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Title: The Street of the Eye
        and nine other tales

Author: Gerald Bullett

Release date: July 23, 2024 [eBook #74101]

Language: English

Original publication: London: John Lane, 1923

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF THE EYE ***





  THE STREET OF THE EYE
  AND NINE OTHER TALES




  THE STREET
  OF THE
  EYE
  and nine other tales

  by GERALD BULLETT

  LONDON
  JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED




  _First Published in 1923_

  _Made and Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner,
    _Frome and London_




  _To_ ROSALIND
  --_THESE FICTIONS_




CONTENTS


                                                PAGE

  THE STREET OF THE EYE                            3

  SLEEPING BEAUTY                                 45

  THE ENCHANTED MOMENT                            59

  THE MOLE                                        79

  A SENSITIVE MAN                                 97

  MISS LETTICE                                   113

  WEDDING-DAY                                    135

  DEARTH’S FARM                                  145

  THE GHOST                                      169

  THE HOUSE AT MAADI:

        Part   I: AN AFTERNOON IN APRIL          181

        Part  II: SHEILA DYRLE                   189

        Part III: SHEILA FAIRFIELD               266

        Part  IV: AN EVENING OF THE SAME DAY     299

  _One of these stories, THE MOLE, appeared in ‘The London Mercury.’ To
  the editor of this journal I tender thanks._




THE STREET OF THE EYE




THE STREET OF THE EYE


‘Stories of the supernatural,’ said Saunders, ‘serve at least one
useful purpose: they test a man’s intellectual capacity. Not a very
sure test, you may say; but for purposes of rough classification it is
sure enough. Incertitude, a sense of imminent surprise, is after all
the very salt of life. Denounce the habit of classification as bitterly
as you like--and I know well the intellectual perils that attend it--it
is none the less true that we do, when we meet a man, like to be able
to place him, roughly, in this category or that. And most men, by the
way, submit to the process very meekly. You subtle folk’--here Saunders
bowed to me in genial irony--‘in attributing to the mass of mankind
your own mental complexity flatter them grossly. I have heard you
yourself discourse on the folly of the old religious psychology which
divided mankind, arbitrarily, into sheep and goats. As philosophy, of
course, it is nonsense, and the fathers of the church must have known
that as well as you and I do; but as a formula for rough-and-ready
justice, it serves. If you are pulling your weight in the boat you are
a good man; if you are not pulling your weight you are a bad man--that
is a definite and verifiable verdict based on rational calculation.
The fun begins when having made our calculation, and acted on it, new
factors begin to appear which knock all our arithmetic silly. But in
our dealings with men how rarely, on the whole, that happens! You do
not agree? Well, you are permitted to disagree so long as you believe
me to be sincere in my opinion. All modern thought, I know, is moving
away from my idea as fast as, according to you, it is moving away from
my church; but I fancy that, in practice, the world will continue to
adhere to it. If I were to say that all men are types, that would
be not so much a falsehood as a wanton exaggeration of a truth. I
know all that can be urged, and justly urged, against pigeon-hole
classification; but what impresses and startles me is how easily the
greater number of one’s fellow-creatures fit into the pigeon-holes.
Unique souls, no doubt; but the human soul is a mystery which I don’t
profess to understand and which you profess not to believe in. It is
the ordinary workaday mentality of a man that can be labelled with
some approach to accuracy. And the supernatural story, as I say, is
something of a test. Tell a group of new acquaintances some fairly
well authenticated ghost-story, and they will fall apart and regroup
in their special classes like a company of soldiers forming up into
platoons. There will be the credulous fools on the one hand, ready
to believe anything without question; there will be the materialist
fools on the other hand, snorting in angry contempt. Between the
two--truth is generally found midway between extremes--between the
two, preserving a delicate balance between scepticism and credulity,
doubting the story, perhaps, but admitting the possibility, will be the
wise men. I need hardly add, my dear fellow, that it is among these
wise philosophers that I myself am to be found. There you have three
well-defined types, and it is noteworthy that I am a bright specimen of
the exemplary type. If you wish to be saved you have only to look at me
and do your best.’

There was a gleam of laughter in Saunders’s kindly and humorous eyes,
a gleam that seemed to apologize for having read me something in the
nature of a lecture. I had just told my clerical friend that queer
story of Bailey’s about James Dearth and the white horse. It had
interested him, and he was far more disposed to take it seriously than
I was. It started him talking about the Unseen, a hypothesis in which
he has a more than professional concern, and so led him to the bundle
of generalities I have just recorded. They impressed me less than
Saunders’s remarks usually do, but I knew better than to interrupt
him. Whatever be the truth about his theory of types, he himself is
certainly a distinguished exception to the theory. One never knows
where his talk will lead, and I for my part always listen in the hope
that it will lead to a story. Saunders, with his penetrating vision
and his unique opportunities, has seen many a naked soul, many a human
creature stripped bare, by triumph or catastrophe, of the coverings
that hide it from the public eye--yes, and from the eyes of intimate
friends no less. He is as full of good stories as of bad sermons. And
so I waited now, like a timid angler afraid even to cast in his line
lest the troubling of the waters should scare the fish away.

‘The surface mind is dull enough,’ continued Saunders presently,
‘dull enough to justify a label. It is the mysterious region below
consciousness, the rich, dark, infinitely fertile subsoil, that passes
the wit of man to understand. For the most part, one can only reach it
by vague conjecture. But sometimes, here and there, some beautiful or
terrible flower shoots up from that underworld into the light of our
conscious existence. As for your friend’s experiences at the farm, I
think, frankly, that there was sheer devilry in it, black magic. But it
isn’t always so. You remember what I told you about poor Bellingham.’

In the pause that followed, my hopes flourished exceedingly. Then I
hastened to assure Saunders that he had told me precisely nothing at
all about poor Bellingham, whose name I heard for the first time. And
so, with a little coaxing, I got the tale from him.


1

By one of those fantastic coincidences that make life sometimes seem
more artificial than fiction, as well as stranger (said Saunders), it
was in a little café in Rue de l’Oeil, Marseilles, that I first noticed
Bellingham. Strange that one should have to journey to the south of
France to make the acquaintance of a fellow-collegian! For Bellingham,
too, was a Jesus man. I had nodded to him a hundred times in the Close,
walked with him once or twice for a few hundred yards, and passed
him every day in the Chimney going to or from lectures; but I knew
next to nothing of him. Once, I remember, we met in the rooms of some
other fellow and had coffee. Furnivall was there, who afterwards made
something of a hit as an actor; Dodd who got a double first in classics
and then, before the results were out, accidentally drowned himself
within sight of Trinity Library; Chambers who, under a Greek pseudonym,
wrote donnish elderly witticisms for undergraduate journals. Looking
back on that inauspicious scene I know that not one of the men I have
named possessed half the spiritual force of Bellingham, and yet, had
it not been for after-events, I should not now have remembered that he
was there at all. He was a tall slackly-built man, rather like a black
sackful of uncoordinated bones; he stooped a little, peering out at the
world under long bushy eyebrows from behind a large nose. The mouth was
large and loose; the cheeks sagged a trifle; the ears stuck out from
the head at an angle that, if you looked twice, seemed excessive; and
the hands were big and bony with long fingers that moved, sometimes,
like a piece of murderous mechanism. It was as if the hands of a
strangler had been grafted on to the body of a morose, ungainly saint.
I do not describe him as he appeared to me in that college room: that
would be impossible, for I simply didn’t observe him. He was no more to
me then than an uninteresting ultra-reserved fellow-student drudging
at ecclesiastical history and similar stuff. That I failed to single
him out is sufficiently amazing to me now. My eyes must have been in
my boots. But there it is--he made no impression on my somnolent mind.
It was not, as I say, until we met again in that little café in Rue de
l’Oeil that I really saw Bellingham. For the thousandth time I looked
at him and for the first time I saw him. There was quite a little
crowd of us: Hayter of Caius; Mulroyd with his soft voice and Irish
cadences; an Oxford man whose name I’ve forgotten; and the Honourable
Somebody, a mild-mannered, flaxen-haired boy, a Fabian socialist
trying to live down the fact that he was the younger son of a peer.
But I’m forgetting myself: these people are merely names to you, and
names they must remain. The Oxonian was a chance acquaintance who had
encountered our party in Paris and diffidently joined us, a charming
fellow who constantly tried--only too successfully, for he remains in
my memory as the vaguest phantom--to efface himself. Hayter, whose
chief preoccupation, I remember, was the maturing of a new Meerschaum,
played the elder brother to the flaxen-haired youngster. Mulroyd was
my own particular friend, and it was he who had dragged in Bellingham,
the misfit of the party. Bellingham was a curiously solitary man, a
ward in Chancery or something of the kind; no one knew anything about
his origin or antecedents, and he had no friends. The suspicion that he
was lonely, neglected, with nowhere to spend the Long Vacation, made
him irresistible to Mulroyd; and that he was conspicuously unsociable
Mulroyd regarded as a clarion call of challenge to his own militant
kindliness. Well, there’s a rough sketch of the crowd that gathered in
that little red-tiled, black-raftered, French hostel. You must imagine
us all as sitting or standing about the place, in various negligent
attitudes, drinking execrable _vin rouge_, and talking of routes and
train-services and the comparative merits of ales. What turned the
conversation towards more ultimate matters I cannot begin to remember,
but turn it did. I think it was our Oxonian who interpolated some
gloomy observation that set us all thinking of a brooding, inscrutable
Destiny which for ever watched, with hard unblinking eyes, our trivial
conviviality, listened, with infinite indifference, to our plans of
to-day and to-morrow. The remark was succeeded by a pause that was
almost a collective shudder, a pause in which, as it seemed to me, we
all listened fixedly to our own heart-beats ticking away the handful
of moments that divided us from an unknown eternity. You know what it
is to be recalled suddenly, wantonly, to a sense of the immensities,
to be aware that death, an invisible presence, is in your midst, to
feel his lethal breath chilling the warmth of your idle joy. Even
Madeleine, the daughter of the house, who had watched us hitherto with
laughter in her dark eyes, and innocent invitation on her full lips,
was conscious of the abrupt change of temperature. She understood
not a word of our speech, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her
hand make the sign of the cross and her lips move in prayer. Hayter,
shockheaded, long and oval of face, ceased fingering his pipe and
seemed lost in contemplation of its mellowing colour. A wistful light
shone in Mulroyd’s eyes. The Honourable Somebody--I can’t recall his
name--smiled and said ‘Um.’ In that pregnant moment during which we
all sat peering over the edge of the unfathomable, questioning the
unresponsive darkness, that monosyllable sounded like an incantation,
a word mystical and potent. As for me, I looked from one face to the
other, trying to read what was written there, and so my glance fell
upon Bellingham. Fell and was arrested, for the face of Bellingham
was a revelation. What it revealed is difficult to describe in cold
prose; a musician could better express it in some moaning, unearthly
phrase of music. It was as if there shone from that face not light
but darkness, and as if over that head hovered a halo of dark fear, a
crown of shuddering doom. The eyes flashed darkness, I say, and yet
through them, as through sinister windows, I saw for one instant into
the infinite distances of the soul behind them, the unimaginable and
secret world in which the real Bellingham, the Bellingham whom none
of us in that room had ever seen or approached, lived his isolated
life. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his chin propped up
in those gaunt skeleton hands that were several sizes too big for
him. To me, who stood facing him, the effect was incredibly bizarre:
it was for all the world as though some monster whose face was
hidden from me was crouching at my feet offering the truncated head
of Bellingham for my acceptance. The red-knuckled fingers formed a
fitting cup for the grotesque sacrifice. I put the horrible fancy
behind me and sought to regain a human view of that face. Gaunt and
pallid, with high cheekbones and burning eyes, it was a battle-ground
of conflicting passions. But the natures and names of the passions I
could only surmise. An ascetic and a voluptuary, perhaps, had fought in
Bellingham, and his face was the neutral ground that their warfare had
violated and laid waste. The merest conjecture, this, and it remained
so, until it was proved to be false.

‘It doesn’t bear thinking of,’ remarked Hayter, ‘so it’s best to avoid
the thought. The animals are better off than we, by a long chalk.’

‘There’s religion,’ said the flaxen-haired Fabian tentatively.

‘Soothing syrup,’ Hayter murmured. ‘Religion doesn’t face death: it
only pretends it isn’t there. Gateway to the larger life, and all that
cant.’ Hayter was a very positive young man in his way.

Mulroyd tried to banter us back into a more comfortable humour.
‘Material for a first-rate shindy there. Now then, Saunders, speak up
for your cloth, my boy!’

‘I shall, when I’ve got it,’ said I. A theological student does not
care to talk shop in mixed company. I was shy of posing as a preacher,
and not to be drawn.

‘Well, if Saunders won’t, I will.’

The voice was harsh, and tense with emotion. It seemed to come
out of the grave itself. We all stared at Bellingham, whom we had
become accustomed to regard as almost incapable of contributing to a
conversation. We waited. Hayter even forgot that work of chromatic art,
his pipe.

‘Death waits for every man,’ said Bellingham. ‘At any moment it may
engulf us.’ The triteness of the sermon was redeemed by the personality
that blazed in the speaker. ‘And then....’ His voice trailed off into
silence.

‘And then?’ enquired Hayter, with a politeness that I fancied covered a
sneer.

‘And then,’ said the man of doom, ‘we shall find ourselves in the
terrible presence of God.’

For once even the genial Mulroyd was stung to sarcasm. ‘I must say,
judging from your tone, you don’t seem to relish the prospect much.’

‘Never mind what I relish,’ answered Bellingham sternly. ‘In that hour
you and I will be judged. We shall be forced to look into the eye
that at this moment, and always, is looking upon us.’ There was an
uncomfortable silence, as well there might be. We had not reckoned upon
such an explosion of evangelical fervour, and it embarrassed us as some
flagrant breach of manners would have done. Perhaps, heaven help us, we
regarded it as a flagrant breach of manners. Bellingham was committing
the cardinal sin: he was taking something too seriously.

‘When I was a child,’ went on Bellingham, without ruth, ‘I was told
the story of a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement. To this
punishment was added the further horror of perpetual watching. A small
hole was drilled in the cell-door through which an eye never ceased to
peer at the prisoner. That was an allegory, and I have never forgotten
it. Even now, you fellows, we are being watched.’

Some of us, I swear, looked round nervously, half expecting to catch
sight of that vigilant eye. I, for my part, was angry. ‘That’s not an
allegory, Bellingham,’ I said. ‘It’s a damned travesty. You conceive
God to be a kind of Peeping Tom, with omnipotence added. I would rather
be an atheist than believe that.’

‘Perhaps you would rather be an atheist,’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Perhaps
I would rather be an atheist. But I can’t be. Nor can you. Did any of
you notice the name of the street?’

‘Name of the street?’ echoed some one. ‘What street?’

‘This street,’ said Bellingham.

‘We’re not in a street. We’re in a café,’ said Hayter truculently.
‘At least I thought so a moment ago. I begin to fancy we must be in a
mission-hall.’

At the moment no one could remember having noticed the name. ‘Well, I
did notice it,’ said Bellingham. ‘It is the Street of the Eye.’

Mulroyd shrugged his shoulders, a gesture plainly disdainful of this
touch of melodrama.

‘Well,’ said I, ‘what of it?’ For the fellow’s morbidity had spoiled my
temper. I expected a night of bad dreams.

‘The Street of the Eye,’ repeated Bellingham. ‘We’re all in that
street; every man born is in that street. And we shall never get out of
it.’

I believe some of us half-suspected that the wine had gone to his
head, though how such stuff could make any man tipsy was beyond
understanding. He continued to irradiate gloom upon us from under his
shaggy brows. Mulroyd, to create a diversion, held out his hands to
Madeleine in mock appeal.

‘Du vin, mademoiselle! Nous sommes bien chagrinés.’

The girl’s eyes brightened again. At the merest hint of a renewal of
gaiety she rose, radiantly, as if from the dead.

‘Let’s have some champagne,’ Mulroyd suggested, ‘to take the taste of
death out of our mouths.’

‘_Carpe diem_,’ murmured Hayter. ‘Trite. But the first and last word of
wisdom.’

‘You can’t escape that way,’ remarked Bellingham, sourly insistent.

But we could stand no more of Bellingham just then. Flinging courtesy
to the winds we laughed and sang and shouted him down. ‘Death be
damned!’ cried Mulroyd, as we clinked glasses. Never was a toast drunk
with more fervour.


2

You’ll be surprised when I say that after this incident I got to know
Bellingham better and to like him more. Strange as it may seem, he
was not entirely without humour; and I fancied that he was the least
bit ashamed of his outburst. The next day he went about like a dog
in disgrace, feeling perhaps that every one disliked him. Back he
went into that shell of silence from which he had only once, and
with such dramatic effect, emerged. He would never, I know, have gone
back on the substance of his discourse; but, as he admitted to me
afterwards, he very quickly began to doubt the wisdom of his method.
Fellow-undergraduates were not to be frightened into conversion by
the kind of revivalist rant he had treated us to. He began to feel
woefully out of place in our company. Mulroyd, good fellow though he
was, could not bring himself to make any warm overtures to one whom
he now regarded as a religious maniac; on the surface he was breezy
and friendly enough, but in his heart he knew that Bellingham must be
reckoned among his failures, one who had failed to justify his ardent
faith in the latent social value of every man. The others ignored him,
though not pointedly, much as they had always done. My own attitude
was different. I have, as you know, an insatiable curiosity about
human nature--especially freaks of human nature, I’m afraid--and
Bellingham had piqued that curiosity. I had repudiated his particular
version of God as being nothing but an almighty Peeping Tom, and yet
a weakness for peeping is my own besetting sin. All my life I have
been a kind of amateur detective of the human soul. Moreover--though
I don’t stress this--I had more than a sneaking sympathy for the
man. After all we had something in common, something that none of
the others of our party shared with us. We were both hoping to be
ordained. In spite of myself I had to admire the colossal courage
of his intervention in that argument, even while I disparaged its
tone. In fine, for this reason and for that, I made rather a point
of cultivating Bellingham’s acquaintance from that day forth. And I
had my reward. I really believe that to me he revealed a more human
side of himself than anybody else ever caught sight of. Next term,
back at college, he made a habit of strolling into my rooms at five
minutes to ten, and very often we talked till the early hours of the
morning about this and that. Sometimes he became reminiscent about his
childhood. His earliest memories were of a grey suburban villa, with
a black square patch in front and a black oblong patch behind, both
called gardens. The square one was marked off from the road by hideous
iron railings and an iron gate. Bellingham assured me that the pattern
of those railings was branded on his retina; and in an unwonted lapse
from literalism he declared that it was a pattern designed in hell and
executed in Bedlam. ‘Wherever I see it,’ he said passionately, under
the influence of nothing more potent than black coffee, ‘wherever I
see it--and it is all over southeast London--I recognize the mark of
the beast, the signature of an incorrigible stupidity. The very smell
of those railings is noisome.’ He was like that: ever ready to see
material things as symbols of the unseen, and very prone--like many
religionists--to confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. In
the sheer exuberance of his passion, whether of joy or disgust, he
would make some wild exaggerated statement that no one was expected
to take literally; and the next moment he himself would be taking it
literally. If, for example, I had suggested to him that to talk of the
smell of railings was a trifle fanciful, he would have been genuinely
astonished. Whenever he loved or hated, rationality went to the winds.
And he seems to have hated the home of his childhood pretty completely.
The back garden, where he spent a good deal of his time, figured in
his talk as if it were a plague spot, an evil blot upon the earth. If
one is to believe his tale, this garden was always, in season and out,
full of wet flapping underclothes hanging on a line. They used to lie
in wait for him, he said, and smack him in the face: it was like being
embraced by a slimy fish. He was glad, however, of the clothes-line
posts; he used to climb them and swing from the cross-bars, and once
or twice he pulled one of these posts out of its wooden socket in the
ground and stared down at the minute wriggling monsters that scuttled
about in that little twilit world. Another thing that gave him pleasure
was the sight of a neighbouring church, aspiring towards the sky, the
throne of God. These memories may well have derived much of their
colour from imagination, for both his parents died before he was ten,
and he then left the suburban villa to become the ward of his uncle
Joseph. Joseph Bellingham appears to have been conspicuously unfitted
for the delicate task of bringing up a sensitive, solitary, and already
morbid child, although not a word against him would his nephew have
admitted. Justly or unjustly I was disposed to believe that this Uncle
Joseph had completed the dark work begun in Bellingham by his childish
solitude and loveless home. For his parents, I should have told you,
were lifeless, disillusioned people. I suspect they had never been
happy or passionate lovers, and that they regarded their son’s birth as
one more penalty rather than as the desired fruit of their marriage.
In some preposterous way (naturally Bellingham was reticent here)
the man had sacrificed himself in marrying his wife--some fetish of
‘honour’ perhaps--and of course he spent the rest of his life hating
her for it. This may or may not account for the fact that when I first
got to know Bellingham he seemed extraordinarily insensitive, for a
man of his temperament, to beauty. Not totally deficient--because even
his hatred of a certain kind of iron railings implies some standard,
however subconscious--but what sense of beauty he possessed had never
been wakened: it manifested itself only in a series of dislikes. He
had quite a devilish flair for seeing the most repulsive aspect of
things. This was all in tune with his miserable theology. To the
spiritual loveliness that radiates from the central figure of the
New Testament--to that beacon he was as blind as he was deaf to the
many golden promises of the religion of Christ. I do not mean that
he swerved by a hair’s breadth from orthodoxy; I mean that there was
some subtle twist in his temperament that made him accept ‘the love of
God’ as a euphemism and ‘the wrath of God’ as a terrible reality. He
thought more about hell than about heaven, because he had only seen
beauty whereas he had _felt_ ugliness. The one was an intellectual
apprehension: the other was a perpetual experience. It was evident to
me, from what he did not say, that he had never known love, and I
wondered what was in store for him.

But though with me he became more and more unreserved, from all other
fellows of his class and education he drew farther away. There was a
spiritual uncouthness in him which prevented his taking kindly to the
harmless social artificialities of academic life. As I told him--and
he admitted it good-humouredly--he would have been more at home as
chief medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. In some remote and savage
bush his niche awaited him. Even the traditions of politeness he grew
to despise. I shocked him by admitting that I myself had more than
once got out of accepting an invitation to breakfast or to coffee by
feigning to be engaged elsewhere. Bellingham would have said bluntly,
‘No, thanks,’ and have left it at that. Courageous, no doubt, but
it did not make for easy social relations. He became more and more
dissatisfied, too, with the mild fashionable Anglicanism of our dean.
Of his own religion sensationalism was the life-breath; and the worship
of good form, the religion of all undergraduates, was in his eyes the
most dangerous idolatry. No one was surprised when, having taken his
degree with the rest of us, he abruptly left the University. Instead
of being ordained he became just what I had chaffingly suggested, a
medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. To be more exact, he set up as
a lay-missioner near the Euston Road. He had a meagre but sufficient
private income which permitted him to go his own solitary gait. And
there he busied himself wrestling with the Devil for the souls of
all the miscellaneous street-scum he could lay hands on. God forgive
me if I have ever in my heart derided Bellingham! He had the heroism
as well as the mania of a one-idea’d man. I find it hard to suppose
that his converts were any the happier for having been injected with
his particular virus of fear; but, as Bellingham would say, where
happiness cannot be reconciled to salvation happiness must go. Go it
did, I have no doubt. Fear of the policeman was displaced by a scarcely
less ignoble fear of God, conceived to be another policeman on a much
larger scale. If I speak bitterly, it is not in spite of my religion
but because of it. Before I have finished the story you will understand
that I have cause for bitterness.

