her hand at parting.
In spite of her silence she thought of his words. The little that she
had to say upon the subject she said to her father as they were
sitting before the library fire that evening.
John Fenley was a prosperous lumberman, possessed of an
affluent good nature which accorded well with his other surroundings
in life. Virginia was his only child, and motherless. She could not
remember that her father ever refused her anything in his life; and
certainly he had never done so while smoking his after-dinner cigar.
“Papa,” she began, in her pretty, deliberate way—“papa, Roderick
Le Garde is in love with me.”
Her father looked up at her keenly. She was not blushing, and she
was not confused. He watched a smoke-ring dissolve, then
answered, comfortably,
“Well, there is nothing remarkable about that.”
“That is true,” assented Virginia. “The remarkable thing is that I like
him—a little.” Her eyes were fixed upon the fire. There was a pause
before she went on. “I have never liked any of them at all before, as
you know very well. I never expect to—very much. Papa, you afford
me everything I want; can you afford me Roderick Le Garde?”
“Do you know what you are asking, Virginia, or why?” he said,
gravely.
“I have thought it over, of course. Couldn’t you put him in charge at
one of the mills or somewhere on a comfortable number of
thousands a year? Of course I can’t starve, you know, and frocks
cost something.”
“My daughter is not likely to want for frocks,” said John Fenley,
frowning involuntarily. “You did not take my meaning. I wish your
mother were here, child.”
“I am sufficiently interested, if that is what you mean,” said Virginia,
still tranquilly. “He is different, papa; and I am tired of the jeunesse
dorée. Perhaps it is because I am so much dorée myself that they
bore me. Roderick has enthusiasms and ideals; I am one of them; I
like it. You, papa, love me for what I am. It is much more exciting to
be loved for what one is not.”
Her father knit his brows and smoked in silence for a few minutes.
Virginia played with the ribbons of her pug.
“Marylander, isn’t he?”
“Something of the sort; I forget just what.”
“H’m!”
“Le Garde isn’t a business man,” John Fenley said, at length.
“Isn’t he?” asked Virginia, politely smothering a yawn.
“Is he? You know enough about it to know how important it is that
any man who is to work into my affairs, and ultimately to take my
place, should know business and mean business, Virgie. It is a long
way from poverty to wealth, but a short one from wealth to poverty.”
“Yes,” said Virginia, “I know; but I also know enough about it to be
sure that I could manage the business if it became necessary. You
and I are both business men, dear. Let us import a new element into
the family.”
Fenley laughed proudly. “By Jove! I believe you could do it!” A little
further silence; then, “So your heart is set on this, daughter?”
“Have I a heart?” asked Virginia, sedately, rising and leaning an
elbow on the mantel as she held up one small, daintily slippered foot
to the blaze.
II
Long afterward he used to wonder how it had ever come to pass—
that first false step of his, the surrender of his profession, and so of
his liberty. Before middle life a man sometimes forgets the imperious
secret of the springs that moved his youthful actions. In reality, the
mechanism of his decision was very simple.
“How can I give up my profession?” he asked Virginia.
She smiled up into his eyes, her own expressing a divine
confidence. “But how can you give up me?”
Though his doubts were not thereby laid to rest, the matter was
practically settled, and it was understood between them that he was
to accept her father’s unnecessarily liberal offer, and take his place
in John Fenley’s business as his own son might have done. This
may have been unwise, but it was not unnatural, and if there was
any unwisdom in the proceeding, it was apparent to no eyes but
Roderick’s own. Other people said what other people always say
under such circumstances—that young Le Garde was in luck; that he
would have a “soft snap” of it as John Fenley’s son-in-law; that he
had shown more sagacity in feathering his own nest than could have
been expected of such an impractical young fellow. They did not
understand his chill reserve when congratulated on this brilliant bit of
success in life. If they had spoken of his good fortune in being loved
by Virginia, that was something a man could understand. The gods
might envy Virginia’s lover, but that he, Roderick Le Garde, should
be congratulated on becoming John Fenley’s son-in-law was
intolerable.
He by no means pretended to scorn money, however, and he felt
as strongly as did Fenley that Virginia must have it. Luxury was her
natural atmosphere—any woman’s perhaps, but surely hers. Other
men sacrificed other things for the women that they loved. He gave
up his proud independence and his proper work, and was sublimely
sure that Virginia understood what the sacrifice cost him.
But it was true that he was not a business man by nature, and his
first few years in John Fenley’s service were not the exacting drill
which would have given him what he lacked. Although he
conscientiously endeavored to carry his share of the burden and do
well what fell to him to do, the fact was that John Fenley was a great
deal too energetic and too fond of managing his own affairs to give
up any duties to another which he could possibly perform for himself.
Thus Roderick’s various positions were always more or less of
sinecures as far as responsibility was concerned, and he had a large
margin of leisure as well as a sufficient amount of money to devote