We exchanged a few letters, he and I; but it was not until eighteen
months later that, at his own invitation, I went to see him. ‘Saunders,
I need your help,’ he said in his letter, and added something about my
being his only real friend and so on. He had dismal little lodgings
in a dismal little side-street the name of which I have forgotten.
Bellingham himself opened the door to me. I had told him when to expect
me and he must have been waiting at the window. He greeted me in a
shamefaced eager fashion that touched my heart. I was astonished at the
change in him: the more astonished because it was at once subtle and
impossible to miss. There was a gentleness in his eyes that I had never
seen there before. He was more human. He led me to his own rooms--they
were at the top of a four-storied house, and looked out on a prospect
of smoking chimneys--and forced me into the only comfortable chair he
possessed.

I began smoking, but he denied himself that nerve-soothing indulgence.
His eyes, alight with an unwonted shyness that was only half shame,
avoided meeting mine. We fenced for a while, talking over our Jesus
days; and all the while my mind, involuntarily, was seeking a name
for something in that room that I had not expected to find. Presently
Bellingham rose from his chair. It was an abrupt and surprising
movement. ‘Like to see the rest of my quarters?’ he said, in a tone
desperately casual. I followed him into the next room, and there, in
one glance, the mystery was made clear. The bedroom was the answer
to the problem of the sitting-room. What I had detected while we sat
talking was domesticity, a subtle but decided fragrance of home: a
certain precision in the arrangement of books and furniture. In the
bedroom, with its two spotlessly white-sheeted beds and its vase of
flowers standing in the centre of a miniature dressing-table, the same
story was told more eloquently; there was, accentuated, aggressive,
the same neatness and daintiness of effect which a contented woman
instinctively imposes on her surroundings. No bachelor, however
fastidious, could have achieved it. ‘Quite a jolly little place,’ I
remarked, to hide my own surprise and his embarrassment. ‘Very,’ said
Bellingham, and we went back to our seats by the fire.

Bellingham tried to take up the thread of our conversation where we had
dropped it five minutes before. But for his own sake I cut off that
line of retreat.

‘Look here, my dear fellow! You didn’t ask me over here in order to
discuss our esteemed Dr. Morgan. Tell me all about it.’

Bellingham faced me squarely at last. ‘You mean my marriage?’ I nodded.
‘Well, to start with, I’m not married.’

I think he expected me to flinch at that; and perhaps my failure to do
so disconcerted as well as encouraged him. I said nothing. I felt that
I could do more good by listening than by talking.

‘She has been in these rooms for two months,’ said Bellingham. ‘And
what you saw in there--that has existed for ten days, just ten days.’ I
divined that this was his way of indicating to me the duration of his
married life. ‘You see I didn’t fall at once, or easily. The Devil is
always insidious, isn’t he? Saunders, that girl is a magician. Joan,
her name is. She transformed this place. It’s not bad now, is it? You
should have seen it before she came. And me, too--you should have seen
me before she came. It’s a new life to me. I’m translated. And yet....’

‘How and where did you meet her?’

‘In the street, at the beginning of November. Her husband kicked her
out. A swine he is; thank God I’ve never set eyes on him. Told her to
go and sell herself, and come back with her earnings.’

There was a pause. ‘And she?’ I asked.

‘She was on the streets for five days. Yes, a prostitute for five
days.’ I saw Bellingham’s face contract with pain, and I knew that
something deeper than pity had been stirred in him. And so the
recital went on. Bit by bit I got his story and pieced it together.
He did not spare himself; but even his passion for repentance, his
ingrained conviction of sin, could not persuade me that he had been
guilty of a very heinous crime. He had rescued the girl, at first
in sheer compassion, and cherished her as he would have cherished
any other fragment of human salvage. And her presence, her pathetic
prettiness and her childish need of affection, had been too much for
him. In a passion of gratitude, I surmise, she had offered him, with
a full heart, what she had so reluctantly sold to casual men during
her five days purgatory. The appeal to his manhood was too sudden,
too overwhelming, to be resisted. Beauty, seen for the first time in
dazzling glory, had invaded his heart and beaten down his defences.
For the first time in my experience of him there was inconsistency
in Bellingham. He spoke, one minute, of his ‘fall,’ like any sour
moralist; and in his very next sentence he would become almost lyrical
about this ‘new life,’ this shattering apocalypse of beauty. It was
as if the man had been cloven in twain and spoke with two voices. And
that, I believe, is the real key to the baffling terror that was to
follow.

Later in the afternoon, in time to prepare tea for us, came Joan
herself, a big-eyed child in her early ’twenties, with very fair hair,
like a little lost angel with a Cockney accent. The sudden fear that
leaped into her eyes as she timidly greeted me would have stabbed any
man’s heart. She was absurdly fragile, and I saw at once that those
five evil days had been no more than a gruesome physical accident which
had left her courage shaken but her innocence unimpaired. She guessed,
no doubt, that we had been discussing her; and both Bellingham and I
felt caddish, I dare say, when we remembered having done so. But I
succeeded in winning her confidence by displaying a keen interest in
her market-basket, which she carried on her arm, and in a very few
moments she became garrulous about her shopping experiences, displaying
a pretty pride in her purchases. They included, I remember, three dried
herrings and a pound of pig’s-fry. The herrings we had for our tea, and
I have never enjoyed a meal more.

In the evening, during a long walk through mean streets, Bellingham
came to the point. He had said, you will remember, that he needed my
help. What he wanted was no less than that I should play the part of
conscience to him. I was to be instated, apparently, as his spiritual
pastor. For the sake of that poor child happily darning his socks at
home, I could not refuse the embarrassing honour thrust upon me. And
when I learned that repentance was actually beginning to gain the upper
hand of him I was glad indeed to exert any influence I possessed on
the side of humanity. He had had a vile dream, he told me, and it was
evident that he regarded it as a warning sent by that vigilant deity
of his. In the dream his landlady, who believed him to be a legally
married man, came and smiled at him over the bedrail, and wagged her
head till it detached itself from the body and multiplied. The air was
full of these grinning heads, poised like dragonflies, all their evil
eyes on Bellingham. Terror, he told me, took concrete form inside his
own head: he could hear it simmering, sizzling, gurgling, boiling,
splitting; it drove him out of bed, away from Joan, and across the arid
plains of hell under a sky monotonously grey except where the sun,
a bloody red, like a huge socket from which the eye had been torn,
stared sightlessly at him. Even as he gazed at it it filled and became
menacing with the eye of God.

‘It was a vision of hell,’ Bellingham said, wiping the moisture from
his brow. ‘And the eye of God was even there. O Lord, how can I escape
from Thy presence!’

It did not seem to me a moment propitious for argument, so I held my
peace. He talked on about his doubts and his difficulties, his sin and
his repentance; and at last I gathered that I was being invited to tell
him whether he should stay with Joan or leave her.

‘Oh, fling her into the streets,’ I advised him, with furious irony,
‘as her husband did.’

‘Yes,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘You’re right. Against all my religious
convictions I feel you to be right. I have made her my wife, and I must
be faithful to my choice, right or wrong.’

‘It’s as plain as day,’ I assured him. ‘Love and duty are pointing in
the same direction for once. Why should you doubt it?’

‘You see, Saunders,’ said Bellingham, with sudden fire, ‘it’s all or
nothing. She must remain my wife, or we must separate. There’s no third
way. I can’t spend the rest of my life in the waters of Tantalus. I’m
only a man, God help me!’

For a while we left it at that.


3

Saunders has an exasperating habit of stopping in the middle of a
story, and behaving as though it were finished. He did this now. I
reminded him that I was still listening.... No, I haven’t done yet, he
admitted. I thought that was the end, but it was only the beginning
of poor Bellingham’s troubles. You must imagine me now as popping
in and out of his home pretty often. Those two remote rooms, like a
fantastic nest built among London chimney-pots, attracted me by the
romance they symbolized, by their air of being an idyllic peasant
cottage, exquisitely clean, stuck away in the heart of the metropolis.
Bellingham sent another urgent summons to me. It was the first of
a series of alarms. The haunting began. The dreams that, every few
nights, made Bellingham’s sleep a thing of terror began now to invade
his waking life. The Watching Eye was upon him, the eye of God, he
declared it to be, trying to subdue him to submission. He heard a voice
that said to him, ‘Put the woman from you.’ In short, he exhibited all
the signs of incipient madness. At the time I thought it was indeed
madness which threatened him. With one of his frantic telegrams in my
hand--‘I have seen God’ or ‘He is come again in judgment’--what else
could I think? Yet I still believed that together he and I, with the
courageous co-operation of Joan herself, might fend off the danger.
She, poor girl, was tearful but invincibly staunch. She would have
sacrificed herself utterly for him, whom she loved with an unshakable
devotion; but I persuaded her that her going away, as she suggested,
would not ease the situation. You will think me fanciful, no doubt,
but sometimes I felt that Bellingham was fighting for his soul against
some usurping demon, and that anything--death or damnation--was better
than base surrender. And Bellingham, though he took a very different
view of the nature of the contest, came to agree with my conclusion.
He rejected my proposition but embraced the corollary. He conceived
himself fighting against impossible odds, with no less than God, the
Might and Majesty of the universe, as his implacable antagonist. ‘I
tell you, Saunders,’ he said to me, ‘I saw Him plainly. He stood over
there by my desk. He has incarnated Himself once more in order to crush
my revolt.’ I passed over the almost maniacal egoism of the conception,
and asked for a description of the Divine Visitor. ‘His body was all in
strong shadow,’ Bellingham answered, shuddering at the recollection.
‘Only His terrible eyes were visible, and His accusing finger that
pointed at me.’

I had respected Bellingham ever since I had come to know him; and
now, if I respected his intelligence less, I felt something more
than admiration for the indomitable spirit of the man. His unshaken
belief that he was defying his Creator made fidelity to Joan a
piece of titanic courage. Beset by horrors unspeakable, conscious
that the citadel of his very reason was being stormed, he yet held
doggedly to his determination. Doggedly at first, and afterwards with
a sublime pride that I could not witness without an answering pride,
a flaming exultation in the splendour of the human soul. Maniac or
not, he extorted willing homage from me. You may say what you like
about hallucination and the rest of it, but I tell you that to me, an
eye-witness, the battle was lifted into the realm of cosmic drama where
everything takes on a significance past mortal understanding but not
past mortal apprehension. I thought of Job; I thought of Prometheus;
and I thought of Bellingham as no mean third, championing life against
death, championing youth, beauty, and all frail humanity, against the
cruel bogey of the mind that menaced them. It goes without saying
that his terrors derived all their power from his belief in their
reality. He was blind to the plain facts of real religion, deaf to my
rationalizing explanations of the horror that haunted him, obstinate
in his conviction that God, and none other, was the author and agent
of his persecution. Equally convinced was he that he had but to cast
Joan out and he would save his soul alive. Every week saw a change
in his physical condition. That brief period of his second blooming,
fostered by the sweet presence and the maternal care of Joan, seemed
over for ever; it was as if the seven years of spiritual famine were
now to follow. He grew more gaunt, more haggard; vitality shrunk into
him like a pent prisoner and peered out through those fiery orbs, his
eyes, as through the mean windows of a condemned cell. He was locked
fast in an impregnable isolation, from which no one could rescue him,
it seemed, certainly not I, either by force or guile. He distrusted his
food; he distrusted the men and women who passed him in the street.
There were only two human souls he did not distrust: Joan herself was
one, and I, by the mercy of heaven, was the other. He began to see a
vast and sinister significance in all sorts of trivial events, all
sorts of minor disasters that did not in the least concern any one
of us, seeing in them the beginning of a cosmic disintegration that
should engulf him in perdition. He was afraid yet defiant of these
fatalities. He was both egomaniacal and illogical in his conviction
that God, his implacable adversary, would behave like the veriest
villain of melodrama rather than let him escape: tear the universe
to tatters in order to compass the death or the dishonour of this
one rebellious spirit, like a man who should pull his own house about
his ears in the pursuit of a solitary rat. I myself began to scan the
papers anxiously for wars and rumours of wars. Different as were our
intellectual convictions, there was the stark comradeship between us of
those who face death together. He watched for signs of God; Joan and I,
with equal vigilance, watched him. And the stronger grew my affection
for Bellingham, the shakier my own nerves became. Finally, with a kind
of exultation, I threw up all my work--I was a curate at the time--and
flung myself body and soul into this holy war. I found lodgings near
Bellingham’s, and visited him every day without fail. I felt that this
fretting, this piling of horror upon horror, could not go on much
longer. Sooner or later there would be a crisis; the increasing tension
would snap. Mingled with my fear for Bellingham’s sanity was a fear
for the safety of Joan, caged up with a maniac. For a week or more we
worried and waited.


4

The end came with a sudden and sickening rush. And yet it was an end
worth waiting and working for. In the street just outside his home,
Bellingham was knocked down by a passing cab. Joan saw the accident
from the window. By the sheerest chance he escaped with nothing worse
than bruises and flesh wounds, but his excitement and terror reached
their climax as he was helped back, limp and bleeding, to his rooms.
The policeman, with a kindly word, handed him over to Joan’s care. She
was all for summoning a doctor, but Bellingham would not hear of it.
White-faced, hiding his rising tumult behind a mask of steely calm, he
told her curtly to fetch me. She obeyed, poor child, in terror of her
life and his own. I was with them ten minutes later.

‘Saunders,’ he greeted me, without preamble. ‘God has flung down His
last challenge.’

‘You mean this accident!’ said I, scoffing gently.

‘Accident!’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Do you, a priest of God, talk to me
of accident! Not a sparrow falls without God. No, it was no accident.
It was the last warning. I feel in my bones that this is the end. At
any moment now He will strike, and I shall burn in hell for ever more,
where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ He had the
true missioner’s flow of quotations, mostly misapplied; but I knew
better than to cross him then. Something of his own passion infected
me.

We were standing in the bedroom, where he was at last submitting, with
the most complete indifference, to the medical ministrations of Joan.
‘Let’s go into the other room,’ I suggested, ‘and discuss this quietly
and in comfort.’ I led the way, and they followed. The living-room, as
I fancy they called it, was more cheerful by a long way. There was a
fire in the grate, and a lamp like a great harvest moon glowed yellow
on the table.

‘Listen to me, Saunders,’ cried Bellingham, refusing to sit down. ‘You
are my best friend, my only friend; and Joan is my wife, the finest
wife that any man had. The All-Seeing Eye is watching me now, as
always; that street-accident, as you call it, was the plain speech of
God telling me to desert this woman. I’m a doomed man, Saunders, and I
can speak my mind now. I believe in God as firmly as ever I believed
in Him, but I have learned something. He is not worth serving. I tell
you, Saunders, that the God we have both worshipped is as evil as He
is powerful. Almighty Evil sits upon the throne of the universe, and I
will curse Him and die.’ Poor fellow, he could not believe me when I
told him that it was the God in himself that was speaking those wild
words, the God in himself that was fighting a heroic battle against
the demon of fear that Joan by her woman’s tenderness had cast out.

There came, suddenly, a crash of something falling in one of the lower
rooms of the house. It jarred our tense nerves horribly. And then, for
the last time, the terror came to Bellingham, as if in answer to his
taunt. He alone saw it, and you will quickly interpose that it was his
mind alone that created it. And in a sense I believe you are right, but
you’ll find it hard before I finish to maintain that the apparition was
a purely subjective thing. Can an hallucination cause windows to rattle
and doors to move? I believe for my part that in some unfathomable way
the old Bellingham, or rather the riot of evil fancies about God that
had victimized the old Bellingham, had woven for itself some external
form. Language is crude and clumsy, crushing the truth at which it
grasps; but it seems to me that in some sense--and a sense not too
metaphorical--the man was, as I said before, cloven in twain, divided
against himself. But your face warns me that I’m boring you.

‘There it is,’ shouted Bellingham, pointing towards a corner of the
room. Joan, afraid of her lover, rushed to me, and my arms closed
round her instinctively. We stared and saw nothing. ‘The same evil
eyes,’ said Bellingham, more quietly, ‘the same accusing finger.’ And
then began an uncanny one-sided colloquy. Bellingham conversed with
his invisible mentor. ‘I will not leave her, God,’ said Bellingham.
‘I despise your dirty counsels. Kill me, damn me, burn me. Send me to
hell, where I may see your hateful staring face no more.’

The windows began unaccountably to rattle. Joan clung to me, sobbing,
on the verge of hysteria. Bellingham strode towards the table and
with one swift gesture put out the light. ‘I am not afraid of your
darkness,’ he flung out.

For a moment, silence; and a darkness made ghastly by bright moonlight.
Then the windows rattled again, and then, quite without warning,
Bellingham collapsed and fell against me. My body had broken his fall,
and I now released Joan in order to turn my attention to her lover.
The sight of him prostrate restored her to courage. She was always
ready when needed. I left Bellingham to her care for a moment and
turned again to that haunted corner. I have never known fear such as I
knew at that moment, and yet I felt infinitely braced by the dramatic
significance of this conflict with an unknown terror. It was as if
hell had invaded earth, and that God had left me as His sole witness.
At such crises a man with religion turns to it. Your old-fashioned
agnosticism will be shocked by my method of exorcising evil.

‘In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, I
charge you to leave this man in peace!’ I made the sign of the cross.

And still I stared, and still I saw nothing. Joan was busy with
Bellingham, who was beginning to shew signs of returning consciousness.
I could not move my eyes away from the corner by the door. And while I
stared, something at last happened. Thank Heaven that I alone saw it!
The door leading to the bedroom, which had been left half-open, began
closing. It closed, pulled to from the other side, and the knob moved
and the catch clicked, as though released from the hand of the Unseen.
I ran to it, opened it, and looked out. And saw--nothing at all.




SLEEPING BEAUTY




SLEEPING BEAUTY


1

Harriet leaned across the scullery sink, where dirty plates were
soaking, in order to get a better view of the moon. Her sleeves were
turned up to the elbow. Her right hand grasped a ball of dishcloth from
which slimy water oozed between her red fingers to float, in black
spots, upon the surface of the water. Upon that water, through which
projected a tureen, like the bows of a wrecked ship, the moonlight
fell. The three and elevenpenny alarum clock in the kitchen began
striking nine.

All Harriet’s spiritual crises had had for their _mise-en-scène_ this
scullery, or so it seemed to Harriet herself. Seven years earlier
she had stood where she was now standing and had wrestled with
overmastering fear, to the accompaniment of that same ticking clock and
to the drip-drip from the plate-rack upon already washed spoons. She
had leaned then across the sink, as she was leaning now, and stared in
terror at an unearthly glow in the sky that could scarcely fail to mean
the end of the world and the coming of God in judgment. She shuddered
to picture the dead bodies, putty-coloured, rising in their shrouds to
confront--with her and Mamma and Alice and Maud--an implacable Creator.
‘O God, don’t come yet!’ It had been the most spontaneous of all her
prayers. She had heard too much of this God to trust herself readily
to His mercy; and she, the most wicked of girls, had little enough to
hope from mere justice. She had too often deceived her teacher and been
unsympathetic with her poor mother; and far too often had she resented
having to drudge in the house--sweep and dust, make beds, empty slops,
and wash dirty dinner-things--while still at school, and to the neglect
of her home-lessons.

Whether in answer to her prayer, or from come other cause, God had
stayed His coming on that occasion, and to-night, within a week of her
twentieth birthday, she was thinking of quite other things: not of
God, but of the moon. There was something placid and sisterly to-night
about that celestial presence, and Harriet was deliciously aware of
a bond between them, ‘Because Geoff likes us both,’ she said in her
heart. What had been his phrase, the phrase that had astonished her
first to gladness? ‘Gentle as moonlight, soft and gentle as moonlight.’
The words haunted her memory like singing birds. Geoff’s liking was
in itself strange enough: the degree of his liking was scarcely
credible. Why had he no eyes for Alice, the acknowledged beauty of
the family?--or for Maud, with her brains? ‘Cinderella and the Ugly
Sisters,’ Geoff had said. But Cinderella had been a pretty girl, and
she, Harriet, was all too plain. It could only have been kindness or
perverse obstinacy that had made him deny that. She glanced into the
tiny mirror that hung from a nail on the pink distempered wall, and
examined with some distaste the oval olive face, the fair hair, and the
large brown eyes that looked out at her. Tears began to form in those
eyes. ‘Now don’t start that silliness!’ she admonished herself. And
she returned to the practical world and to the washing of the things
dirtied at supper. ‘I do wish mamma wouldn’t leave all her fat,’ she
thought, as with her scullery knife she sped three quivering fragments
into the waste-pail.

There remained the undeniable fact that Geoff wanted to marry her:
that is, he liked her so much that he wished her to share his home,
when he acquired one, and wash his dishes instead of her mother’s.
She could cook, too: she could make him nice things; and she would
indeed have cheerfully slaved for his comfort in gratitude for that
pity which, as she supposed, had made his glance linger in kindness
upon her. But that was not to be. Even in that wonderful moment when
he praised her gentleness she had realized how impossible it was that
she should leave mamma; and her sisters had been not slow to emphasize
that impossibility. ‘Boy and girl flirtation,’ said Alice with genial
contempt--unaccountably, since Geoff was twenty-six and considered to
be rather a clever young man. He was a poet--a bank-clerk in his spare
time--and his knack of finding rhymes should alone have earned him some
respect. To Geoff himself Alice had always been conspicuously friendly;
and as for Maud--he had been her friend in the first place (she had
met him in the city), and it had always been assumed that it was Maud
whom he came to see. But about Geoff’s intentions now there could be no
doubt at all. He had even wanted, the dear silly, to help Harriet wash
up, but she had not dared to allow that, and he, making a virtue of
necessity, was at this moment closeted with the family, perhaps urging
once more his extravagant claim.

The last dish dried, the last fork placed in its proper section of the
plate-basket, she returned, rather shamefaced, to the sitting-room.
As the door closed behind her an ominous hush fell. A smile upon the
proud plump face of Alice froze hard and thawed suddenly. Maud swung
round upon the revolving music-stool and began turning the pages of
Mendelssohn’s _Lieder_. Her mother, perched insecurely on the edge of
her chair, visibly suffered. She was always visibly suffering.

‘Girls!’ said mamma plaintively.... It was enough. Harriet’s sisters
rose without a word and left the room. Mamma looked at the young man,
but he made no movement. ‘Geoffrey!’ she said, a world of pathos in her
voice. But Geoffrey was deaf to it. ‘This concerns me too,’ he said.
‘May I smoke?’

‘Very well. Stay, if you wish to be cruel....’ But this man, lost to
all sense of humanity, only replied: ‘I’m vulgarly persistent, no
doubt, but you see I happen to want Harry.’

Harry’s mother turned twin orbs of suffering upon her daughter, and
began reciting the speech she had prepared.

‘I’m sorry, Harriet, to disappoint you. I understand your desire to
get away from a troublesome invalid mother and your two bread-winning
sisters. But you are God’s charge to me and I must protect you.’

‘From me?’ inquired Geoffrey.

She did not heed the interruption.

‘I say nothing against Geoffrey, but I can’t consent to anything in the
shape of an engagement between you. For one thing you are as yet a mere
girl; you know nothing of life and nothing of marriage. And that isn’t
all. Geoffrey has told me something very sad. He has been very open
and frank with me: I _will_ say that for him. We all like Geoffrey.
But he’s told me that he would wish to be married in an office. He has
queer views, my dear. He even tells me that he only goes to church to
please his mother and father. I’m afraid he’s let go of the Saviour’s
hand altogether. After that, I need hardly say more. I know my little
Harriet too well to believe that she can wish to give mother pain. I
already have my Cross to bear.’

‘Very well, mamma.’ Harriet’s eyes were luminous with tears.

At that Geoffrey rose. ‘Then I’d better clear off home at once.’

‘My dear Geoffrey,’ protested his hostess, ‘I know you are thinking
to spare my feelings after this upset. You’re very good to me
always. But you’ll please stay your week-end. We mustn’t part in
unfriendliness--and you know how I should hate you to travel on Sunday.’

He could not keep bitterness out of his smile, but he replied
cheerfully enough:

‘Well, Mrs. Mason, since Harry is not to be engaged to me there’ll be
no harm in my taking her out for half an hour before bed? Would you
care to come, Harry?... Thanks awfully.’


2

Harriet went to her room in a trembling ecstasy, struggling against
odds to believe that she was indeed beautiful, as he had said. While
she moved about, within the pink beflowered walls of her very own room
(as in her heart she was wont to call it), his voice still made music
in her memory.

‘Why will you submit to be boxed up in that prison? Can’t you
understand how I want you? Can’t you understand how lovely you are?’ He
had never before been so passionate in his iterations. And she could
only shake her head, elated, yet with secret misgiving. He had very
queer ideas, mamma had said. Was this obsession by the thought of
beauty perhaps one of them? But there was worse to follow.

‘Harry, are you determined to give me up?’

She replied miserably: ‘I can’t go against mamma. You wouldn’t have me
go against mamma. Oh, Geoff, I would do anything else for you.’

The words were like a match dropped in dry stubble. ‘Then you do love
me? You do! You do!’

His violence frightened and braced her. ‘You know I like you
tremendously,’ she said, grappling with the unknown, ‘better than
anyone else in the world.’

‘Except your mother,’ he retorted bitterly, and then added in a changed
tone: ‘Harry darling, we’ve never kissed. Do you like me enough for
that? We may never have another moment alone.’

‘Of course, you funny boy!’

He bent towards her, and she kissed him, in friendly fashion, on the
cheek. ‘Happy now?’ she asked, almost merrily, hoping to drive away his
tragic air.

He smiled. ‘Not exactly.’ An odd smile it was. And at the bend of the
road, under the shadow of Mrs. Lavender’s lime trees, he took her face
suddenly between his hands and kissed her mouth. Something stirred in
her but did not awake. She could not understand his emotion.

‘Harry, you said you’d do anything for me. Did you mean it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll think me strange. Perhaps you’ll be shocked. It’s this: let me
see you. If I’m to go away from you, as I must, let me see you just
once, as you really are. Give me a memory to take with me.’

Was he indeed mad? Poor Geoff! ‘But, dear, you can see me now.’

‘Your face, your clothes. Let me see _you_, all your beauty. Venus
Anadyomene....’

She burned with shame as something of his meaning dawned on her ...
and now, as she stood in her bedroom re-living the scene, the plan he
had unfolded seemed both wild and wicked. Wild and wicked, yes: yet
shot through with a flash of poetry. An illuminated ‘Thou God seest
me’ gleamed at her from one wall, and a pledge to abstain by God’s
help from all intoxicating liquors as beverages, signed in childish
caligraphy _Harriet Mason_, accused her from another. Wild and wicked;
but in a passion of gratitude for being loved, and for the spark
kindled within her, she had yielded her promise.

‘Thou God seest me.’ Blushing hotly, very conscious of that
inquisitive eye, she took down her hair. With a miniature clatter
the pins fell from nerveless fingers on to the glass surface of the
dressing-table. Slowly she undressed; paused a moment, shyly stroking
her slim nude body; and then with a gesture of resolve slipped into her
kimono. The eye of God was still upon her, but she had given her word.

Her woolly slippers made no sound on the oilcloth floor. She opened
her door and stepped into the passage. Opposite her was Geoff’s door,
left purposely ajar. Tremblingly, but swiftly lest fear should make
her false, she crossed and entered. Geoff made no sound. She stood,
too ashamed to look up, pushing his door to with a nervous backward
movement of the hand. It closed, not without noise.

Her lips moved, as in prayer. She lifted her arms high, and her
garment, slipping from white shoulders, fell and clustered at her feet,
a diaphanous shimmering mass.

‘Lovely, lovely ... O God!’ The scarce-heard whisper made her heart
leap in exultation. She raised her head and looked steadfastly at her
love. He sat up in bed, still as an image of adoration, the moonlight
making visible the worship in his eyes. She stooped, gathered up her
gown, and went out into the passage ... into the arms of Alice.

‘I heard a door slam,’ said Alice. ‘What’s the matter? Why, you’ve----
That’s Geoff’s room!’

Alice became pale and for a moment speechless with anger. When she
recovered her tongue it was to use a language strange to the ears of
Harriet.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ cried Harriet, starry-eyed, ‘and I don’t
care. He loves me, Alice, because I am so beautiful, beautiful. Why
didn’t you tell me I was beautiful?’

She pushed past Alice and locked herself in her bedroom. Those bitter
reproaches had no sting for her. Even had she understood them they
would have been less than a feather’s weight against the joy now born
in her heart. For her the world was made new, clean and new. With
beauty, seen hitherto through a glass darkly, she was now face to face.
She fell asleep exhausted with happiness, and when in the morning mamma
came to her room and sobbed, and raved, she could understand not a word
of it.

‘You’ve brought disgrace and shame upon us all, you wretched child!’
And to this Harriet, in her profound innocence, could only answer: ‘But
we love each other, mamma. What harm have we done?’

‘You shall leave my house as soon as that man can be made to marry
you, and never come back again.’

‘Am I to marry Geoff after all, then, mamma?’

Yes, it appeared that she was, and that her daring to ask the question
was further proof of her shamelessness. It was all very baffling.




THE ENCHANTED MOMENT




THE ENCHANTED MOMENT


Mr. John Pardoe was not an imaginative man, but--if the truth must
be known--he had once been a child, and though, as Mr. Pardoe aged,
the child grew smaller and smaller, it was not yet squeezed out of
existence. The secret had been well kept. Plump, rosy, and forty-five
years old, encased in patent-toe boots, doeskin spats, sleek morning
coat, striped trousering, and silk hat--not to mention certain articles
of underwear--Mr. Pardoe oscillated daily between his office in Cannon
Street and his pleasant home at Putney, giving no cause to his dearest
friend or his bitterest enemy to suspect him of having a secret hoard
of youth. His waking mind was occupied exclusively by lighterage,
freight duties, marine insurance, bus routes, time tables, foreign
exchange rates, and the criminal ineptitude of the Government party;
and his dreams, which rose only to the bait of cheese and spring
onions for supper, reflected his general staidness of character with
a minimum of humorous distortion. For more than a decade he had lived
within half a mile of the house that held Swinburne, and he was still
unaware of having anything in particular to thank God for.

But in his forty-sixth year, when he had already begun to cherish some
of the idiosyncrasies proper to a much older man and to regard with
complacency his shining porcelain pate and his fringe of greying hair,
something happened to Mr. Pardoe that was the beginning of a spiritual
revolution. The something was named Miss Adela Simpson, and it had for
many years typed his business letters with an enthusiasm and a generous
disregard for pedantry in spelling which would have been hard to match
in any other city office. Perhaps it was Mr. Pardoe’s patience with
these orthographical freedoms that won Adela’s affection, or perhaps
she alone of all his acquaintances had divined the existence of that
child in him which I have felt it my duty to mention. Whatever the
cause, she married him; and, being herself a fluffy, golden-haired, and
sentimental creature, with an unbounded capacity for enjoyment, she
persuaded him that he was very happy with her. Had the matter ended
there, all might have been well: Mr. Pardoe might have lived and died
decorously, a plain man with no nonsense about him. The youth in him
might have remained bottled and out of sight for ever, had not Adela
tampered with the cork.

But destiny, in the person of Mrs. Pardoe, chose to play tricks on
this excellent man. Some eighteen months after that rational registry
wedding, the fluffy girl insisted on giving birth to a boy. The local
doctor assisted its entry, and the local vicar declared its name to be
Timothy. I have already said that Mr. Pardoe was not an imaginative
man, and this event was quite outside his calculations. Being both by
instinct and training a gentleman of considerable delicacy, he was
embarrassed--as who would not be?--and quite unable to assume, at short
notice, the rôle of fond parent. But as the weeks passed by and the
red squeaking pudding called Timothy began to shew some traces of its
humanity, began even to bear a slight resemblance to himself, a change
more subtle but no less real occurred in the feelings of the reluctant
father. For one thing, the preposterous littleness of the creature
attracted his notice and excited his wonder. Sometimes when he looked
at Timothy Mr. Pardoe’s face would break into a wholly irrational
grin. Once or twice, when no one was near, he presented his index
finger to be enfolded in miniature hands of unparalleled clamminess,
or played the fool with his watch; and once, once only, he blushed to
find himself making ridiculous noises, noises not unlike those emitted
habitually by the child’s agreeable but infatuated mother.

The translation of Mr. Pardoe from a serious man with business
responsibilities and a taste for party politics into a kind of
domestic pet, thinker of thoughts too deep for tears, and lover of
children--this translation might have continued apace had not the cook
suddenly, wantonly, left to get married. Adela, luxuriating in her new
freedom, decided to manage without a cook; but Adela’s cooking was
no more precise than her spelling. It played havoc with Mr. Pardoe’s
digestive apparatus, and--by that transmutation of matter into spirit
which is the most disconcerting fact in life--Mr. Pardoe’s digestive
apparatus played havoc with Mr. Pardoe’s temper. He became angry with
the world and with the life that crawled upon its surface.

Nevertheless the world continued to revolve, and life was not extinct.
Timothy, in particular, was far from extinct. For five years he
flourished, and on his fifth birthday, at an hour well past his
bedtime, he entered Mr. Pardoe’s study and demanded to be told a story.

Mr. Pardoe, interrupted in the reading of his favourite periodical,
_The Bondholder’s Register_, was annoyed. Birthday or no birthday,
this was an outrage: the sanctuary violated, the high priest disturbed
at his devotions. Yet, in spite of his dyspepsia, he exhibited an
admirable restraint.

‘No, Timothy,’ he said, holding up a cautionary finger. ‘I shall
not tell you a story. You know I do not like to be disturbed in the
evening. You will go to bed, and at the proper moment I shall come
to kiss you good night. But tell you a story I will not. I see your
mother’s hand in this--this act of rebellion. If you wanted stories you
could go to your toy-cupboard, where you would find several volumes of
stories: ridiculous enough, no doubt, but suited to your age. Although
you cannot yet read with facility you could easily amuse yourself with
the pictures. Really, Timothy, I can’t imagine why you should suppose
that I should tell you a story, a thing I have never done in my life.’

As a substitute for an applauding public meeting of the company’s
shareholders, Timothy was not a success. He clung to his simple thesis
with the brutal tenacity of the very young. ‘Mummy says _you_ are to
tell me a story.’

The fluffy girl appeared suddenly in the doorway. ‘Yes, John, you
really might, this once. He’s tired of my stories. And it’s his
birthday, after all, poor little thing!’

‘Poor little thing!’ sneered Mr. Pardoe. This was sheer domestic
tyranny: he wouldn’t suffer it. ‘Let me tell you, Adela,’ he cried,
pointing at her accusingly with _The Bondholder’s Register_, ‘you are
spoiling the poor little thing, as you call him. It’s eight o’clock, an
hour past his bedtime. The way to bring a child up....’

But here Mr. Pardoe was interrupted, and a valuable homily on the
training of children thereby lost to the world. The clock began
striking. Now it was one of Mr. Pardoe’s nervous weaknesses, of which
there were many, that he could never raise his voice above the sound
of a striking clock. He disliked clocks. He resented their unmannerly
habit of cutting his sentences in half and making him lose the thread
of his discourse. And now he had to wait several seconds until that
clock chose to let him proceed with what he was saying. Very well:
he resigned himself to the delay. His face was that of a martyr too
well-bred even to invoke his God. He mentally counted the strokes:
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven....’

‘Why!’ cried Mr. Pardoe, ‘that clock’s wrong. An hour slow. I’m sure
it’s eight o’clock. I set my watch this morning by Greenwich Time....’


2

The words died on his lips, which remained open only because in his
bewilderment Mr. Pardoe forgot to close them. He seemed to have stepped
into the very heart of Spring. The sounds and colours and the rich
earthy smell of the woods made him tingle with delight. Never before
had he breathed such air. It was like strong wine in its effect, and
that alarmed Mr. Pardoe, who dreaded nothing so much as to lose control
of himself. For him the light of reason was the only legitimate light
in the universe: moonlight, starlight, sunlight--these were merely
decorative. ‘No wonder the fruit is so fine,’ he said to himself; and
he plucked one of the golden apples from a laden branch that bowed
towards him, and set his teeth in it with a disregard of the rights
of property that was quite foreign to his principles. All round him
tall grasses waved, and satin-skinned trees stretched out armfuls of
treasure, their leaves luminously green, their fruit glowing like
multi-coloured glass globes. Mr. Pardoe began to revise his first
impression. It could hardly be Spring with all this fruit already
ripe for eating, and in such abundance, such astonishing variety!
Apple, pear, plum, greengage, lemon, pomegranate, quince--‘Why, with
greengages at their present price, there’s a small fortune here!’ He
wondered whether there was a market within easy distance. There was
no sort of road within sight: there was only a long avenue of arched
trees, in the branches of which birds sang with laughter as well as
joy in their tumultuous music. At his feet, wherever he stepped,
flowers sprang up as if to greet him: lilies lifted their pale faces
towards him; roses red and blue rioted in the grass; pansies eyed
him amorously. A sound that was like colour made audible, a deep
golden sound, a singing dream, filled the forest till it brimmed over
with loveliness. In the dim glowing air shot through by shafts of
moonlight from the outer world, great dragonflies poised themselves,
lost in trance. ‘A trifle theatrical, perhaps,’ said Mr. Pardoe, ‘but
undeniably pretty.’

Moving slowly on, he racked his poor brains for a rational explanation
of these phenomena. Nature, hitherto so circumspect, was behaving in
a most unbridled way. A voice dropped out of the sky, like a bell:
‘Greenwich Time, my dear sir? Good stuff, isn’t it! Come and have
some.’

‘Thank you. But I never drink between meals.’ The reply came from
Mr. Pardoe’s lips before he could check it. This was absurd--he of
all men to have an experience like this! Indignantly he stared in
the direction of the voice that had hailed him. A little golden star
appeared to be falling through the sky. It lodged in the lower branches
of a tree, writhed brilliantly for a moment, and resolved itself into
a human being: a creature about the size of a foot-rule with a round
red baby-face. It jumped to the ground and shook lumps of starshine
from the soles of its wooden boots. ‘Excuse me, won’t you. I’ve been
shopping. A fellow gets simply smothered with this stuff in the Milky
Way.’

Mr. Pardoe bowed. ‘It is for me to apologize, if you, as I surmise,
are the proprietor of this valuable piece of orchard-land. I fear I am
trespassing. I must have lost my way. To be perfectly frank with you,
I’ve not the slightest idea how I got here; and let me hasten to add
that I’m a strictly temperate man. I rather fancy that I’ve been made
the victim of some clownish practical joke.’

The midget shed a scintillating tear, which made a circle of green
light in the grass where it fell. From his pocket he snatched a
notebook. ‘I must make a note of that,’ he said.

‘Of what?’ inquired Mr. Pardoe.

‘That tear. I’ve got only six to last the whole evening. I limit myself
to ten a day now. It’s bad to become a slave to pleasure.’

Mr. Pardoe coughed to hide his alarm and embarrassment. ‘Yes, yes.
Quite so. Did you read your paper this morning, my dear sir? What a
disgraceful Budget again!’

‘Ah,’ cried the midget, turning up his eyes; ‘what is there more
enjoyable than a choking sob on a cold Wednesday morning before
breakfast? And they ought not to have taken your clothes. I can’t allow
that.’

‘My clothes!’ Mr. Pardoe blushed from top to toe, and that blush was
the only thing that covered his nakedness. ‘Incredible! It had entirely
escaped my notice. I really don’t know how to apologize. I am more
ashamed than I can say. This is a disaster that has never happened
before. Whatever am I to do?’

‘A happy encounter,’ chuckled the midget, rubbing his hands together.
‘I’m a tailor by trade. Fit you out in no time. Three yards of gossamer
spun out of lovers’-dream. The finer the mesh the higher the price.
Excuse my speaking commercially, but business is business, you know.’

For the first time Mr. Pardoe’s heart went out to this odd creature.
‘I share your admirable sentiments. Business _is_ business. But
I deplore this rather fanciful talk about dreams and gossamer,
this--ah--second-rate poetry, if I may call it so. But there, I’m only
a plain business man.’

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked the midget surprisingly.

Mr. Pardoe looked revolted. ‘A rather indelicate question, is it not?
However, since you have seen fit to ask it, I will confess that I have
never found any particular need for believing in the Person to whom you
allude.’

The midget put out his tongue, looking inconceivably pert. ‘I’m God,’
said he.

‘Pardon me,’ Mr. Pardoe replied, with immense dignity. ‘I cannot stand
here and listen to blasphemy. I am a member of the Church of England.’

‘Don’t know the name,’ said the midget. ‘If it’s an inn, take me to it,
like a good fellow.’

‘Before we continue this conversation,’ said Mr. Pardoe, beginning to
relish the sound of his own voice, ‘I feel it only fair to say that
I entertain the gravest suspicions of you. I suspect you of being a
figment of my imagination, perhaps a mere dream. I am not aware of
having eaten anything calculated to disagree with me, but that is what
has probably happened. It’s a lesson to me, which I shall not easily
forget, that one cannot be too careful about one’s diet.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ remarked the midget. He
paused to draw three circles in the grass with the point of his foot.
‘But if you want some Greenwich Time you’ve come to the right place.
Slip these shoes on.’ In the centre of the middle circle was a pair of
loose-fitting shoes, rather like goloshes, made of the skin of a green
reptile. It seemed to be covered with eyes. Mr. Pardoe, convinced now
that he was dreaming, obediently slipped his feet into these shoes,
which immediately began to dance. He found it impossible to control
them. That didn’t surprise him so much as did his enjoyment of the
dance. ‘Come along,’ said the midget, kicking up his heels, and Mr.
Pardoe, following in the wake of that preposterous figment of his
imagination, danced down the avenues of Faery with a light heart.
Something was released inside him. He felt himself shrink till he
was scarcely bigger than his guide, and the loss of that frock coat
and that pair of nicely creased striped trousers distressed him no
longer. Was it possible that the child he had secreted so long had
at last broken out, and that the old John Pardoe, that bond-holding,
cheque-endorsing animal, was no more? Was it possible that he had died,
and that this was the glorious resurrection promised to the faithful?
Mr. Pardoe’s thoughts buzzed in his brain like a hive of bees when he
remembered this little tailor-fellow’s blasphemous claim to godhead.

Nothing more unlike Mr. Pardoe’s conception of God can be imagined
than the ruddy-faced mischievous creature who stood in the doorway of
his house to welcome his guest. The house bore a striking resemblance
to a country inn, the best kind of country inn, and Mr. Pardoe fell
instantly in love with it. The sight of it induced in him a thirst such
as he had never in all his life experienced before.

‘You’d like to see my beard, I expect,’ remarked his host, as they
stepped across the threshold. ‘Well, there it is.’ He waved a
careless hand towards the centre of the oak-raftered room, where,
in a flower-pot that stood in the middle of the table, a grey beard
flourished.

Mr. Pardoe scratched his head: sure proof that he was feeling more at
home. ‘Now I can’t quite place that,’ he said, reverting to the idea
that he was in a dream. ‘The dancing shoes were from Hans Andersen, but
this for the moment eludes me.’

‘It’s a good growth,’ said the beard’s owner. ‘Never gives any trouble.
Great advantage, not wearing it on the chin. Some of my clients don’t
care about a bearded tailor. And to those who do, I say: Step inside. A
place for everything and everything in its place, and the place for my
beard is the parlour. Very quiet and well-behaved, and drinks far less
water than an aspidistra. If it sings too loud I just snip it down a
bit with me scissors.’

‘The Singing Beard,’ mused Mr. Pardoe. ‘That must be a public-house
sign I’ve come across somewhere.’

‘Now,’ urged the genial tailor, ‘what about a little refreshment. Or
would you rather I set about that suit of clothes first?’

The eyes of the abandoned Pardoe sparkled. He visioned a wineglass, the
size of a milking-pail, filled with champagne. He felt it against his
lips, felt it slip down his dry throat, and sink into his innermost
being like a benediction.... He looked at his host with a little
shamefaced smile. ‘Well, if it’s all the same to you ... if you’ll
excuse my rather unconventional appearance....’

‘Come down to the cellar,’ cried his friend, taking him by the arm,
‘the Cellar of a Thousand Bottles.’ Still gripping Mr. Pardoe, he
stamped thirstily on the floor. A trapdoor opened. They shot into the
cellar with lightning speed, and before he could remember his manners
Mr. Pardoe was knocking the tops off bottles with a skill that in
cooler moments would have astounded him.

‘There you are!’ cried the little tailor. ‘Greenwich Time on every
label. Look for our trademark and refuse imitations.’ He drank copious
draughts. He became confidential, even affectionate. ‘Now that’s the
difference between you and me. Your name’s Pardoe. That just shews
the difference between you and me. Now my name’s Dionysus,’ he went
on, with a radiant smile. ‘It’s a good name. And me father’s name was
Dionysus before me. But me grandfather--ah, that’s another story.’

‘And what, my little man, was your grandfather’s name?’ enquired Mr.
Pardoe, waving his glass in air.

‘Oh, me grandfather? Were you asking after me grandfather? Ah, _his_
name, don’t you see, was Dionysus. They distinguished us one from the
other by our trades. We were tailors, you know, all three of us.’

Mr. Pardoe rose to his feet. The performance was a credit to him. He
made a last effort to exorcise the demon of levity that possessed him.
‘My friend, you have had enough. More than enough. You are intoxicated.’

Dionysus paused in his drinking to fix a waggish eye on Mr. Pardoe.
‘Drunk. Drunk as a god. Aren’t you! Why the devil don’t you drink?
Imprison you for sobriety.’

He held a brimming glass to the lips of Mr. Pardoe, and, as he drank,
the poor bewitched gentleman saw his host swell till the house could
no longer contain that vast bulk. Himself a flame of exultation,
Mr. Pardoe stared until the eyes of Dionysus became fierce seas,
sparkling with unearthly light, towering in storm, and the glory of his
sunset-face filled the sky.


3

‘... eight.’ The last stroke of eight o’clock. Mr. Pardoe, rubbing
his eyes, saw that his wife’s face still wore the expression of bored
patience with which she was accustomed to receive his domestic sermons,
and that Timothy, as before, balanced himself on one leg and jerked
his body backwards and forwards by way of passing time. They seemed to
be waiting for him.

‘What’s this?’ cried Mr. Pardoe, staring at the paper in his hand. He
recognized _The Bondholder’s Register_. An alarming idea visited him.
‘Am I...?’ He looked down at his legs, stroked his arms. Yes, he was.
He breathed deeply in his relief. ‘My dear, did you notice anything,
anything unusual?’

Blank faces greeted him.

‘Between the seventh and eighth stroke of the hour--did anything happen
to me?’

His wife took a step towards him. Her eyes became anxious. ‘No, dear.
Are you feeling ill?’

‘No, no. Perfectly well. Just a whim of mine. A mere fancy. Nothing at
all. Nothing.’

‘Oh, father!’ said Timothy, for the fourth time, ‘you _might_ tell me a
story.’

Mr. Pardoe turned to the boy with enthusiasm. He beamed paternal
affection upon him. ‘Yes, old man. Come along. A story before we go to
bed, eh?... Once upon a time there was a tailor who lived in the forest
and kept a beard, a grey beard, which sang pretty tunes....’




THE MOLE




THE MOLE


Conversation turned inevitably to the local tragedy that was agitating
all the village. The little general store, the only shop the place
boasted and a poor thing at that, had been burned down in the night,
and nothing remained but the heap of ruins from which, not many hours
since, two charred corpses had been removed. Our chessmen stood
in battle array, ready for action, but unnoticed by either of us.
Something in Saunders’s manner held my attention. Sceptic though I
am, I have always found him interesting. He pays me the compliment
of divesting himself of his rectorship when he visits me, and it has
flattered my vanity to believe that I see a side of him that is for
ever hidden from those of his parishioners who assemble Sunday by
Sunday to receive from him their spiritual ration. And I was the more
intrigued because I divined depths in him still to be explored.

Perhaps I am over-fanciful, said Saunders, edging his chair nearer to
the fire; but it had always seemed to me that there was more in their
marriage than the mere female domination so obvious to every one. And
when poor Gubbins came to me last winter, with the story that I’m going
to tell you, my guess was confirmed. Mrs. Gubbins wore the breeches--a
vulgar phrase for a vulgar thing--but that wasn’t all. I shall never
forget my first visit to her shop. You’ve seen the woman scores of
times, but I’ll tell you the impression she made on me. Her face was
leather; her nose was pinched and pitiless; her eyes--did you ever
notice her eyes? You’d expect her to possess the malignant dominating
eyes of the shrew. No such thing. Mrs. Gubbins’s eyes resembled those
of a mask, or of a corpse: they were fixed, so it seemed to me, in a
cold, everlasting, fishy scrutiny of a drab world. If they were the
windows of her soul, they were windows made of frosted glass. Looking
at them I seemed to see vacuity behind them. Looking again, I surmised
a soul indeed, but a damned soul. A professional prejudice, perhaps,
that you won’t sympathize with. But it was not her eyes that most
disturbed me. I have seen a variety of unpleasant eyes. But I have
never seen on any human being so ugly a mole as was on that woman’s
chin. It was about the size of a pea, and growing from it were three
longish black whiskers. The thing looked positively feline. It became
for me, as soon as I caught sight of it, her most significant feature.
And that, too, proved a good guess.

I had gone to the shop ostensibly to buy a cake of soap, but really in
the hope of catching a glimpse of a human soul, of two human souls. I
had heard queer accounts of this couple, and I was curious.

‘A cake of soap, please, Mrs. Gubbins.’ I was then a stranger to her,
as to all the village, but my use of her name evoked no sign of life in
those glassy eyes of hers. She turned to her husband, that mild little
man with dreaming eyes and a trim beard who looked just what he was,
a lay preacher with a taste for fantastic prophecy. He was sitting at
the back of the shop on a case of sugar, or something of the kind,
engrossed in reading his pocket Bible.

‘Run along,’ said Mrs. Gubbins, in her flat expressionless voice.
‘Soap, George! You know where it is!’

The little man looked up with the air of one dragged unwillingly from
a dream. In his small rabbit-eyes Christian patience did battle with
resentment. I seemed to scent a crisis. Had the woman nagged him for
his idleness I couldn’t have blamed her. But what interested me was
not the rights and wrongs of the quarrel, but its method.

He blinked at her defiantly. There was a pregnant silence during
which they stared at each other. Then the woman, protruding her chin,
elongating her thin neck, bent a little towards him. I was dumbfounded
with astonishment and a kind of morbid curiosity. For the moment it
seemed to me that she must be mutely demanding a kiss in token of his
submission; but while I watched, fascinated out of my good manners, she
lifted her hand slowly and placed her index finger upon the point of
her chin. It flashed on me that she was directing his attention to that
mole of hers.

Gubbins averted his eyes and slid off the seat. ‘Yes, dear!’ he
muttered, and disappeared into the bowels of the shop.


2

Secrets of the confessional? Yes, in a sense. But Gubbins wouldn’t
grudge you the story now. It was during that phenomenally cold spell
in November, fifteen months ago, that he came to me. That he came
to me at all should tell you something of his anguish of spirit,
if you knew the man. Everybody knew him to be a deeply religious
person, of the Bible-punching kind, but not everybody guessed how his
particular conception of reality had eaten into his mind. He could
prove to you by an elaborate system of Scriptural cross-references
that the Day of Judgment was due to occur in the summer of 1950; and
the geography of heaven was more familiar to him, and more concrete,
than the chairs and tables in his own house or the streets of this
village. Two-thirds of him lived among these precise humourless
dreams of his, dreams that were the fruit not of mystical experience
but of a laborious investigation, with rule and compass and a table
of logarithms, extended over fifteen years. Two-thirds of him--that
means he was more than a little unbalanced. He was a preposterous
combination of arrogance and humility: we had many a friendly argument
together, though the friendliness, I fancy, was rather on my side.
Blandly certain of being the custodian of divine truth, he was yet
pitifully dubious about his own chance of salvation and almost crazy
in his forlorn pursuit of the love of God. Almost, but not quite: in
the medical sense he was undoubtedly as sane as you or I. Me and all my
kind he disliked because we receive payment for preaching Christ. That
is what makes his appeal to me so remarkable an event.

Well, he came to the Rectory and was admitted by the maid, loyal to her
orders to exclude no one, but scared. I found him standing on my study
hearthrug, his face ashen, his lean hairy hands clutching a cloth cap
as though it were his only hold on safety. The white knuckles gleamed
like polished ivory. I saw the fear that flared in his tiny eyes and
guessed that he had come as a suppliant, that in some way his faith in
himself was broken. And knowing of old the obstinate strength of that
faith, I shuddered.

‘In trouble, Mr. Gubbins?’

He appeared not to see my outstretched hand. ‘I’ve had an escape from
hell,’ he squeaked. ‘It’s that damned monkey-spot, Mr. Saunders.’

The mild expletive, coming from Gubbins, astonished me no less than
his statement. I asked him to sit down and tell me all about it,
but he remained standing and his fingers twitched so violently that
presently his cap fell to the ground unheeded. ‘It nearly got me, sir,
that monkey-spot.’ A local expression, no doubt; but what did it mean?
Gubbins saw at last that I didn’t understand him. ‘That monkey-spot on
her chin. My wife’s chin. You must have seen it.’

Can you imagine two human beings, tied by marriage, devoting all
their emotional energy to hating each other? Perhaps not; but that
is, as near as I can tell it to you, the truth about the Gubbinses.
Twenty years ago she was an unremarkable woman, and he no doubt a
very ordinary youth. Mere propinquity, I imagine, threw them at each
other. He, with little or nothing of the genuine affection that might
have excused the act, took advantage of her, as the phrase is. Sin
number one, the first link in the chain that was to bind him, the first
grievance for her to cherish in her ungenerous heart. They were married
three months before the birth of the child. It died within an hour.
She chose to see in this event the punishment of the sin into which
he, as she contended, had betrayed her. From that moment Gubbins was
her thrall: not by virtue of love, or the legal tie, but by virtue of
the hideous moral ascendancy that the woman had been cunning enough,
and pitiless enough, to establish over him. Carefully she kept alive
the memory of his offence. It was a whip ready to her hand. And when
seeking for distraction from his domestic misery he turned to that
intricate game of guesswork which was for him religion, what he
learned there of the significance of sin only served to increase his
wretchedness.

He was evidently a man weak both in spirit and intelligence, or he
would have realized at once that he was no more guilty than she was.
But once she had succeeded in imposing her view upon him he could not
shake it off. It remained, to poison his self-respect. Side by side
with his conviction of unworthiness there grew up a hatred of the woman
he was supposed to have wronged. And, being itself sinful, this very
hatred provided a further occasion for remorse. It was a race between
loathing and repentance, and loathing won. Never a personable woman,
Mrs. Gubbins became daily more repellent, until at last the wretched
husband found her mere presence a discomfort, like an ill-fitting shoe
or a bad smell. In particular, he detested--as well he might--that
mole on her chin with its three feline hairs. And she, fiendishly
acute, found it all out. She caught his sidelong glances of distaste,
and pondered them long; and that distaste became another weapon to
her hand. She accused him of harbouring cruel thoughts; taunted him
with first robbing her of youth and then despising her for lacking it;
flung out wild and baseless charges of infidelity. To propitiate her
he made the most fantastic concessions: allowed her to turn him out of
the shop, and consented to do all the housework in her stead. It became
patent to the world that she was master.

You’ll ask why he was fool enough to put up with this treatment? But,
given his weakness, the explanation is credible enough. She attacked
him at his most vulnerable point, his conscience. Religion, as he
conceived it, taught him to submit to circumstances, not to master
them. In his darkest hour he could still kneel at his bedside and say,
‘Thy will, not mine, be done.’ And he really believed for a while
that God’s will and Mrs. Gubbins’s were in mystical accord, that she,
in fine, was the rod with which, for his own soul’s good, heaven was
scourging him. To aid this grotesque delusion there was the spectacle
of her formal piety. For she was a prayerful woman, scrupulous in her
speech, and of unquestioned honesty in her commercial transactions.

If only he could have cursed her and stood by his words, she might have
mended. But he, who believed he had unravelled the ultimate secrets of
destiny, dared not pit his moral judgment against hers. He was ever
ready to sit on the stool of repentance. A day came when hatred rose
to a frenzy in him. He cut short her complaints with an oath, poured
out the gall of his heart upon her. She seemed quelled, and in his
triumph he added a taunt, banal and indeed puerile: ‘You whiskered old
cat!’ It was a fatal mistake. She stared at him mutely for a moment,
no doubt in sheer astonishment. Then her eyes narrowed and something
like a smile twisted her lips. ‘Cat and mouse,’ she remarked coldly.
And--call the man a fool, if you like--that reply terrified Gubbins as
nothing else could have done.

He had betrayed himself once more into the hands of the enemy. He had
provided her with a new and a bitter grievance. Worst of all, she knew
his secret, knew that his loathing centred on that monkey-spot of hers,
as he called it. From that moment I imagine her cherishing that mole
with the solicitude that Samson, had he been a wiser man, would have
lavished upon his hair. It was the source and the instrument of her
power. So far as I understood Gubbins, it was as much nausea as hatred
that the thing inspired in him. His soul sickened at the sight of it.
It became a poison, a torture. All this she knew and exulted in....
Curious that an æsthetic sense, together with a weak stomach, should
suffice to work a man’s downfall.

And so I come back to that night of fear the events of which drove
Gubbins, twenty hours later but still electric with terror, to the
refuge of my study.


3

Saunders paused to relight his pipe. One disconcerting thing about
the affair, he resumed after a while, is that in Gubbins’s account of
his wife I can discover no human qualities at all. I fancy he himself
had begun to regard her as an agent, not of God this time, but of
the devil. Characteristic of him to jump from one pole to the other.
And that theological fantasia, his imagination, may have coloured
everything. That is as it may be. I can only tell you what he told me.

You know how quickly some noxious weed will overrun a flower-bed. Well,
something of the kind happened in the ill-disciplined mind of Gubbins.
He was pitifully susceptible to suggestion. An idle fancy presented
itself to him: ‘Many a woman has been murdered for less than that
monkey-spot.’ And the fancy became a fear which walked with him night
and day, a fear lest he should be betrayed by sheer force of suggestion
into murdering his wife. You realize what that would mean; it would
mean damnation for his soul, or so he believed. The gallows had but few
terrors for him. I think he would have welcomed death, could he have
been sure of his salvation hereafter.

The seed was sown. The idea took root. And the more passionately he
struggled against it, the more persistently his imagination envisaged
the crime. At last one night, after a hundred sleepless hours, he
reached the end of his tether.

He jumped noiselessly out of bed. Moonlight flooded the room, imparting
a ghastly pallor to the face of the supine Mrs. Gubbins. In sleep she
had something of the chill dignity of a corpse lying in state. The
thin lips curled back a little on one side of the mouth, and in the
gap gleamed a gold-crowned tooth, a tiny yellow fang. On the point
of her chin was that at which the wretched man tried not to look:
itself not very offensive, but rendered hideous by the three black
jealously-guarded hairs depending from it. Gubbins swears that as he
stood staring at his wife’s face those hairs were moving to and fro
like the long legs of a spider, or the antennæ of an insect seeking
prey.

Having gazed long, he forced his fascinated eyes away, and padded
across the room. The door clicked, in spite of him, as he opened it.
He experienced all the alarms of a guilty man. Yet his intention was
innocent enough: it was even, in its grotesque fashion, comical. He
had determined to shear this female Samson of her power by cutting off
those three hairs.

But when he returned to the bedside, and stood again by the sleeping
body of his wife, he was overcome by nausea. Distaste for the task
paralysed his will. He felt as a sensitive man would feel if he were
forced to crush a beetle with his naked finger. As an excuse for delay
he began examining the instrument in his hand, which was a perfectly
ordinary pair of household scissors having, as all scissors have,
one sharp end and one blunted. The sharp end interested him most. He
scrutinized its point and pressed it against the ball of his thumb;
and the thought flashed to him, as though the devil himself had
whispered it: ‘This is sharp enough--one thrust under the left ear.’
He shuddered, recoiled from the idea, and burned with shame and fear
for having ever had it. And, while still suffocating with the sense of
his own guiltiness, there crept into his consciousness the nightmare
conviction that he was being watched. He could not see his wife, his
gaze being fixed on the scissors, but he knew that she had opened her
eyes.

Gubbins couldn’t explain to me the horror of that moment. He merely
bowed his head on my mantelpiece and closed his eyes as if to shut out
an evil vision. For when, after an age of immobility and silence, he
forced himself to look at the face on the bed, he saw the cruel lips
curled in a smile of final triumph; and even the opaque eyes seemed for
once to shine. And what, for Gubbins, gave the last turn to the screw
of terror was that the woman was not looking at him at all. Her gaze,
full of evil beatitude, was fixed on the ceiling. For several minutes,
minutes that throbbed with his agony, she neither moved nor spoke; and
at last, very slowly, she moved a little higher on to the pillow and,
still smiling insanely, bared her throat for him to strike. Gubbins
was convinced that she ardently desired him to stain his soul with her
blood.

Well, as you know, he didn’t murder her: not that time, at any rate.
He escaped, as he said, from hell. But I think I would as soon go to
hell as have to live through those last fifteen months of his. For now
she had completed his enslavement; now she had got his miserable little
soul between her finger and thumb. Added to all her old grievances,
those daggers with which to stab at his conscience, she had another
and a more sensational one: this terrible sin, this attempt upon her
life. Spiritual blackmail prolonged for twenty years. No wonder he set
fire to the place.




A SENSITIVE MAN




A SENSITIVE MAN


The sight of Elsie’s drawn face, that pallid mask of desolation, moved
Wyvern to a self-pity that savoured exquisitely on the tongue. To watch
suffering and to be unable to relieve it was a cruel experience. He
hardly dared to conjecture how much she had suffered during the last
few days of suspense while he, the only man in the world for her, had
been trying to make up his mind on a matter affecting the destinies of
three persons. He could not dislike Elsie: she had a certain fragile
winsomeness and she was still, though her first bloom was gone,
pathetically young. Everything she said to-night did but strengthen his
conviction of her intellectual immaturity. Between his mind and hers
there was a great gulf fixed. Now Marion--Marion was so different. That
did not mean that he had no pity left for Elsie. Not at all. His heart
was wrung for the one no less than for the other. That was his tragedy:
he had a threefold burden. From that point of view he had to admit
himself the most luckless of the three.

‘I know my little wife will understand. Her Jim has been quite frank
with her.’

Elsie leaned forward, chin in hands, staring fixedly at distance. Only
her extreme pallor showed her to be suffering. For the rest, her brow
was knitted as though she concentrated all her power upon some problem
that as yet baffled her.

‘Yes, Jim, I understand. I understand that you’re so much more
sensitive than other men, and can’t resist beauty. Your gift carries
penalties with it, and acute susceptibility is one of them. But....’

He glowed in appreciation of her. She was really unique. ‘Only one
woman in a thousand could see that,’ he said warmly. ‘And my little
wife is that one. She is the dearest....’

Elsie winced. ‘I was going to say there’s something I _can’t_
understand. I always thought you were the soul of honour, and you were
once. Yet you were going away from me without a word of explanation.’

Sorrow looked out at her from his eloquent brown eyes. ‘My dear Elsie,
don’t disappoint me. You’ve always been so understanding and helpful.
How many men would have confided to their wives all that I have
confided to you about my love for Marion?’

‘But, Jim!’ She frowned again, struggling to believe the best of him.
‘Jim, you didn’t tell me anything until other people had begun to make
scandal.’ The idea hardened her. ‘I don’t believe you’d ever have told
me. You would just have gone on deceiving us both.’

A gesture of impatience, and that was all. He did not give way to
anger. ‘My dear, I realize how hard it is for you to listen to the
voice of reason in a crisis like this, but you will try, won’t you? It
all began in the most innocent, the most human way. I was overwhelmed
by my compassion for the poor child--virtually imprisoned, as she
is, with a husband she can’t even respect, let alone love. And
then the affection ripened. She stimulates me wonderfully. She is
an inspiration, just the inspiration that I need. Our minds are so
beautifully attuned.’

And still Elsie was not satisfied. ‘You know I don’t grudge you
anything, Jim. It’s the deceit that worries me. She ought to know about
me. You ought not to take her under false pretences. It’s not like you,
Jim, to be content with a vulgar intrigue.’

‘There is nothing vulgar in love.’ He softened the rebuke by taking
her hand, which she instantly withdrew. ‘And nothing guilty,’ he added,
with a note of sternness.

Her laugh was of a kind that could not but shock him. ‘How clever
you are at putting me in the wrong!’ she remarked, when her bitter
mirth had subsided. ‘But I’m not wrong.’ Emotion induced in her a
vitality that made him almost admire her. ‘I’m not sticking up for
Respectability or any of the seven deadly virtues, as you call them.
You dethroned these gods for me long ago. But there _is_ something
I believe in. I do believe in honour, and I hate a liar.... You’ve
deceived her as well as me.’

Wyvern sighed. It was sometimes hard to be patient with women. ‘Elsie,
why do you say things which you know to be untrue?’ His tone was still
gentle.

‘Well, isn’t it true?’ she retorted. ‘Have you told her about me? Have
you explained that a man so many-sided as yourself needs the love of
more than one woman? Have you told her that the human heart is capable
of almost infinite expansion? You know you haven’t.’

‘I respect you too much,’ he replied, cold with a new dignity, ‘and
I respect myself too much ever to discuss you with another woman. I
thought you understood me better, Elsie.’

The fire in her seemed to die down. Vitality vanished, leaving her limp
and listless. She rose, a frail slip of a girl with colourless skin
and a halo of light brown hair like a dim mist--items so negligible
compared with the lilies and roses of Marion’s robuster person, the
flaming glory of her hair, the seductiveness of her brimming youth.
Wyvern could not resist making a mental comparison even in this moment.
He hated himself for making it, and he recorded it to his credit that
he hated himself. It was so like him to be merciless to his own faults.
He watched Elsie narrowly, from behind a curtain of cigarette smoke.

‘Very well, Jim. I shan’t stand in your way; you know that. To-morrow
I’ll go away somewhere. Good night.’

He was pained and yet elated. She would go away to-morrow. Fortunately
she had plenty of friends and, thank heaven, he had long ago settled
an adequate income upon her. He had nothing to reproach himself with.
She would go away to-morrow. They would meet again--oh, frequently.
They would always be friends. He felt more warmly towards her than he
had done for months, and yet he was dissatisfied. The victory he had
won didn’t seem so good to him as it had seemed in prospect. He shrank
from the suspicion that he had, in some inexplicable way, sunk in her
esteem. The idea was unbearable.

‘We’ll discuss that another time. You’re not angry, darling?’ he said.
‘You see how inevitable it all is?’

With her hand on the door knob she turned to say: ‘Yes, Jim. I’m not
blaming you.’ And she went out, closing the door softly behind her.

So that was all right. He smoked his cigarette out in something like
peace of mind. Not perfect peace, however; the thought of losing
something--even something for which he didn’t care--was distasteful.
Old associations would cling. It was an insufferable social order
that pressed this cruel alternative on a sensitive man, ordaining
that he must release one woman before he could take another. ‘It’s
all so niggardly, niggardly!’ said Wyvern, as he stepped out into the
sweetness of that June evening. He felt the need, as he had never felt
it before, of Nature’s soothing touch, her sunset’s balm for his eyes,
the caress of her delicate breezes on his brow.

For the sake of the walk he set out in the direction of his studio,
a walk that would take him away from suburban houses into little
lanes surrounded by open fields. There one could get close to Nature
and to Beauty. He had often been grateful to his own foresight for
having provided him with a studio not only separate from his residence
but distant from it by many miles. Only in solitude, he murmured to
himself, can the human spirit grow to its full stature; and he knew
that the rather recondite art whereby he supplemented, or failed to
supplement, his substantial private income could never have flourished
in the vicinity of Elsie, who was, when all was said, ‘a dear little
woman, but no artist.’ In his studio he could work undistracted;
and once or twice, when the tide of his inspiration had been at the
full, he had stayed there for several days, sleeping at nights upon
a little canvas folding-bed. There was something Spartan about the
practice that appealed to him. Elsie exhibited a suitable distress
at these absences, but she encouraged his painting and applauded the
results, though without revealing any real critical understanding of
them. James Wyvern professed allegiance to no school, and to that fact
attributed his failure to obtain recognition. He dealt too exclusively
in subtleties to be able to please the multitude, even the multitude
of art-critics. It was his declared purpose to demonstrate by his work
a familiar French aphorism: _La vérité consiste dans les nuances._
‘The Boot Cupboard’ and an unnamed picture representing amethyst-blue
houses were perhaps his most successful productions. ‘Representation,
no. Symbolism, if you like. Representation is an artistic vice.’ Yet
he had his lapses and was deliciously conscious of them. ‘My dear, I
am daring. I am taking the gravest risk. What do you think--a ploughed
field! Positively a ploughed field! The danger is simply colossal.’
To his artist-friends he was in the habit of saying: ‘Fundamentally,
I suppose, I’m a novelist.’ Just as, three years before, during his
literary period, he had fended off praise by murmuring: ‘I’m happiest,
after all, with my palette and brush.... Oh, that little box of paints!’

Striding along between fragrant hedges, he luxuriated in the joy of
the open air and in his new sense of freedom. Everything had been
explained to Elsie, and she had taken it, on the whole, beautifully. He
was really grateful to Elsie. And now he was a free man. ‘Freedom, the
deep breath!’ he quoted in rapture. He was free now to rescue Marion,
his imprisoned princess, from her dungeon of despair. He would take her
away, far away. Away from censorious England to the magic air and blue
skies of Italy, where life should become an exquisite indolent dream.
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Como! Como shall be the _mise-en-scène_.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Dreaming of Como, he entered the studio.

‘What the devil----!’ There she was, Marion herself, in his
wicker-chair. ‘My darling, _you_!’ He was amazed to find her there, and
amazed by the unearthly beauty of her. She rose to meet him, excited
fear shining in her large eyes.

‘Hullo, Jimmy! You won’t be glad to see me.’ How the deuce did she know
that? ‘John has found out about us. He made a scene. He’s dangerous.
I’ve fled the house.’

‘Marion, what a wonderful girl you are! What a study in contrast--your
fragrant English girlhood, and your exotic chintz dress!’ He enfolded
her in arms of solicitude. ‘My dear, tell me it all.’

‘That’s all. People have been talking to him. He threatened me. So I
came here.’

He could see her nostrils dilate and her breasts flutter in the
intoxication of the danger. ‘Like netted fish they leap,’ he quoted to
himself. Aloud he murmured: ‘Darling, you came here. Yes, of course.
But how....’

‘Oh, I found out where it was and just came. There was a woman here----’

He was startled. ‘A woman?... Oh, Mrs. Phillips, perhaps, the woman who
cleans up.’

‘Yes. I told her I was a friend of your wife’s, and she let me stay.
Cheek, wasn’t it! Invented a wife for you. Just bluff, but it came
off.... Do give me a cigarette.’

But this would never do. Here they were alone together, in a most
compromising situation, while her husband--positively a dangerous
fellow--raged round the countryside looking for her, perhaps with a
pistol. At any moment----‘But, my darling girl, is it wise?’

With no sign of having heard the question, she rested her head on his
shoulder. ‘Darling Jimmy, what shall I do?’

It was surely the most beautiful moment of his life. He was touched
almost to tears by her perfect trust in him. All her dewy freshness,
all her passionate beauty, all her vital young womanhood, was his
for the taking. He had but to say: ‘Come with me now.... Como!’ and
she would come. But was it wise to act so hastily? He plunged into a
delirium of pleasurable emotion only to emerge with that question in
his mind. With his lips clinging to hers he asked it. Was it wise?
They would go away sooner or later: that was inevitable; but to go
now, would it not be precipitate? To take a woman from her husband was
a serious matter, involving unexampled responsibility. He would be
bound to her more surely than by any legal marriage. And the scandal,
the hateful publicity, the dragging of one’s name through the divorce
courts--it was all so intolerable to a sensitive man. He would incur
the enmity of many people, and he would lose Elsie. Elsie would divorce
him, would perhaps forget him and re-marry....

He released Marion from that mad embrace.

‘What am I to do, darling?’ she repeated.

‘Let me think, dear,’ he said, stroking his troubled brow. ‘Let me
think. Above all we must listen to the voice of reason. So much depends
on this. Don’t you think it would be best for you to go back? Only for
a while, of course.’

She stared as though he had spoken in an unknown tongue. ‘Go back? Go
back to John?’

‘Only for a few weeks, darling, until I can see daylight, and make all
arrangements.’

She stepped back from him a few paces, as if to survey him the better.
Her eyes had the surprised and stricken look of a child unaccountably
hurt.

‘I don’t think I understand. Are you telling me to go back to my
husband? _You_, are you telling me _that_?’

‘My darling girl, don’t you see....’

‘Do you understand what that means? Go back to my husband who, when
I last saw him, was raging like a beast. Go back to him and, if he
doesn’t kill me, be his woman.’

‘Dear heart, for a few weeks only.’

She trembled violently for a moment, and then became rigid with scorn.
‘I agree with you perfectly. I had better go.’

The door slammed behind her before Wyvern recovered his wits. He ran
forward a few steps as if to pursue her ... and stopped. ‘My God, I
shall never see her again!’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Perfect
harmony, complete understanding, all lost. That was the moment, the
moment of my life, and I let it pass. Como ... I shall never bear
to look on Como again.’ Painful as his sensations were, they were
undeniably interesting. If ever he wrote a novel he would make that
incident the pivot of the plot, the crisis, the turning-point. ‘There
is a tide in the affairs of men.... By Jove there is!’ Why had he not
taken it at the flood? It was all too sudden--no arrangements made,
and a picture half-finished. Marion--he must forget Marion. Perhaps he
had been mistaken in her. Her scorn for him had been so undeserved; he
writhed at the recollection of it. He yearned now for some haven of
refuge. Bruised and broken by life, his heart cried out for comfort.
Ah, Elsie--she did not scorn him. A stab of fear lest the impossible
had happened, lest he had alienated his wife’s love, sent him flying
out of the studio and on the road for home. Forsaken by both women,
he would be homeless indeed, and with no balm for his wounds. What if
it were his fate to be misunderstood again? He began rehearsing the
speeches he would make to Elsie. He conjured up the scene: Elsie in
her night-dress, sitting up in the rumpled bed, just disturbed out of
sleep. Perhaps she would be a little cruel at first: women were like
that. ‘If my little wife is not kind to me now I shall go mad with the
pain of it all.’ At that she would relent, and weep upon his breast.
And she would love him more dearly than ever for having been so near to
losing him.




MISS LETTICE




MISS LETTICE


Needing some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who
knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders
is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has
an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me
(without any irony), is the most important of his duties--far more
important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is
fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a
very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret
troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased,
comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must
be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With
so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I
find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to
keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not a
garrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that
interest me most in his discourse.

As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes.
‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers.
For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges:
they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm--you know the place? It’s
not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by
the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’

‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit
of using that epithet without cause.

‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend
too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened
over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of
grotesque babyhood.’

I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t
an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the
dead.

‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked
by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a moment by the
exactness of his information--it was so characteristic of him that he
knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of
thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’

‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.

Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’

‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.

Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked
at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you
shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a
misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the
cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that
has a very old-fashioned name.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a
hopeless passion.’

‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’

Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a
pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a
hurry for ten minutes?’

I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with
that air of pensive reminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes
going, he told me the story.


1

You are surprised (said Saunders) at being asked to associate Miss
Lettice with the idea of passion, requited or unrequited. And, if you
recall her small plump figure, and the nun-like pallor of the face that
peered placidly from under her black bonnet, you will readily believe
that hers was no ordinary passion. But it was passion: let there be
no mistake about that; I’m not going to fob off some remote mystical
ecstasy upon you under that name. It’s hard enough to credit that the
heart of that staid, quaint, curtseying old spinster was aflame with a
hunger that ultimately destroyed her, but the evidence is overwhelming.
It is twofold, that evidence: there is the evidence of her words and
the evidence of my own eyes.

My interest in Miss Lettice was first roused by a disquieting rumour
that reached me, by a devious route, from a neighbour’s wife who was
employed by Miss Lettice to come in and do the rough housework for
her. According to this rumour Miss Lettice was, for no stated reason,
afraid of me. This puzzled me, as well it might, because at that time I
didn’t even know who she was: if we had met in the street I could not
have recognized her. But it was more than puzzling: it was distressing.
I knew that if I were to be of any use to the parish at all, fear was
the very last emotion I must inspire. I examined the few sermons I had
preached, for there, I thought, since they were the only communications
I had had with the lady, the solution of my problem must lie. I looked
for unsound doctrine, or for traces of hell-fire, or for anything else
that could have alarmed a timid soul; and I found nothing. You must
remember that I was new to the job, and totally without experience,
and altogether too disposed to take trifles seriously. To-day I should
soon find a summary method of dealing with such a situation, but at
that time it baffled me. I accepted it for a while as a permanent minor
discomfort.

I had promised myself to make friends, if I could, with every member
of my congregation, and with as many others as I could contrive to
visit--no small undertaking in this wilderness of scattered dwellings.
Miss Lettice had to wait her turn, of course, but it was a point of
honour with me that she should not have to wait beyond it. Nervous, but
also curious, I knocked at her front door.

She received me, rather sternly, I thought, but without discomposure.
I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the
parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself
was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual
cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the
inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and,
equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls
were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most
of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be
seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a
real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a
tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.

For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to
fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of
frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and
determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me
my chance.

‘You have been in the parish three months, have you not, Mr. Saunders?’

I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’
I answered, loading my words with all the weight they would carry.

‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted.
And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion--I was nearly
twenty years her junior--she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken
forgiveness.

It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’
I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook
her head. ‘Then why _did_ you dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know.
Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’

She seemed startled. ‘What do you know?’ Her eyes narrowed to gimlet
points. The abrupt change in her manner disconcerted me. ‘What do
you know?’ she repeated defiantly, and, finding me silent, she flung
another question at me, this time a veritable challenge: ‘Do you know
about my son?’

Her son! So that was the cause of all the misunderstanding. ‘Nothing at
all,’ I assured her. ‘Upon my word this is the first I’ve heard of him.
Did you think....’

‘Yes, I did. I thought you disapproved of me, as your predecessor did,
or maybe his wife. I thought you were never going to call.’

‘But why,’ I protested, ‘why should I or anyone presume to disapprove
of you?’ And I wondered what travesty of religion had been current in
this parish before my coming.

She looked unaccountably severe. ‘I think you don’t understand.’

‘I think I do,’ said I, with cheerful arrogance.

‘Mr. Saunders, I am an unmarried woman, and I have a son.’

‘Yes?’ I said, simulating polite interest when in truth I was
burning with curiosity. But if I hoped to win her sympathy by this
unconventional attitude I was to be woefully disappointed. ‘You don’t
seem to realize the gravity of what I tell you,’ Miss Lettice rebuked
me. ‘It is mistaken kindness to treat a sin so lightly.’

‘I want to be a friend to the parish, not a judge.’ Priggish remarks
rise readily to the lips of a young man such as I was then. ‘Besides,’
I added, ‘if your son was a child of true love there was no worse a sin
than indiscretion.’

But the confessed sinner would not hear of such wickedness. ‘You,
the vicar, to say a thing like that! That’s not the kind of teaching
we want in this parish. Why, I’ve done penance all my life for that
indiscretion, as you dare to call it. I forfeited marriage and sent
my lover away. Not even for the child’s sake would I condone our sin
by marrying. And do you tell me that all my bitter repentance was
unnecessary?’

What could I say? It would have been cruel to convince her that she
had thrown away her happiness in sheer waste, sacrificed her life on
the altar of a false god. I hadn’t the heart to attempt it, so I fell
back, I’m afraid, on Scriptural quotations, and left it at that. The
familiar words seemed to comfort her and to reinstate me in her eyes as
a moralist. None the less she was sufficiently assured of my sympathy
to speak of her love, and as she spoke I began to wonder whether after
all my pity had not been misplaced. Sin or no sin, the memory of her
golden youth was dear to her. She was repentant enough, no doubt, when
she remembered to be; but she did not live by morality alone. The woman
in her still exulted, the woman’s eyes still shone, in the knowledge
that she had, however long ago, been found beautiful. ‘We were very
young,’ she said, with disarming simplicity, ‘and we loved each other
very much. He was all the world to me.’ Her cheeks flushed; her meagre
bosom rose and fell tremulously--and in that moment I saw her as she
had been, young, fresh, adorable, alight with limitless ecstasy, the
incarnation of a man’s desire. The transfigurement endured only for
a flash, and flickered away, leaving me desolated with the stabbing
poignancy of life. From that to this, I thought, we must all pass. To
hide my emotion I led the talk back to her son. ‘And where is he now?’
I asked. ‘Does he often come to see you?’

She smiled wanly. ‘He’s all I’ve got. You see there’s a place set for
him. You’ll take a cup of tea with us?’

The lid of the kettle that stood on the fire was already palpitating.
Miss Lettice made the tea and enclosed the pot in a knitted cosy of
green wool. For the next few minutes we exchanged only tea-table talk.
But afterwards, when I made gestures of going, she confronted me
wistfully, her eyes lit up once again. But this was a new light, and
one more consonant with her years.

‘Would you like to see his room?’ she said, almost in a whisper.

I expressed eagerness, and she led me to the threshold of a room so
tiny that it made one think of a monastic cell. It was just large
enough to contain a small single bed, ready for use, a wash-stand,
and a miniature dressing-table. The furniture was all of childish
dimensions. In the further corner, under the window, stood a
cricket-bat. I glanced round with the vague smile of politeness. ‘So
this is Bernard’s room. A snug little place. And I see it’s all ready
for his return.’

After a silence Miss Lettice sighed. ‘He would have been eighteen this
coming April,’ she murmured.

I stared at her a moment in stupid wonder. ‘He would have been ... do
you mean...?’

‘He was stillborn,’ she confessed, and her glance dropped before my
stare. ‘It was silly not to tell you at once. But Bernard’s all I’ve
got. He’d be a fine big fellow by now.’

To avoid those glistening eyes I turned away, only to encounter a sight
but one degree less pitiful: Bernard’s cricket-bat--symbol of lusty
young manhood, white flannels, sunlit turf--which no cricketer’s hand
had ever grasped. What could I say or do? I was angered as well as
touched by the wanton sentimentality of that room, and having murmured
words of conventional comfort I hurried back to the vicarage. Not
until many hours had passed did I succeed in hustling away my mood of
melancholy; and as I entered my own bachelor bedroom I shuddered to
hear, in imagination, the Good-night uttered by that fond impossible
woman to the ghost with whom she shared her home.


2

Saunders got out of his chair, as though the story were finished,
and stood with his back to the fire warming the palms of his hands.
There was a moment’s silence, which I saw no reason for breaking, and
then he began talking again. After that, he said, Miss Lettice and I
were quite good friends. I became a constant and welcome visitor at
her cottage: constant because her solitude was something of a pain
to me, and welcome because she knew that to me she could talk about
Bernard to her heart’s content. And that, by Jove, was a privilege
she lost no opportunity of exercising. How many times have I piously
lied to that woman assuring her that my interest in her Bernard was
insatiable! Often, as you’ll readily understand, I was bored beyond
expression, though I never lost my sense of the grotesque pathos of her
life. But I must be careful not to let you suppose that she was a mere
monomaniac. She knew, as well as I did, that she was playing a game of
make-believe: she was not the victim of any sort of delusion, and her
obsession never became pathological or threatened to become so.

Things went on like this for ten years or so. She lived untroubled
among her dreams until some few months ago. During the war Bernard led
an existence even more shadowy than usual. Of course he enlisted, and
was wounded, and won decorations for his valour; and Miss Lettice,
knitting socks for more substantial soldiers, continued to play her
secret game by fancying that they would comfort the feet of her son.
The change came, as I’ve said, not many months ago, and it shewed
itself first of all in our conversations. From those conversations
Bernard was painlessly excluded, and his place taken by a young man
weighing twelve stone or more. You’ll know the name well enough--Jack
Turnbull, the stationmaster’s son. Jack began to loom so large in
the hopes and fears of Miss Lettice that I became uneasy, the more
so because I had been the instrument of bringing them together. It
was this way. During the latter part of the war, and ever since, Miss
Lettice had found it increasingly difficult to manage on her extremely
modest income, and music pupils were more in request than ever. I did
what I could for her by dropping a recommendation here and there, and
among others I enlisted the active sympathy of old Turnbull. Together
we hatched a little conspiracy, the upshot of which was that Jack, a
big hulking fellow approaching thirty years, was fired with a sudden
ambition to become an amateur pianist. Jack had done well in the
army, and finding himself in mufti again, at a loose end, and with a
captain’s gratuity standing to his credit at Cox’s, he lent himself
very readily to the amiable fraud. His three hours tuition a week
was very useful to Miss Lettice; but it proved her undoing. For now
we come to the hopeless passion I spoke of. And I needn’t stop to
assure you that there’s nothing scandalous in this tragic affair. Miss
Lettice fell in love with Jack, but the love she yearned to lavish on
him was maternal love. If you think me perverse in calling that love
a hopeless passion I must disagree with you. It was passion, and it
was, in part, physical passion, as all human love must be. Why do we
shrink from admitting that maternal love is as deeply rooted in the
body as any other? Miss Lettice loved Jack Turnbull for his strength,
his masculinity, his youth, and because, by a fatal coincidence, he was
born in the same month of the same year as her Bernard. In a sense it
was the calendar that killed the Miss Lettice we knew and set in her
stead a witless child. No doubt Jack seemed to her a gift from God,
a wonderful consolation prize, a token of the heavenly forgiveness.
Indeed she told me as much when, with the air of imparting to me her
dearest secret, she said that Jack was coming to lodge with her. She
had bought some pretty things for his bedroom, worked ornamental
bolster-slips with her own fingers, and replaced the dressing-table
by a chest of drawers dragged in from her own room. I hardly dared to
hint my misgiving. ‘Are you quite sure he is coming?’ I ventured. ‘I
fancied he would soon be looking out for a job. Young men can’t remain
idle for long nowadays, you know.’ But she wouldn’t hear of my doubts.
Jack would get work at the station under his father. He hadn’t exactly
promised to come to her, but she had urged it and she knew he would
humour an old woman.

I was by no means so sure, and I made up my mind to tackle Master Jack
at the earliest possible moment. I called at his father’s house and
left a message asking him to make a point, if he could, of calling at
the vicarage. He came the same evening. ‘Well, Turnbull,’ I said. ‘I
hear you’re thinking of changing your quarters?’

He looked as guilty and uncomfortable as though I had surprised him
with his hand in somebody’s till. ‘Has it got round already? Why, I’ve
told no one outside the family. Why can’t people hold their tongues!’

‘My dear fellow,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you. But I really
don’t see why you should be so secretive about it. And it wasn’t your
father who told me.’

‘Who was it?’ He spoke curtly. Four years as an infantry officer hadn’t
improved his manners.

‘It was Miss Lettice herself.’

I have never seen a man more astonished. ‘Miss Lettice! Miss Lettice
told you! Damn it, sir, she doesn’t know!’ After a moment’s stupefied
silence he added, with an air of apology, ‘But perhaps we’re at
cross-purposes. What was it that Miss Lettice told you?’

‘Only that you’re going to lodge in her house. Nothing to get excited
about.’

He began striding about the room. ‘We are certainly at cross-purposes
all right. I thought you meant Canada. I’m leaving next week for
Canada.’

‘For a holiday?’ I ineptly inquired.

‘For keeps,’ said Jack. ‘Mounted Police, with a commission soon, I
hope. This country’s gone to the dogs, sir.’

Here was a pretty mess! ‘But look here, Turnbull, Miss Lettice has got
it into her head that you’re going there as a lodger. Have you given
her any cause to believe such stuff?’

At that the swagger dropped off him. ‘That woman, I’m sorry for her,
but she gets on my nerves. She gushes too much for my taste. She wants
to mother me, if you ever heard such rot. And I won’t be mothered.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I cut in. ‘But why say this to me? Miss Lettice
is the person you should complain to. Are you content to let her go on
living in a fool’s paradise?’

Well, you can pretty well guess how the conversation proceeded. We
argued for the best part of three hours. Jack was determined not to
yield to her devouring maternal affection, but he hadn’t pluck enough
to tell her so outright. He preferred to save his own feelings by
equivocation. The coward does it with a kiss, you know, the brave man
with the sword. But I must do him the justice to admit that, short
of brutal explicitness, he did all he could to disabuse her mind of
its fond fiction. I was aghast when I realized that the secret of his
departure was being kept solely in order that he might slip out of
the country without bidding her good-bye. After long battle I wrung
from him a reluctant promise that he would spare her that culminating
cruelty.

And that is the end of the story. I too was a coward, for I did not
dare to visit Miss Lettice until Jack had gone. In point of fact I
watched him off the premises and then stepped in, unwillingly enough
but hoping to afford the wretched woman some comfort, if only the
comfort of distraction. The front door yielded to my push: it was
seldom locked. I tapped at the door of the sitting-room. There was no
sound from within. Gently I turned the handle and looked in.

‘Good morning, Miss Lettice,’ I said, with a cheerfulness that was
idiotic, I dare say, but what was one to do?

Miss Lettice sat staring at the wall in front of her, staring fixedly,
motionless. Whether she heard my voice or not I don’t know, but she
neither moved nor spoke. I became very anxious and called to her again,
offering such dry crumbs of comfort as came to hand. ‘Don’t grieve,
my dear Miss Lettice. There’s still Bernard left to you.’ Something
of that sort I said to her, but it made no difference at all. She was
struck down, struck worse than dead, by the colossal and cruel power of
love. And while I continued to stare at her with pity and horror, she
slowly turned towards me, as though on a swivel, a face marred out of
recognition by a smile....

Saunders winced. His lips had hesitated in releasing those last words.
Lifting one hand to his eyes, he turned away from me towards his
bookshelves. There, with a book in his hand, he shrugged his shoulders
as if to shake off the grip of a memory.

‘If it’s standard trees you’re having,’ he remarked, ‘you’ll want light
six-feet stakes. Bowers is your man.’




WEDDING-DAY




WEDDING-DAY


Wedding-day. It was curiously unreal. His own face grimaced back at
him as he struggled to adjust his tie, a face that no man could feel
satisfied with. ‘I sometimes wish Uncle Edgar hadn’t died after all,’
he confided to the looking-glass. Round and pink, with a wisp of
light brown moustache that didn’t seem to belong to it, that ghost of
himself continued to agonize. Funny, what women could see to admire
in men. As for Florrie’s devotion to himself, the unreasonableness of
it, the obstinacy, positively vexed him. If it hadn’t been for that
little legacy they would have had to wait another five years. Not that
he wanted to wait, but still--five years was five years, time to turn
round in. That fifty pounds a year had made just the difference; it
had brought this day within his immediate reach; his heart’s desire,
glowing like luminous fruit upon an inaccessible tree, had bent
suddenly towards him, and his hand was already poised to grasp it.
Fateful moment. It didn’t bear thinking about. The old man ought not
to have sprung it on him like this.

‘Cheer-O, Bert!’ There was a bang upon the bedroom door, and before
it could be answered the attacking force entered tumultuously. It
was a large red-headed man, dressed unmistakably for the approaching
ceremony, tall, clean-shaven, possessing hands a size too big for his
body.

‘Hullo, elephant!’ He resented the fellow’s entry, and yet in some
vague way he was glad of it. He wanted to be alone with his dreams, but
he feared to be alone with his doubts. Well, in a few hours solitude
would be a thing of the past indeed. Florrie and he would be together,
sleeping and waking, in sickness and in health, till death them did
part. Forty years, perhaps, and never alone. Breakfast with Florrie,
the eight-thirteen to town, the six-five back, a late tea with Florrie,
conversation with Florrie, supper with Florrie; and week-ends spent
going to church or digging in the garden. There was no escape now.
Escape! Who wanted to escape? Not he, anyhow. And that was fortunate,
for here was Maurice, the jubilant best man, and Florrie’s brother to
boot. No escape.

‘You’d better pull your socks up, old feller,’ said Maurice, his face
bisected by a grin. ‘You haven’t got as much time to spare as you seem
to think. Cab’s at the door.’

It was fortunate, he knew, that the tide of events was sweeping him
along, or he would have stood for ever staring at himself in a dream
of indecision. Yet he hated to be bustled. He was still a free man,
and there leapt to life in him a spark of anger against the man who
sought to wrest that freedom from his grasp before the hour had struck.
It would strike soon enough, but until then ... it seemed suddenly
necessary that he should assert his independence of Maurice. His toilet
was already completed, but he would delay a while yet.

‘All right. I won’t keep you a minute.’ He spoke with an affected
coolness, as though addressing an importunate commercial traveller.
And, without haste, he picked up from the dressing-table a small pair
of nail-scissors. With these he began cutting off his moustache.

‘Hullo, what’s the game?’ asked Maurice.

‘Time that thing came off,’ replied Bert, still plying the scissors.
‘Pour me out a spot of water for shaving, there’s a good chap... No,
cold’ll do.’

The world without was ablaze with summer, a beacon in the grey waste of
infinity, a fire-ball flung into the darkness. The sky flamed beauty
down upon the responsive pavements. But he, stubbornly, remained
shut in his cold introspection. It was as if he alone of all created
things was able to resist the infection of gladness that the warm
air held. Forty years, forty years. The dailyness of life terrified
him. The amiable Maurice became for him the symbol of all-conquering
circumstance.

It was a new Florrie who joined him at the altar, a Florrie veiled,
mysterious, and therefore seductive. ‘Therefore’ was the word stressed
by the devil in his brain. But she was undeniably pretty, and so
fragile, so like a piece of exquisite china, that he held his breath
in awe when she yielded her hand to his. This was the lovely ingenuous
child that life, day by day, year by year, would bend and break, and
finally cast aside. His was to be the dubious privilege of watching
that process, of watching the hair go grey, the face wrinkle, the
child-dreams die one by one. His heart beat with a profound pity. Poor
little devil, they were both in the same boat. She too was swearing
her freedom away, taking the veil of everlasting monotony. And,
irrationally, he blamed not himself, not her, but the officiating
clergyman, the guests, and most of all that fellow Maurice. He was glad
that he had not allowed himself to be bustled by Maurice, glad to feel
that soreness of the upper lip which bore witness to his not having
been bustled.

The clergyman at whose feet he knelt was tactfully gabbling words about
the procreation of children. Someone in the pews behind was sniffing
tearfully. That would be Florrie’s mother, no doubt, that angular
female version of Maurice. He became almost bemused by the drowsy
noises, like bees in a bottle, emitted by the priest. The sunlight,
pouring through the stained-glass window, cast a luminous many-coloured
pattern across the chancel floor. The colours entered him--his eyes,
his nostrils, his very veins--and made his blood tingle in tune with
their brightness. A faint purple, like wine stains; a rich yellow,
like harvested corn--they rang their little bell-melodies in his
consciousness till he lost count of time.

‘And I hope you’ll be very happy. Now we’ll go to the vestry.’

With Florrie clinging to his arm he went to the vestry; and there a
swarm of relations, like honey-seeking bees, descended upon them.
‘Florrie, you look too sweet!’ ‘Bert, you dear old thing!’ And so on.

Florrie’s younger brother approached, fresh from school. ‘Gratters, old
horse. She’s a good girl. I’ve trained her well. But what’s happened to
the cricket teams?’

‘The what?’

‘Cricket teams. Eleven a side, you know.’

Florrie translated. ‘He means your moustache, Bert. Why did you shave
it off? I wish you hadn’t.’

He experienced a pang of compunction. Curse it, why had he shaved it
off? ‘Oh, I don’t know. Thought I’d feel freer without it.’

Maurice, the omnipotent Maurice, bore down on them. ‘Off we go!’ he
said briskly. Why was he always in such a devil of a hurry? Bert and
his bride began marching down the aisle. He wanted to dance: not with
joy, but because it was so difficult to walk against the tempo of
Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

Outside, the world still blazed. And a hundred eyes stared. He handed
Florrie into the waiting cab, and leaped in after her, with grains of
rice trickling down his back. Maurice, the gaoler, shut the door behind
them, and then, with incredible agility, thrust his head through the
open window-space, elongated his neck, and kissed his sister on the
cheek. ‘Best of luck, both.’ He withdrew. The taxi moved on, gobbling
like a turkey. ‘I’m glad I had that shave,’ said Bert viciously. The
forty years began.




DEARTH’S FARM




DEARTH’S FARM


It is really not far: our fast train does it in eighty minutes. But so
sequestered is the little valley in which I have made my solitary home
that I never go to town without the delicious sensation of poising my
hand over a lucky-bag full of old memories. In the train I amuse myself
by summoning up some of those ghosts of the past, a past not distant
but sufficiently remote in atmosphere from my present to be invested
with a certain sentimental glamour. ‘Perhaps I shall meet you--or you.’
But never yet have I succeeded in guessing what London held up her
sleeve for me. She has that happiest of tricks--without which paradise
will be dull indeed--the trick of surprise. In London, if in no other
place, it is the unexpected that happens. For me Fleet Street is the
scene _par excellence_ of these adventurous encounters, and it was in
Fleet Street, three months ago, that I ran across Bailey, of Queens’,
whom I hadn’t seen for five years. Bailey is not his name, nor Queens’
his college, but these names will serve to reveal what is germane to my
purpose and to conceal the rest.

His recognition of me was instant; mine of him more slow. He told me
his name twice; we stared at each other, and I struggled to disguise
the blankness of my memory. The situation became awkward. I was
the more embarrassed because I feared lest he should too odiously
misinterpret my non-recognition of him, for the man was shabby and
unshaven enough to be suspicious of an intentional slight. Bailey,
Bailey ... now who the devil was Bailey? And then, when he had already
made a gesture of moving on, memory stirred to activity.

‘Of course, I remember. Bailey. Theosophy. You used to talk to me about
theosophy, didn’t you? I remember perfectly now.’ I glanced at my
watch. ‘If you’re not busy let’s go and have tea somewhere.’

He smiled, with a hint of irony in his eyes, as he answered: ‘I’m not
busy.’ I received the uncomfortable impression that he was hungry and
with no ordinary hunger, and the idea kept me silent, like an awkward
school-boy, while we walked together to a tea-shop that I knew.

Seated on opposite sides of the tea-table we took stock of each
other. He was thin, and his hair greying; his complexion had a soiled
unhealthy appearance; the cheeks had sunk in a little, throwing into
prominence the high cheekbones above which his sensitive eyes glittered
with a new light, a light not of heaven. Compared with the Bailey I now
remembered so well, a rather sleek young man with an almost feline love
of luxury blossoming like a tropical plant in the exotic atmosphere of
his Cambridge rooms, compared with that man this was but a pale wraith.
In those days he had been a flaming personality, suited well--too
well, for my plain taste--to the highly-coloured orientalism that he
affected in his mural decorations. And co-existent in him with this
lust for soft cushions and chromatic orgies, which repelled me, there
was an imagination that attracted me: an imagination delighting in
highly-coloured metaphysical theories of the universe. These theories,
which were as fantastic as _The Arabian Nights_ and perhaps as unreal,
proved his academic undoing: he came down badly in his Tripos, and had
to leave without a degree. Many a man has done that and yet prospered,
but Bailey, it was apparent, hadn’t prospered. I made the conventional
inquiries, adding, ‘It must be six or seven years since we met last.’

‘More than that,’ said Bailey morosely, and lapsed into silence. ‘Look
here,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘I’m going to behave like a cad. I’m
going to ask you to lend me a pound note. And don’t expect it back in a
hurry.’

We both winced a little as the note changed hands. ‘You’ve had bad
luck,’ I remarked, without, I hope, a hint of pity in my voice. ‘What’s
wrong?’

He eyed me over the rim of his teacup. ‘I look a lot older to you, I
expect?’

‘You don’t look very fit,’ I conceded.

‘No, I don’t.’ His cup came down with a nervous slam upon the saucer.
‘Going grey, too, aren’t I?’ I was forced to nod agreement. ‘Yet, do
you know, a month ago there wasn’t a grey hair in my head. You write
stories, don’t you? I saw your name somewhere. I wonder if you could
write my story. You may get your money back after all.... By God, that
would be funny, wouldn’t it!’

I couldn’t see the joke, but I was curious about his story. And after
we had lit our cigarettes he told it to me, to the accompaniment of a
driving storm of rain that tapped like a thousand idiot fingers upon
the plate-glass windows of the shop.


2

A few weeks ago, said Bailey, I was staying at the house of a cousin
of mine. I never liked the woman, but I wanted free board and lodging,
and hunger soon blunts the edge of one’s delicacy. She’s at least ten
years my senior, and all I could remember of her was that she had
bullied me when I was a child into learning to read. Ten years ago
she married a man named Dearth--James Dearth, the resident owner of a
smallish farm in Norfolk, not far from the coast. All her relatives
opposed the marriage. Relatives always do. If people waited for the
approval of relatives before marrying, the world would be depopulated
in a generation. This time it was religion. My cousin’s people were
primitive and methodical in their religion, as the name of their sect
confessed; whereas Dearth professed a universal toleration that they
thought could only be a cloak for indifference. I have my own opinion
about that, but it doesn’t matter now. When I met the man I forgot
all about religion: I was simply repelled by the notion of any woman
marrying so odd a being. Rather small in build, he possessed the
longest and narrowest face I have ever seen on a man of his size. His
eyes were set exceptionally wide apart, and the nose, culminating
in large nostrils, made so slight an angle with the rest of the face
that seen in profile it was scarcely human. Perhaps I exaggerate a
little, but I know no other way of explaining the peculiar revulsion he
inspired in me. He met me at the station in his dog-cart, and wheezed
a greeting at me. ‘You’re Mr. Bailey, aren’t you? I hope you’ve had
an agreeable journey. Monica will be delighted.’ This seemed friendly
enough, and my host’s conversation during that eight-mile drive
did much to make me forget my first distaste of his person. He was
evidently a man of wide reading, and he had a habit of polite deference
that was extremely flattering, especially to me who had had more than
my share of the other thing. I was cashiered during the war, you know.
Never mind why. Whenever he laughed, which was not seldom, he exhibited
a mouthful of very large regular teeth.

Dearth’s Farm, to give it the local name, is a place with a personality
of its own. Perhaps every place has that. Sometimes I fancy that the
earth itself is a personality, or a community of souls locked fast in
a dream from which at any moment they may awake, like volcanos, into
violent action. Anyhow Dearth’s Farm struck me as being peculiarly
personal, because I found it impossible not to regard its climatic
changes as changes of mood. You remember my theory that chemical action
is only psychical action seen from without? Well, I’m inclined to
think in just the same way of every manifestation of natural energy.
But you don’t want to hear about my fancies. The farmhouse, which is
approached by a narrow winding lane from the main road, stands high up
in a kind of shallow basin of land, a few acres ploughed but mostly
grass. The countryside has a gentle prettiness more characteristic of
the southeastern counties. On three sides wooded hills slope gradually
to the horizon; on the fourth side grassland rises a little for twenty
yards and then curves abruptly down. To look through the windows that
give out upon this fourth side is to have the sensation of being on
the edge of a steep cliff, or at the end of the world. On a still day,
when the sun is shining, the place has a languid beauty, an afternoon
atmosphere. You remember Tennyson’s Lotus Isles, ‘in which it seemed
always afternoon’: Dearth’s Farm has something of that flavour on a
still day. But such days are rare; the two or three I experienced shine
like jewels in the memory. Most often that stretch of fifty or sixty
acres is a gathering-ground for all the bleak winds of the earth. They
seem to come simultaneously from the land and from the sea, which is
six miles away, and they swirl round in that shallow basin of earth,
as I have called it, like maddened devils seeking escape from a trap.
When the storms were at their worst I used to feel as though I were
perched insecurely on a gigantic saucer held a hundred miles above the
earth. But I am not a courageous person. Monica, my cousin, found no
fault with the winds. She had other fears, and I had not been with her
three days before she began to confide them to me. Her overtures were
as surprising as they were unwelcome, for that she was not a confiding
person by nature I was certain. Her manners were reserved to the point
of diffidence, and we had nothing in common save a detestation of the
family from which we had both sprung. I suppose you will want to know
something of her looks. She was a tall, full-figured woman, handsome
for her years, with jet black hair, a sensitive face, and a complexion
almost Southern in its dark colouring. I love beauty and I found
pleasure in her mere presence, which did something to lighten for me
the gloom that pervaded the house; but my pleasure was innocent enough,
and Dearth’s watchdog airs only amused me. Monica’s eyes--unfathomable
pools--seemed troubled whenever they rested on me: whether by fear or
by some other emotion I didn’t at first know.

She chose her moment well, coming to me when Dearth was out of the
house, looking after his men, and I, pleading a headache, had refused
to accompany him. The malady was purely fictitious, but I was bored
with the fellow’s company, and sick of being dragged at his heels like
a dog for no better reason than his too evident jealousy afforded.

‘I want to ask a kindness of you,’ she said. ‘Will you promise to
answer me quite frankly?’ I wondered what the deuce was coming, but I
promised, seeing no way out of it. ‘I want you to tell me,’ she went
on, ‘whether you see anything queer about me, about my behaviour? Do I
say or do anything that seems to you odd?’

Her perturbation was so great that I smiled to hide my perception of
it. I answered jocularly: ‘Nothing at all odd, my dear Monica, except
this question of yours. What makes you ask it?’

But she was not to be shaken so easily out of her fears, whatever they
were. ‘And do you find nothing strange about this household either?’

‘Nothing strange at all,’ I assured her. ‘Your marriage is an unhappy
one, but so are thousands of others. Nothing strange about that.’

‘What about him?’ she said. And her eyes seemed to probe for an answer.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Are you asking for my opinion of your
husband? A delicate thing to discuss.’

‘We’re speaking in confidence, aren’t we!’ She spoke impatiently,
waving my politeness away.

‘Well, since you ask, I don’t like him. I don’t like his face: it’s a
parody on mankind. And I can’t understand why you threw yourself away
on him.’

She was eager to explain. ‘He wasn’t always like this. He was a gifted
man, with brains and an imagination. He still is, for all I know. You
spoke of his face--now how would you describe his face, in one word?’

I couldn’t help being tickled by the comedy of the situation: a man and
a woman sitting in solemn conclave seeking a word by which to describe
another man’s face, and that man her husband. But her air of tragedy,
though I thought it ridiculous, sobered me. I pondered her question for
a while, recalling to my mind’s eye the long narrow physiognomy and
the large teeth of Dearth.

At last I ventured the word I had tried to avoid. ‘Equine,’ I suggested.

‘Ah!’ There was a world of relief in her voice. ‘You’ve seen it too.’

She told me a queer tale. Dearth, it appears, had a love and
understanding of horses that was quite unparalleled. His wife too
had loved horses and it had once pleased her to see her husband’s
astonishing power over the creatures, a power which he exercised
always for their good. But his benefactions to the equine race were
made at a hideous cost to himself of which he was utterly unaware.
Monica’s theory was too fantastic even for me to swallow, and I, as you
know, have a good stomach for fantasy. You will have already guessed
what it was. Dearth was growing, by a process too gradual and subtle
for perception, into the likeness of the horses with whom he had so
complete sympathy. This was Mrs. Dearth’s notion of what was happening
to her husband. And she pointed out something significant that had
escaped my notice. She pointed out that the difference between him and
the next man was not altogether, or even mainly, a physical difference.
In effect she said: ‘If you scrutinize the features more carefully,
you will find them to be far less extraordinary than you now suppose.
The poison is not in his features. It is in the psychical atmosphere he
carries about with him: something which infects you with the idea of
horse and makes you impose that idea on his appearance, magnifying his
facial peculiarities.’ Just now I mentioned that in the early days of
her marriage Monica had shared this love of horses. Later, of course,
she came to detest them only one degree less than she detested her
husband. That is saying much. Only a few months before my visit matters
had come to a crisis between the two. Without giving any definite
reason, she had confessed, under pressure, that he was unspeakably
offensive to her; and since then they had met only at meals and always
reluctantly. She shuddered to recall that interview, and I shuddered to
imagine it. I was no longer surprised that she had begun to entertain
doubts of her own sanity.

But this wasn’t the worst. The worst was Dandy, the white horse. I
found it difficult to understand why a white horse should alarm her,
and I began to suspect that the nervous strain she had undergone was
making her inclined to magnify trifles. ‘It’s his favourite horse,’ she
said. ‘That’s as much as saying that he dotes on it to a degree that
is unhuman. It never does any work. It just roams the fields by day,
and at night sleeps in the stable.’ Even this didn’t, to my mind, seem
a very terrible indictment. If the man were mad on horses, what more
natural than this petting of a particular favourite?--a fine animal,
too, as Monica herself admitted. ‘Roams the fields,’ cried my poor
cousin urgently. ‘Or did until these last few weeks. Lately it has been
kept in its stable, day in, day out, eating its head off and working
up energy enough to kill us all.’ This sounded to me like the language
of hysteria, but I waited for what was to follow. ‘The day you came,
did you notice how pale I looked? I had had a fright. As I was crossing
the yard with a pail of separated milk for the calves, that beast broke
loose from the stable and sprang at me. Yes, Dandy. He was in a fury.
His eyes burned with ferocity. I dodged him by a miracle, dropped the
pail, and ran back to the house shrieking for help. When I entered the
living-room my husband feigned to be waking out of sleep. He didn’t
seem interested in my story, and I’m convinced that he had planned the
whole thing.’ It was past my understanding how Dearth could have made
his horse spring out of his stable and make a murderous attack upon a
particular woman, and I said so. ‘You don’t know him yet,’ retorted
Monica. ‘And you don’t know Dandy. Go and look at the beast. Go now,
while James is out.’

The farmyard, with its pool of water covered in green slime, its manure
and sodden straw, and its smell of pigs, was a place that seldom
failed to offend me. But on this occasion I picked my way across the
cobblestones thinking of nothing at all but the homicidal horse that
I was about to spy upon. I have said before that I’m not a courageous
man, and you’ll understand that I stepped warily as I neared the
stable. I saw that the lower of the two doors was made fast and with
the more confidence unlatched the other.

I peered in. The great horse stood, bolt upright but apparently in a
profound sleep. It was indeed a fine creature, with no spot or shadow,
as far as I could discern, to mar its glossy whiteness. I stood there
staring and brooding for several minutes, wondering if both Monica and
I were the victims of some astounding hallucination. I had no fear
at all of Dandy, after having seen him; and it didn’t alarm me when,
presently, his frame quivered, his eyes opened, and he turned to look
at me. But as I looked into his eyes an indefinable fear possessed
me. The horse stared dumbly for a moment, and his nostrils dilated.
Although I half-expected him to tear his head out of the halter and
prance round upon me, I could not move. I stared, and as I stared, the
horse’s lips moved back from the teeth in a grin, unmistakably a grin,
of malign intelligence. The gesture vividly recalled Dearth to my mind.
I had described him as equine, and if proof of the word’s aptness were
needed, Dandy had supplied that proof.

‘He’s come back,’ Monica murmured to me, on my return to the house.
‘Ill, I think. He’s gone to lie down. Have you seen Dandy?’

‘Yes. And I hope not to see him again.’

But I was to see him again, twice again. The first time was that
same night, from my bedroom window. Both my bedroom and my cousin’s
looked out upon that grassy hill of which I spoke. It rose from a few
yards until almost level with the second storey of the house and then
abruptly curved away. Somewhere about midnight, feeling restless and
troubled by my thoughts, I got out of bed and went to the window to
take an airing.

I was not the only restless creature that night. Standing not twenty
yards away, with the sky for background, was a great horse. The
moonlight made its white flank gleam like silver, and lit up the eyes
that stared fixedly at my window.


3

For sixteen days and nights we lived, Monica and I, in the presence
of this fear, a fear none the less real for being non-susceptible to
definition. The climax came suddenly, without any sort of warning,
unless Dearth’s idiotic hostility towards myself could be regarded as
a warning. The utterly unfounded idea that I was making love to his
wife had taken root in the man’s mind, and every day his manner to me
became more openly vindictive. This was the cue for my departure, with
warm thanks for my delightful holiday; but I didn’t choose to take it.
I wasn’t exactly in love with Monica, but she was my comrade in danger
and I was reluctant to leave her to face her nightmare terrors alone.

The most cheerful room in that house was the kitchen, with its
red-tiled floor, its oak rafters, and its great open fireplace. And
when in the evenings the lamp was lit and we sat there, listening in
comfort to the everlasting gale that raged round the house, I could
almost have imagined myself happy, had it not been for the presence of
my reluctant host. He was a skeleton at a feast, if you like! By God,
we were a genial party. From seven o’clock to ten we would sit there,
the three of us, fencing off silence with the most pitiful of small
talk. On this particular night I had been chaffing him gently, though
with intention, about his fancy for keeping a loaded rifle hanging
over the kitchen mantelpiece; but at last I sickened of the pastime,
and the conversation, which had been sustained only by my efforts,
lapsed. I stared at the red embers in the grate, stealing a glance
now and again at Monica to see how she was enduring the discomfort of
such a silence. The cheap alarum clock ticked loudly, in the way that
cheap alarum clocks have. When I looked again at Dearth he appeared to
have fallen asleep. I say ‘appeared,’ for I instantly suspected him
of shamming sleep in order to catch us out. I knew that he believed
us to be in love with each other, and his total lack of evidence must
have occasioned him hours of useless fury. I suspected him of the most
melodramatic intentions: of hoping to see a caress pass between us that
would justify him in making a scene. In that scene, as I figured it,
the gun over the mantelpiece might play an important part. I don’t like
loaded guns.

The sight of his closed lids exasperated me into a bitter speech
designed for him to overhear. ‘Monica, your husband is asleep. He is
asleep only in order that he may wake at the chosen moment and pour out
the contents of his vulgar little mind upon our heads.’

This tirade astonished her, as well it might. She glanced up, first at
me, then at her husband; and upon him her eyes remained fixed. ‘He’s
not asleep,’ she said, rising slowly out of her chair.

‘I know he’s not,’ I replied.

By now she was at his side, bending over him. ‘No,’ she remarked
coolly. ‘He’s dead.’

At those words the wind outside redoubled its fury, and it seemed as
though all the anguish of the world was in its wail. The spirit of
Dearth’s Farm was crying aloud in a frenzy that shook the house, making
all the windows rattle. I shuddered to my feet. And in the moment of my
rising the wail died away, and in the lull I heard outside the window a
sudden sound of feet, of pawing, horse’s feet. My horror found vent in
a sort of desperate mirth.

‘No, not dead. James Dearth doesn’t die so easily.’

Shocked by my levity, she pointed mutely to the body in the chair.
But a wild idea possessed me, and I knew that my wild idea was the
truth. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that may be dead as mutton. But James Dearth is
outside, come to spy on you and me. Can’t you hear him?’

I stretched out my hand to the blind cord. The blind ran up with a
rattle, and, pressed against the window, looking in upon us, was the
face of the white horse, its teeth bared in a malevolent grin. Without
losing sight of the thing for a moment, I backed towards the fire.
Monica, divining my intention, took down the gun from its hook and
yielded it to my desirous fingers. I took deliberate aim, and shot.

And then, with the crisis over, as I thought, my nerves went to rags. I
sat down limply, Monica huddled at my feet; and I knew with a hideous
certitude that the soul of James Dearth, violently expelled from the
corpse that lay outside the window, was in the room with me, seeking
to re-enter that human body in the chair. There was a long moment of
agony during which I trembled on the verge of madness, and then a flush
came back into the dead pallid cheeks, the body breathed, the eyes
opened.... I had just enough strength left to drag myself out of my
seat. I saw Monica’s eyes raised to mine; I can never for a moment
cease to see them. Three hours later I stumbled into the arms of the
stationmaster, who put me in the London train under the impression that
I was drunk. Yes, I left alone. I told you I wasn’t a courageous man....


4

Bailey’s voice abruptly ceased. The tension in my listening mind
snapped, and I came back with a jerk, as though released by a spring,
to my seat in the tea-shop. Bailey’s queer eyes glittered across at me
for a moment, and then, their light dying suddenly out, they became
infinitely weary of me and of all the sorry business of living. A
rationalist in grain, I find it impossible to accept the story quite
as it stands. Substantially true it may be, probably is, but that it
has been distorted by the prism of Bailey’s singular personality I can
hardly doubt. But the angle of that distortion must remain a matter for
conjecture.

No such dull reflections came then to mar my appreciation of the
quality of the strange hush that followed his last words. Neither of us
spoke. An agitated waitress made us aware that the shop was closing,
and we went into the street without a word. The rain was unremitting.
I shrank back into the shelter of the porch while I fastened the collar
of my mackintosh, and when I stepped out upon the pavement again,
Bailey had vanished into the darkness.

I have never ceased to be vexed at losing him, and never ceased to fear
that he may have thought the loss not unwelcome to me. My only hope
is that he may read this and get into touch with me again, so that I
may discharge my debt to him. It is a debt that lies heavily on my
conscience--the price of this story, less one pound.




THE GHOST




THE GHOST


Seven days leave--how exhilarating! Freedom was wine in the mouth. And
though of those seven days only three remained he was still enjoying a
delirious intoxication. He had learned the art of squeezing the present
moment dry, of living with all his heart in a happy now, when he
reached one, regarding the long intervals of wretchedness as unmeaning
parentheses.

‘I was a silly fellow not to get here earlier. But you know what
relatives are.’

‘You were both silly and horrid,’ answered his hostess. But her eyes
danced with pleasure as they met his, and the two friends exchanged a
smile of understanding. This was their good time, and they would make
the most of it, wasting no regret on the past and admitting to their
hearts no fear of the great black future that loomed, like a beast of
prey, ready to shatter their happiness with a blow of its paw. It was
a most delightful friendship, and that it depended on mutual liking
alone, and on no sort of conventional tie, constituted not the least
of its charm. Dressed in a white tub-frock, her small face from under
a drooping sun-hat flushing with excitement, Betty--publicly known
as Mrs. Charles Cowley--looked exquisitely cool and fresh and young,
younger even than her years, which numbered twenty-seven. It did
Arnold’s eyes good to look at her, and it sent a warm thrill through
his romantic heart that he was able to enjoy that comforting sight,
able to bask in her jolly friendliness, without a thought of disloyalty
towards her husband, his old friend Charles. So far as he could feel
sorry for anyone this morning he was a little sorry for Charles: not
because Charles was an ill-paid clerk, nor because Charles’s was a
retentive firm conspiring with medical officers to defeat his patriotic
ambition, but merely because on this day of all days he had to remain
cooped up in the city, poor devil.

He put his head out of the kitchen window and inhaled the summer air in
long rapturous draughts. Jove, what a day for picnicking!

‘Hullo!’ cried Betty, at his back. ‘What do you think you’re achieving
by that? You can’t stop to do your breathing exercises now. Why, you
haven’t packed the sandwiches yet!’

Arnold wheeled round and saluted her in military fashion--a form of
humour then in vogue. ‘Sorry, sir!... Anyhow, have you finished washing
up your dixies?’

Betty regarded him with severity. ‘Yes, of course. Haven’t I got my hat
on and waiting for you!’

He repeated the question reflectively. ‘Haven’t I got my hat on and
waiting for you?... In what sense is your hat waiting for me, Betty? As
the dear general said in Bernard Shaw, I’m only a silly soldier-man.
Don’t harass my poor intelligence.’

‘Oh, grammar!’ She annihilated grammar with one pout. Her quick fingers
stacked the sandwiches, and wrapped them in grease paper snatched
from the table drawer. ‘Come along.... No, _I’m_ going to carry the
haversack. You bring the thermos.’

They stepped out of the bungalow and into rural Buckinghamshire.
It was certainly a unique morning. Earth had never before been so
fresh, breathed such fragrance; never before had the sky bent so
intimately over her. After an hour’s walking down narrow lanes between
sweet-smelling hedgerows, and over hills bordered by pinewoods, the
two friends turned into a field-path. Tall feathery grasses, red-brown
dock-flowers and yellow charlock trembled ever so slightly as in
a trance of ecstasy; clover and ladies’-fingers, buttercups and
celandine seemed to Arnold’s imagination to be so many mute faces,
absurdly knowing, wonderfully content. When they reached their second
stile he paused, and Betty with him. The meadow beyond was a symphony
in green and yellow: a curving sweep of long grass and buttercups,
dazzled with sunlight; and on the far side, by a pond, black-and-white
cows were browsing in the shadow of tall elms, some dreaming over a
celestial cud, some stooping to the water, some cropping the jade-green
grass with soft enfolding lips.

‘How still it looks,’ said Betty.

He nodded, drowsed by beauty, yet stabbed by beauty’s pain. He wondered
if he were seeing this vision of England for the last time. ‘And how
alive,’ he answered. ‘It’s as if the whole field were breathing and
feeling. Dare we go into it? It’s like walking over some one’s face.’

Perhaps in that moment that three-days-hence future thrust its ugly
face into Betty’s. Perhaps she recalled Arnold’s solitary lapse from
soldierly reticence, when he had said: ‘It’s not the actual fighting or
the danger. It’s the filth. And chance sights. A decaying human hand
sticking out of the side of a trench--things like that.’ Perhaps she
recalled this, for her face grew unaccountably tense.

‘Come along, Arnold, that’s where we’re going to have lunch. By that
stream.’ She scrambled over the stile before he could offer to help
her. He followed in a more leisurely fashion, a little disappointed
that she had broken the spell of that meadow’s loveliness.

They sauntered across the field, and climbed another stile. Then,
skirting the hedge to the left, they followed the brook until they
found an agreeable resting-place on the sloping grassed bank. They
sat down a few yards from the pond where, as in a picture, the cows
were grouped, knee-deep in cool grass. Into that little lake, which
reflected the sky’s blue and gold, the brook ran clear over a pebbly
bed. Arnold, embracing his knees, rested his chin on them and stared
into the water, admiring the contours and colours of the smooth,
delicately-enamelled stones, and straining the imagination to share the
lives of the minute creatures that were borne past in the stream. Betty
watched him with a covert sidelong look.

A unique morning, yes; and a unique friendship of which Arnold
was immeasurably proud. Beautifully at peace, he found delight in
contemplating their relationship. He and Betty were the most staunch of
comrades. There was implicit trust between them, unshakable fidelity,
and never a thought of love. He could not believe that ever before had
a man and a girl achieved such intimacy without being betrayed into
a wish for a more passionate symbol of that intimacy than mere talk.
But to Arnold, who was still in his earliest twenties, talk was the
best thing in the world. And what talks he had had with Betty! With
what glorious candour she had disclosed to him the secret places of
her mind, places to which even her mother and sisters had never been
admitted! For Arnold it was a fascinating and a sacred experience; and
if Betty’s respect for his intellect was exaggerated, her absolute
trust in his honour was at least well-founded. It was this absolute
trust that added to their friendship the delicious flavour of romance.
They exchanged ideas--on life, on religion, on sex, especially on
sex--with utter unreserve, and with no hint of concession to vulgar
notions of propriety.

‘Look at those jolly little red worms,’ said Arnold, pointing to the
water. ‘I used to dote on those things when I was a kid.’

‘They’re lovely.’ Betty paused before adding, a trifle consciously:
‘Childhood’s the best time, isn’t it? I wish I had a baby.’

He glanced up with quick interest. ‘Well, why not?’

‘Ah, why! I’ve been married five years. At first we couldn’t afford
it, and now--well, something’s wrong. For two years or more we’ve been
hoping for a child.’

‘Rotten luck!’ Arnold looked back at the stream.

‘Yes. I wanted to tell you. You see, there’s something wrong with
Charlie.’

Arnold became alarmed. ‘Something ... physiological?’

‘Yes. The doctor told him. Nothing very dreadful, I believe, in the
ordinary way. But it makes it improbable that he’ll ever have a child.’

‘And he wants one?’

Betty turned her head away for one moment. ‘_I_ want one; I want one
bitterly. And he too, in his way.’

Arnold kept his gaze steadily upon the moving water, lest he should
see her tears. He was shocked to think that this girl, so robust, so
affectionate, so ripe for motherhood, should be cheated by the accident
of marriage of a tremendous experience. And why must it be so? In a
sensible society would it be so? Before he had begun to work out all
the implications of that challenge, Betty spoke again.

He was amazed to hear her phrasing his own thoughts. ‘If people were
decent-minded, it wouldn’t so much matter,’ she said. ‘There could be a
temporary marriage with someone else.’

Arnold was delighted with this proof of her emancipation. ‘Exactly.
Nothing simpler. But society won’t change in a hurry. No use waiting
for society. It rests with you and Charlie.’

‘He would agree, of course. He would do anything for my happiness.’

Arnold glowed in agreement. Charles was a good fellow, the best fellow
in the world; he had a level head and a wonderfully rational outlook.
Nothing niggardly about Charles.... And then an extraordinary thought
presented itself. Why could not he himself give Betty her heart’s
desire? Could she possibly have any such notion in her mind? Was it
possible that she liked him enough for that? The dream blossomed in his
imagination. He saw the baby laughing up at him from its cradle; saw it
growing up as the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Cowley. He himself would
see the boy--for a boy it would be--only occasionally, and he would
be known as ‘Uncle Arnold’ or some such nonsense. The situation would
be quite impossibly romantic, like something in a novel, and yet a
triumph of decency and good sense over vulgar middle-class morality.
Betty and he would resume their friendship unchanged and desiring no
change. His respect for her was invincible. She was the wife of his
friend, and that she would always be. He conceived the whole episode
dispassionately, an act of pure friendship. Was it possible that
she...? No, it was not possible. Talk was all very well, but confronted
with the need for action she would falter. His thoughts had been mere
presumption. Some other man, perhaps, but he--he could not expect so
great an honour, and certainly he could not seek it. If she had meant
that she would have said so. Of that he was sure. He dared not make
a suggestion that might be repellent to her: she would be so cruelly
embarrassed, and the perfection of their comradeship would be marred
for ever.

And yet, in a situation so excessively delicate, he must venture
something if he wished to be her friend. He tried to say: ‘You know I
too would do anything to make you happy.’ But the words as they formed
in his mind frightened him. How could he make her realize the utter
purity and loyalty of his desires?

Despite his bewilderment he felt the moment to be exquisitely rich in
beauty and in destiny. The pause lengthened. At last he stammered, ‘In
that event, of course, you would ask ... some friend.’

‘Yes.’ Betty’s tone was cold. ‘Forgive me for boring you.’ She jumped
up. ‘I’m getting stiff. Shall we move on?’

Something had gone wrong. Arnold grappled feverishly with the
incomprehensible. Had he said too much? No, too little. Betty was
already walking away. He could see only her back. When he caught her
up, the sight of her pride made him angry with himself; yet he felt
tongue-tied. He knew that he had failed her in a supreme crisis. Could
he have had that opportunity again he would for her sake have risked
all, and said, ‘Let me be the father of your child.’ But she was
talking now, rather volubly and consciously, of indifferent things.
Nothing would ever be the same again. Anger, jealous anger, flamed in
his heart against the child, never to be born, who stood like a ghost
between them, severing their friendship.




THE HOUSE AT MAADI




THE HOUSE AT MAADI


PART THE FIRST

_An Afternoon in April_

‘Ugliness, squalor, is only a nuisance,’ he told himself. ‘It is
beauty that hurts.’ Even in the house at Maadi, the house that held
Rosemary Fairfield, he could lose himself in musing; and he remained
lost until he became aware that a tall elderly woman with fine eyes and
silvering hair moved across the room to greet him.

‘You’re Mr. Redshawe, of course. I’m Rosemary’s mother. It was so good
of you to come.’ The young man’s evident shyness moved her to add, ‘You
_have_ met Rosemary, haven’t you?’

‘Thank you.’ He found his voice at last. ‘Yes, I had that pleasure
three days ago in Cairo. She was in the company of Mr. Bunnard, my
chief.’

‘My brother-in-law,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘You like your work?’

‘Well,’ began Redshawe, ‘an Irrigation Company....’

His hostess smiled. At ease now, and reposing in the charm of her Irish
voice and the kindliness of her speaking eyes, he smiled in return.
As he looked into her lined face he felt that by holding himself very
still he could almost hear the silken rustle of beauty’s vanishing
skirts.

‘Tell me,’ Mrs. Fairfield said, leaning forward a little, ‘does my
brother-in-law do any work, or do you and the rest do it all?’

He stared a moment at the dubious crease in his trousers. When he
looked up, with a slight smile, ‘I’ve a tremendous respect for Mr.
Bunnard,’ he assured her. ‘More than respect, if it’s not presumptuous
to say so. But of course he’s a very big wig indeed, don’t you see?
It’s only natural that he shouldn’t _do_ very much.’

Mrs. Fairfield glowed maternally at the sight of his blushes.

‘How very nice you are,’ she surprised herself by saying, with the
shadow of a tremor in her voice. ‘I’m so glad you came.’

He blushed again as he answered: ‘I’m most amazingly glad. I was
terrified at first.’

Her smile was friendlier than ever.

‘Not of me, I’m sure. Of Mrs. Bunnard, perhaps. She is a very positive
person--always has been.’

He wanted to blurt out: ‘No, it was your daughter that I was afraid
of’; but he could not shake off the grip of his reticence.

‘So are all of that cult,’ he said. ‘They teach one their entertaining
guesswork as though it were an exact science.... And Miss Fairfield--is
she too a believer?’

‘Rosemary is rather a baffling girl,’ replied Rosemary’s mother. ‘She
spends a lot of time with her aunt, and listens, listens. Yes, that is
almost all there is to be said about Rosemary: she listens. At this
moment she is no doubt at the Cairo Lodge, hearing about Yoga and Prana
and Kamaloka.’

‘And other patent breakfast foods,’ said Redshawe, with a cadence so
bitter as to bring wonder into his new friend’s eyes.

‘It would be a pity, don’t you think,’ he answered the question in her
glance, ‘if she took all that stuff seriously?’

‘Aren’t _you_ a little positive?’ she quizzed him.... ‘Ah, here is Mr.
Bunnard.’

Almost boyishly diffident, the spare familiar figure of Redshawe’s
chief sidled towards them. Mr. Bunnard was rather above medium height,
but his earnest concentration on the pattern of the carpet made him
seem smaller. When he raised his head a pair of ingenuous wondering
eyes peered, through the circular lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles,
upon a new world.

‘Ah, Redshawe,’ said Mr. Bunnard, focussing his mild radiance upon the
young man as they shook hands, ‘you’ve come then. How very nice.’

‘You’re just in time to tell us about the Atlantians, Dick,’ Mrs.
Fairfield greeted him, with the air of having been discussing the
Atlantians all the afternoon.

‘_Very_ nice,’ repeated Mr. Bunnard, peering from one to the other.

‘Yes, I’ve come, sir,’ said Redshawe, ‘and I’ve brought every one of my
seven bodies with me.’

Mr. Bunnard considered this remark with a smile that revealed for the
fraction of a second an excellent set of artificial teeth.

‘Ah, you haven’t forgotten our little talk then.... But you’ve got a
lot to learn yet. Seven planes and all interpenetrating. Is Hypatia at
home, Sheila?’

‘My dear Dick! She is at the Lodge, of course, and Rosemary is with
her. I expect we had better not wait tea for them. They’ll probably
have something in Cairo.’

‘Perhaps Hassan will get us some tea,’ ventured Mr. Bunnard, ‘if we ask
him.’

As though to his cue, the white-smocked, red-tarbooshed Hassan, the
Berber servant, appeared at this moment in the doorway bringing tea
on a large tray. In response to Mrs. Fairfield’s nod he shuffled
noiselessly into the room, bowing and smirking in his expansive
Oriental fashion, and set out the tea-things on an occasional table.

‘Seven planes and all interpenetrating,’ said Mr. Bunnard, appearing
to extract a peculiar comfort from the idea. ‘We generally take tea in
the French manner--or is it the Russian?--with lemon juice instead of
milk. By the by, I’ve got some Thought Forms up in my den, Redshawe,
that might interest you. Angry, affectionate, ambitious, pure, envious,
sensual, and so on: all accurately coloured, you know. I’ve spent a
lot of time on them. You’re not eating anything. I can recommend the
shortbread: it came all the way from Scotland.’

Mrs. Fairfield, roused by a sound outside, turned in the act of filling
Redshawe’s cup for the fifth time, to look out of the window.

‘Here are the truants,’ she said, ‘and we’ve nearly finished.’ And
Redshawe, following her glance, saw the miraculous Rosemary standing on
the gravel path outside. To his excited imagination it seemed that she
was but for an instant poised lightly upon this globe before flying
back to the paradise from which she had descended.

Then indeed came the whirlwind followed by the still small voice. Mrs.
Bunnard, tall, angular, and, though quiet, masterful, with conscious
power invaded the room: power which, however, broke like a spent wave
on the adamant rock of Redshawe’s absorption in Rosemary Fairfield.

‘Mr. Redshawe, how are you?’ said Mrs. Bunnard, grasping his hand. ‘We
have never been introduced, but I know you perfectly. This is my niece.’

‘We have met already,’ fell like a benediction from the lips of
Rosemary, as she gave him her hand.

‘Now let us take our things off,’ said Mrs. Bunnard with ferocious good
humour. ‘Come, Rosemary!’

A moment later Redshawe was conscious of having stared at the departing
vision. The exodus completed by Mr. Bunnard, he turned to find the
thoughtful eyes of Rosemary’s mother upon him. Divining that she had
read some of his mind he became confused.

Mrs. Fairfield rose to ring the bell: an action so startling to the
disordered nerves of Redshawe that he breathed deep relief when, a
moment later, he heard her ask Hassan to make some fresh tea for the
ladies. His hostess came back into the bay of the room and stared out
at the clustering purple masses of bougainvillea that hung from the
white house, her hands playing listlessly with a fly-whisk.

‘This is the coolest part of the house till the sun goes down,’ she
said, in a tone so void of expression as to fix his instant attention.
‘Afterwards we will sit out on the piazza, and perhaps Rosemary will
play to us.’

‘That will be delightful,’ he answered, politely acquiescent; but his
mind was asking: ‘What is the matter? What is she going to say?’

He became agitated with the expectation of hearing something momentous
about Rosemary. But, after a pause, Mrs. Fairfield did but add the
commonplace remark that his was an uncommon name.

‘Yes.’ Disappointment and relief strove together in his tone.

‘Are you the son of a certain Stephen Redshawe, I wonder?’

‘Yes,’ he said again, with quickening interest.

‘You have his eyes,’ she assured him with a smile, and turned quickly
to the window.

‘By Jove, you knew my father?’ He got out of his chair in his
astonishment, and found himself, with a sense of shock, face to face
with an old woman who smiled at him wanly.

‘Yes, many years ago.’

‘He never mentioned----’ he began; and stopped, blushing for his
gaucherie. As if in atonement, ‘Please talk to me about my father, if
it won’t distress you,’ he pleaded.

After a long silence, ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘There’s a story I can never
tell you. But we’re going to be good friends, you and I, and some day
we’ll have a long talk about your father.’

Embarrassed, he murmured lame thanks.

‘There’s forty years between us,’ she added, half to herself. ‘So we
shall be good friends.’

The door was slightly ajar and in the contracted doorway flashed the
smile of Mr. Bunnard.

‘Come along, Redshawe,’ chirped Mr. Bunnard. ‘The ladies are coming
down to their tea. Slip away while you can and have a look at my
Thought Forms.’

Redshawe, obeying this unwelcome summons, mused deeply on the story
that he was never to hear.


PART THE SECOND

_Sheila Dyrle_


1

Somewhere, no doubt, in Sheila’s personality, the story was written
down; and she could have turned for young Redshawe the pages that she
so seldom and so reluctantly turned for herself. She was an emotional
but not a sentimental woman, and retrospect was a melancholy luxury
that for the most part she denied herself. So far as she could she
denied it to herself now, although the young man had troubled the deep
waters of her mind. If for a moment she looked back her life appeared
to her as a fruitless quest for something--who knows what?--for beauty,
for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting
fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. Intimations
of such a reality had again and again quickened desire within her. But,
even in the moment of stretching out the hands to clasp it, ‘beauty
vanishes, beauty passes’....

       *       *       *       *       *

Half a century before, in her early teens, Sheila had emerged from her
sister’s bedroom into the green distempered corridor of the school
infirmary, hotly denying in her heart that Helena was dying. She
wondered at the obtuseness of these people who had seen the sweet bloom
of Helena’s cheeks and the lustre of her eyes, and yet drained their
vocabulary of euphemisms hinting at death. Weak and wasted indeed she
was, but full, still, of the serene joy that was her peculiar gift to
the world. God couldn’t be so foolish or so cruel as to let Helena die.
That would surely have been too sorry a joke even for the deity of Aunt
Hester’s imagination.

‘Why is every one so silly?’ she complained to Aunt Hester, who had
waited in trembling silence till her coming. ‘Helena’s getting better.
Of course she is.’

‘Yes, dear,’ agreed Aunt Hester submissively. ‘Did you have a nice
talk?’

‘We couldn’t let her talk much. She’s still so weak. But she said she
would soon be out and about again.’

Tears began trickling down the lined leathery cheeks of Aunt Hester:
cheeks that had suddenly the grotesque air of having been corrugated
for the sole purpose of being wept upon. ‘Poor darling! Did she say
that?’

‘Oh, aunt, why will you believe those silly people?’ Sheila’s voice
rang out. ‘She must get well--she _must_!’

‘We must hope on,’ quavered Aunt Hester, furtively dabbing her eyes
with a little sodden ball of handkerchief.

Sheila, alone in her faith, succumbed to the fear that tried to hide
itself in anger. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘It’s a beastly shame ... to
give up hope. Think how _well_ she looks! She’s been making plans for
the summer holidays.’

At that Aunt Hester turned away her head, hunched up her back, and
frankly sobbed, leaning against the back of a chair. All her prim
dignity had vanished, and for the first time Sheila saw in her aunt an
old frail woman. The shock of that discovery passing, she stared for
a moment in sullen misery at the queer-shaped convulsive figure; then
turned abruptly away and went, dry-eyed, into their bedroom.

In bed she thought she could hear her sister’s voice in delirium,
although she knew that there were two walls and a passage between
them: it muttered interminably until she had to bite her lips together
to prevent herself from screaming. Aunt Hester soon came into the
room, undressed herself by moonlight, and tumbled on to her knees. She
remained kneeling, with her face and arms lying limply across her bed,
for what seemed hours; and Sheila stared stupidly at the ceiling and
strained her ears at every trivial sound. For a moment she closed her
eyes....

And when she opened them again, birds were chattering outside her
window and pale dawnlight, like a ghost, was in the room. ‘Like a
ghost,’ Sheila said, and shuddered. Aunt Hester was not there; her bed
had not been slept in.

Sheila got quickly out of bed, a dry sob of fear breaking from her, and
ran barefooted into the green corridor. She stood quite motionless for
a while, one hand resting on the door handle, and listened; tiptoed
a few steps up the passage, her eyes fixed dreadfully on the room
that held Helena; and drew back again. Time became a throbbing agony.
Her thought dizzied itself by ceaselessly revolving round the glazed
white door that had brass figures, 17, screwed upon its middle panel,
but her eyes steadily stared. ‘Seventeen,’ said some chattering thing
in her brain: ‘that’s her age. Is that why they put 17, or is it a
coincidence?’ But she was not to be distracted by silly questions. The
door began to open.

Slowly the glazed white door that had stared back at her for so long,
mutely reiterating ‘17,’ began to open, as though it had come to life.
‘A big white waistcoat,’ said Sheila’s chattering brain. Like a silly
flat face it moved aside to make room for something that with funereal
step passed out: a bent figure in black tight-fitting bodice and
white lace cap. Aunt Hester’s right hand drew the door to behind her,
and with an abrupt resolute gesture she flung up her head and stood,
regally tall, a black figure of doom framed in the white doorway. In a
silence like death itself the eyes of these two stricken creatures met.

That meeting of eyes was an icy blast in the green twilit corridor.
It froze the running water of Sheila’s thought and made her catch
her breath. Gradually, while they looked at each other, Aunt Hester
crumpled and shrank again to the meagre dimensions of a bent old woman;
she stumbled forward to meet her niece with feebly gesticulating arms.
The next morning she had answered the mute question of Sheila’s eyes
and was enfolding her rigid passive body.

The single word she saw forming on her aunt’s lips released the locked
flow of Sheila’s thought. Her mind became once more almost insanely
active. One dry gasp escaped her, and no other sound. The springs of
pity were barren in her: this sobbing woman was a stranger. Helena
was dead. She turned away from her aunt and went slowly back into the
bedroom. Helena was dead. ‘Very well,’ said Sheila’s mind, and she,
ignoring that, suddenly thought that if God were to appear to her at
that moment she would strike him with her hand. And that would have
been how silly! He would only laugh. Helena was dead. She stared,
dry-eyed, out of the window and saw the sun newly risen in his glory.
The leaves of the acacia were a luminous green; a thrush in its
branches poured out bubbling melody. All the universe was alive with a
stabbing futile beauty. Helena was dead.

No tears came to release the pent grief. Why was that? ‘Like the woman
in the poem,’ muttered that mental chatterbox and began iterating ‘Home
they brought her warrior dead. Home they brought her warrior dead.’ It
was in a little red book. ‘Rose a nurse of ninety years.’ Was it ninety
or eighty? And Rose was a girl’s name, but it wasn’t the nurse’s name.
Rose a nurse. A nurse rose. Rise, rose, risen. And on the third day
he rose again from the dead. Who was it did that? The little red book
had an odd name on its cover.... And suddenly Helena came before her,
alive, alive, and happy as she had always been. What nonsense. Helena
was dead.... Like a city besieged Sheila fought against the cruel
memories that invaded her.

Aunt Hester came with food on a tray, and urged her to try to eat
something, just a morsel, just a sip. What was the good of it all? And
the voice of Aunt Hester stayed with her interpolating dull remarks
about funerals, trains, Penlington, nice to be home again, poor dear
mother, make a friend of Jesus, try not to brood, into Sheila’s busy
thought. But Sheila pushed them all from her. She was eager to brood.
Without brooding, life was empty: a dry husk. She surrendered herself
now, opened her heart to that host of memories: they tumbled in, a
looting rabble. She lived over and over again her days with Helena: her
thought sped through the years ever more quickly, until in a sickening
rush it reached the dead wall of the present. Helena was dead, God
had stupidly killed her. And would they have to try to sing a hymn
about--what was it?--each within his narrow bed, safe home at last,
Jesu’s breast, blend the living with the dead.... Aunt Hester was back
again, urging her to cry. ‘You do the crying, aunt.’ Had she said that
or only thought it? She wished Aunt Hester would go away with her talk
of the kind nurse, just a sip or two, quite a peaceful passing dear,
try to pray, home again soon, take her with us. What was the sense in
saying ‘take her with us’ when Helena was dead? There was nothing to
take home. There was nothing to take home except what was in the white
room, number seventeen. They’d put it in a box ... not Helena; Helena
was gone away ... Sheila was jealous of anything that came to thrust
itself between her and her memories; but she could not still the almost
febrile activity of her aching brain: her random thoughts danced on
dizzily over the bottomless black pit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Back in the house at Penlington. A locked room now, with It, shut up in
a shiny coffin, on trestles. And to-day, at noon, It was to be taken
away.

Noon. The long-tailed black horses trampled on Sheila’s heart. Six men
entered the house and mounted the stairs--tramp, tramp, tramp--and
stopped.... They returned more slowly, their breathing more noisy,
their footsteps less regular. Sheila turned her face from the window
lest she should find horror made visible.

She stood in the stuffy room, waiting for the others to come
downstairs. Although the windows were wide open the atmosphere was
stiflingly hot. The drowsy hum in which all summer sounds were merged
floated in oppressively, and the clock’s ticking was a burden.

She was very uncomfortable and wretched in her black clothes; her
gloved hands perspired. She caught sight, through the trees in the
garden, of the waiting carriage.... Why were all these things necessary?

Uncle Peter came downstairs, followed by Aunt Hester and a school chum
of Helena’s. Other draped figures came, including a strange girl-cousin
with her husband; but none was of the slightest consequence.

In the crawling carriage now; and idiot birds were singing happily
outside. Sunshine, dusty roads, blue cloudless sky, hot air, silly
singing birds, the window-fittings in the carriage, Uncle Peter with
his expanse of waistcoat and great gold chain and perspiring face,
the split in the third finger of her black glove, the ill-repressed
sniffling of the cousin, a scratch in the paint over Uncle Peter’s
head, the houses and hedges moving slowly past them, people at the
side of the road with raised hats, a team of cricketers in a distant
field and the gleam of their white flannels in the sunlight: of all
these things she was conscious, and of the black pit, Helena dead, and
the slow miserable rumble of wheels.

She wondered why God would not speak to her. A new hope flickered. She
would listen for His voice, that still small voice in the soul. But the
only voice she heard, whether within or without, was Uncle Peter’s.
‘It really _is_ hot,’ he said conversationally, as they got out of the
carriage.

And now added to the horror and the heat was the sight of the coffin
being borne into that squat evil building, that house of death, the
cemetery chapel, and, presently, a dull droning voice in melancholy
monotone:

‘_In the morning it is green and groweth up; but in the evening it is
cut down, dried up and withered. For when thou art angry all our days
are gone; we bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told.
The days of our years are three score years and ten._’

And Sheila, a tiny girl again, was having happy romps with Helena in a
garden full of flowers and sunshine. Helena was clapping her hands and
laughing; Helena was lifting her, shoulder-high, to kiss a very tall
rose that was really a princess imprisoned by black magic.... And then
she was going to Helena for her music lesson, and Helena pretended she
was just an ordinary pupil (for that was part of the game) named Linda
Smith. ‘And what are you going to play this afternoon, Linda?’...

‘_The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death._’

The man was still there, the long-faced cadaverous man droning out his
words. And now they were out again in the scorching sun, standing, the
men bare-headed, round an open grave. She heard the women sobbing;
she saw Uncle Peter with bent head, a great red boil peeping over
his collar from the pink folds of neck. And now the coffin was being
lowered. Something seemed to clutch her by the throat; but the tears
would not come.

‘_For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy...._’

‘Come along, dear,’ said Aunt Hester, taking her arm. And Sheila,
waking as from an evil dream, saw compassion looking out of the eyes
of Uncle Peter. She was the centre of this tragedy. For an instant she
luxuriated in the emotion of her position; enjoyed the accession of
self-importance; rolled mourning like syrup on her tongue. She caught
herself in the act; and her heart turned sour and said to her, ‘How
hateful you are!’


2

Helena’s death is of signal importance in the history of Sheila because
it was the occasion of her first serious quarrel with God. And though,
as the years went on, she did in a measure make it up with Him, the
reconciliation was never complete. She never ceased, from that day,
to relish Mr. Hardy’s gestures of contempt for the President of the
Immortals. The name of God, none the less, resumed something of its old
majesty. She depersonalized Him, disembodied Him, transmuted Him from
solid substance into a kind of immanent gas, a presence that disturbed
her with the sense of elevated thoughts. She dabbled in the literature
of popular mysticism, deriving comfort from its comfortable abstract
phrases, its Cosmic Urges, its Universal Self. She read a text-book on
Hegel; and the Hegelian paradox, ‘Being and not-being are identical,’
she rolled on her tongue until it assumed the flavour of truism. While
she was on the crest of this enthusiasm Kay Wilton came, to renew the
promise of a transcendental happiness.

But let us turn the pages more quickly until we come upon a Sheila of
nineteen years, with the Kay adventure past but still fresh in her
mind. With her school-friend Hypatia Fairfield she sat in a coign of
the cliff at Selborne and gazed musingly at sea and sky. Sheila was too
busy with her dream to be very interested in Hypatia’s talk about her
clever brother who had just gone to Cambridge: his profound knowledge
of history, his intellectual honesty, and his sarcasm poured so
liberally on a certain Paley whose _Evidences of Christianity_ he had
been forced to study for the Little Go. Slightly bored by the recital
of this brother’s deeds and sayings, Sheila began a little to scorn
her friend’s sisterly partiality. Even the severe, the rational, the
proudly unconventional Hypatia was not immune from that human weakness.

‘Have you ever liked anybody very much, Hypatia?’

‘Liked anyone?’

‘A boy, I mean.’

‘Why, of course, Edward----’

‘Oh, not your brother.’ Sheila waved an impatient hand. ‘Have you never
been....’

‘Do you mean in love?’ asked Hypatia, in some surprise.

‘Well, yes, in love.’

‘No.’ Hypatia shook her head, firmly, but without the scorn that Sheila
had half-expected to see. ‘I never have. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I just wondered.’

For a moment Hypatia contemplated a distant ship. ‘Look at the sun on
that sail,’ she said.... ‘Have _you_ ever been?’

Sheila nodded, scrutinizing closely a smooth white stone she had dug up
with her fingers from the chalky soil.

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know?’

‘Yes. There was a kind of engagement. It was while I was at St.
Margaret’s.’

‘Do you mean it’s over now?’

Sheila began trying to explain everything. The effort took her away
for a moment to the first dim beginnings of love, four or five years
back, and then brought her swiftly to the greater glory and deeper pain
of the year just gone. Hypatia listened with quiet attention to the
rambling, shy, and inadequate narration.

‘It was at a Band of Hope that I first saw him,’ began Sheila.

‘What_ever_ made you go to a Band of Hope?’ asked Hypatia.

‘I had a friend, Sophie Dewick. She used to go. And they used to have
lantern lectures and concerts and things. It wasn’t bad.’

The lantern slides had been a disappointment, being concerned almost
entirely with graphical statistics about alcohol. The only picture
worth while was that of a flea, magnified some thousandfold, happily
reminiscent of the _New Geology Reader_ and of Poe’s stories. This was
an inadequate sugar coating to the pill of chemical analysis. But Mr.
Beak made everything worth while--Mr. Beak, with spare figure, polished
pate, and black bushy eyebrows. When he rose, lifting his hand for
silence in order that he might announce ‘Hymn Number twenty-thwee--the
twenty-third hymn,’ he seemed like a military commander admitting
defeat but determined not to surrender; he seemed, to himself perhaps
as to his sympathizers, the last champion of sobriety in a drunken
world. This sense of desperate purpose pervaded the whole proceedings
of which Mr. Beak had the conducting: the religious service had always
this invincible air of being held round an open grave--the open grave
of one who, without doubt, had sipped claret-cup at some festival
in his youth and in riper years had taken to wife-beating, smoking,
swearing, and the other vices incidental to dipsomania. Mrs. Beak,
plump, rosy, and smiling, chatted pleasantly to every one and made
optimistic secretarial announcements.

‘And that was where I met him,’ Sheila told Hypatia.

‘Did you lose your heart at once?’

‘Not a bit. There was something about him: I don’t know how to express
it--a sort of mute poetry in his face. But I didn’t really give a
thought to him then. He seemed a nice boy; nothing more.’

Later she discovered that he had sad grey eyes, a submissive mouth,
untidy light brown hair. He wore his high double collar and his black
tie with an incongruous effect, like a cherub masquerading as a clerk.
Sheila’s interest in Kay, her urgent desire to protect him, led her
into strange places; for he was a youth of inscrutable impulses. The
Band of Hope was good fun; and to accept sometimes the hospitality of
Sophie’s pew in a strange chapel full of green gloom was a defection
from Wesleyanism that Aunt Hester found it easy to forgive: the easier
when she reflected that it was a further step from the dreaded Popery.
But the Seven Days’ Mission was something that taxed Sheila heavily.
A new humility was growing upon her; the beatific vision of Kay drew
her with a power she found irresistible. So innocent, so shy a boy,
so unaware of his own attractiveness, he seemed to be crying out for
sympathy. She read an unspoken appeal in his big eyes; she discovered
a pathos of inexpressiveness in his lame confused speeches. That he
admired her was a gradual revelation that at first she hardly dared to
face: that she longed to know him and to be his friend she admitted to
herself at once with her usual candour. Why then did this young prince,
this strayed denizen of the celestial meads, choose such odd ways of
spending his time? What force impelled him to attend that curious orgy
of emotion, the Seven Days’ Mission? She found the riddle hard to read.
Humbly and patiently she set herself the task of trying to understand
these religious fervours.

Sheila and Kay talked rarely, and never of matters more deep than the
Band of Hope, _Pickwick Papers_, the weather, the oddities of common
acquaintances, and the mock-tragedy in blank verse that Clive Bunter
had written for the Social Evening. The rehearsals for this play drew
them together every Tuesday for four weeks; but the play was never
presented to the public, for the dress-rehearsal was attended by Mr.
Beak and Mr. Turley, and these gentlemen, deacons both, were seized
with alarm at the prospect of theatricals, however innocuous, taking
place in a lecture-hall so near the sacred precincts of the church.

Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.

‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.

‘But they were awfully funny, those two,’ Sheila remarked. ‘People so
comic must have a spark of goodness in them somewhere.’

‘Goodness!’ said Clive Bunter, ‘Gallons and gallons of it. It ought to
be put a stop to, this monopoly of goodness. But as for brains--all the
brains in the Band of Hope wouldn’t fill a pin’s head.’

‘You’re not including your own, are you?’ asked Kay.

Sheila, who considered Clive rather conceited, laughed with relish. She
was at some pains to show her appreciation. Perhaps it was this that
encouraged Kay to ask, when, later, she turned to leave the others:
‘May I come a little way with you?’

She said ‘Please do,’ and pointedly refrained from calling out ‘Good
night’ to Sophie, who was walking some yards ahead with the Hero of the
doomed play, a gentleman by whom of late she had been rather engrossed.

Sheila and Kay walked for a while in silence down a broad avenue of
trees bordered on one side by dark woods, and on the other by scattered
houses. A yellow strip of moon hung, glowing in the blue, above the
woods.

She began telling him that she was to be sent away to St. Margaret’s, a
school in Selborne; that the term was thirteen weeks long; and that her
aunt talked of going to live in Selborne permanently. This meant that
she and Kay might never meet again.

Kay surveyed this prospect dismally. They discussed it in elaborately
casual tones. And all the while she was thinking how delicious were the
stillness and the moonlight and this unspoken love. Even the impending
separation was beautiful, tragic, uplifting. When at his suggestion
they sat down on a borough council seat facing the woods, she caught
her breath and trembled at the exquisite beauty of his shy avoidance of
her eyes.

‘Frightfully thick those woods are,’ he said.

But that was said to gain time, she knew. A feeling almost of fear came
over her. He was going to try to put into words this wonderful, this
unutterable love.... If only it could remain unspoken, and they sit
here for ever in silence!

‘I say, Sheila,’ he burst out. ‘I wish you weren’t going!’

‘Do you?’ She stared at the dark gravel path.

‘Dash it all--I’m awfully fond of you.’

She turned to him with flushed cheeks and fluttering heart, trying to
speak.

‘I think ... I think you’re a perfect dear,’ she said. ‘Oh, Kay!’

His eyes filled with light. Rather awkwardly he put his hand on her
shoulder.

They kissed shyly, hesitatingly, as though afraid lest by doing so they
should break the spell of beauty that bound them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hypatia listened, slightly frowning.

‘After that dress-rehearsal,’ said Sheila, ‘he told me.’

‘Told you?’

‘Told me that he ... liked me. I knew before, but he told me then.’

Her voice died away into silence.

‘Nothing can ever come near that,’ she said, in a low tone. ‘Nothing,
ever.’

She resumed her story after a pregnant silence. The sound of the sea
soothed her with its rhythm.

‘A few days afterwards I came to St. Margaret’s. And then....’

She stopped speaking. Hypatia looked up to find her gaze fixed upon the
horizon.

‘Well?’ said Hypatia gently, after a long pause. ‘Did he forget all
about you or something of that sort?’

‘No,’ answered Sheila, ‘he didn’t forget. He kept writing me letters.’

‘Why, of course! Didn’t you want him to?’...

The first letter made her eyes moist with tenderness; but every one
that followed came with a whisper of impending tragedy. He wrote always
of the church, of the office, of the garden, of the Band of Hope: round
these things his immortal soul revolved.

  Next Sunday fortnight I am to give a paper at the Young People’s
  Bible Class. Mr. Dewick asked me if I would and he said he would be
  very pleased if I would say yes and I could not very well get out
  of it as I had no excuse ready. I have chosen for my subject Sunday
  Observance; it is a good subject but I find it hard to put many
  thoughts down on paper about it. I will write and tell you how I get
  on. We had a really broad-minded sermon last Sunday on the text ‘By
  their fruits ye shall know them,’ it upset some of the very strict
  people I fancy but Mr. Dewick liked it and so did I. The preacher,
  whose name I forget, he was from Barnet, said that there had been
  some quite good atheists, but I thought he took a very extreme view
  when he said that some atheists lived much better lives than the
  average christian. It seemed to me that he put that bit in just so
  as to sound paradoxical and daring. Father has been very busy in the
  garden, pruning his roses, as the weather has greatly improved these
  last few days. There is a new fellow now at the office, but I cannot
  say I like him much, he is a bit of a rough diamond; rough anyhow, I
  am not so sure about the diamond. I think he drinks and he certainly
  uses bad language, but if one tells him of it he only gets more
  offensive. By the by, isn’t it funny that you should be still at
  school while I’m at business when we are both seventeen and within a
  few months of each other?

Passages like this frightened Sheila by indicating a gulf of mental
disparity fixed between Kay and her. ‘It’s only superficial,’ whispered
her love. ‘He’s not like that really. He’s not a good letter-writer:
that’s all.’ And she tried to silence her own critical spirit with
tender memories of his wooing. ‘Can love be scared away by a bad
literary style?’ she asked herself. But her mind worked on against
her: by no manner of violence could she prevent its probing into the
substance of Kay’s frequent letters. In spite of her protests it coined
for her a new word, Kayesque, to express a certain indefinable quality,
a taint, manifest in his way of thinking and writing. Indefinable or
not, it was undefined, for she dared not define it. To have confessed
even to herself that it meant complacency, mediocrity, total absorption
in the commonplace, would have precipitated disaster.

And to quicken her faculty for detecting the Kayesque there was the
constant companionship of Hypatia Fairfield. From the moment when
Sheila woke, one midnight, to find Hypatia sitting up in bed reading
by candlelight _The City of Dreadful Night_ the two girls were fast
friends. This was but one book from the secret hoard of five that
Hypatia discovered to Sheila on that exciting night. She found the
school library altogether too prim, too like Miss Fry the head, to suit
her taste.

‘They starve you here, don’t they?’ she said, opening her locker and
exhibiting her treasures one by one.

Each one had a brown-paper cover bearing in large block letters a
title specially designed to propitiate the eye of Authority, should
Authority happen to come round some day with a master-key. _Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs_ clothed with righteousness the impious pages of Spencer’s
_First Principles_, and _The Life of Livingstone_ invested _Monte
Cristo_ with a garb of sanctity. Shelley beat his luminous wings behind
the broad back of Robinson Crusoe.

‘It’s a pity Miss Fry is such a frump,’ said Sheila, when they had got
into their beds and Hypatia had blown the light out.

Hypatia agreed. ‘I’m awfully glad you woke up. We might never have got
to know each other if you hadn’t caught me reading.’

‘I don’t expect we should,’ responded Sheila, glowing with the
excitement of a new friendship.

‘I was absolutely isolated,’ Hypatia said. ‘Oh, why ever didn’t you
come to St. Margaret’s before?’

Sheila laughed. ‘I would have done it if I’d known, perhaps. And yet I
was sorry to leave my other school.’

‘Was it decent there?’

‘Well, they didn’t teach us much, but it was very comfortable and
homelike. I’d practically grown up there. It was a day school. They
didn’t worry me much. Two or three of us in the Sixth used to spend a
lot of our school hours producing a school mag.’

‘Unofficial, I suppose?’

‘Very. We wrote it out by hand and handed it round.’

‘Did you write stories, or what?’

‘Oh, things, you know,’ said Sheila. ‘It was only a lark. A kind of
skit on the official journal.’

‘They’re too ladylike here for anything so vulgar as journalism,’
complained Hypatia to the darkness.

‘I expect so.’

‘Miss Fry with her Ministering Children!’ added Hypatia scornfully....
‘By the way, are you church, chapel, or what?’

‘The last,’ said Sheila. ‘I’m rather keen on Edward Carpenter just now.
Have you read him?’

‘Yes. Whitman and water,’ replied Hypatia. ‘I’m an agnostic personally.
So are my people.’

‘Your people too!’ exclaimed Sheila. ‘I thought one’s people were
always orthodox.’

Hypatia laughed. ‘Are you Irish?’

‘Part of me is.’

‘The voice part,’ said Hypatia.

‘Mother was Irish, and father had some Irish blood--just a drop or two.’

‘Your voice is lovely.’

Sheila heard Hypatia’s bed creak, and then the sound of a match being
struck. Hypatia bent over her.

‘And you’ve Irish eyes too,’ she said. The match flickered out, and she
went back to her bed. ‘They’re blue. Blue eyes and dark hair.’

She struck off at a tangent.

‘You’ll like Spencer. He makes your brain simmer. I said that before,
didn’t I? Especially on the Unknowable. Funny, some people think
there’s nothing unknowable.’

‘Beautiful people,’ said Sheila. ‘The salt of the earth. You’d think,
to hear them talk, that they were present at the Creation of the world
taking shorthand notes.’

There was silence for a few minutes.

‘I believe I’m too excited to sleep,’ said Sheila presently. ‘But I
suppose we ought to....’

       *       *       *       *       *

For weeks together, in defiance of Kay’s letters, Sheila abandoned
herself to her dream of love, and the Kay of her imagination was a
lover beyond criticism. It was become an article of her faith that it
was this perfect lover, not the author of the letters, whom she would
meet again on her return from school. Him she had indeed seen on the
night of their love’s visible flowering. They had but to be together
again, and she would know him for what he was, master of a speech more
eloquent than words. And while she dreamed of this blissful reunion a
letter came that rent her heart.

  DARLING SHEILA.--Do not be surprised if I don’t write for several
  days. Dad died suddenly yesterday.
                                                  Your loving KAY.

She recalled Helena’s death, re-living some of that agony; and
compassion for Kay wrung bitter tears from her. Into her letter she
poured a torrent of love and pity and passionate protest. She yearned
for the moment when she would see him face to face and offer for his
comfort the balm of her lips.

       *       *       *       *       *

‘You see,’ explained Sheila, ‘I couldn’t tell you then, Hypatia. It
would have been disloyal. I didn’t admit even to myself that there was
anything to spoil our happiness. I thought that as soon as I saw him
again, and touched him, that horrible doubt would vanish.’

‘And didn’t it?’

‘Yes, for a moment or two. Then it came back ... and grew and grew ...
to a hateful certainty.’

‘Yes?’

‘The separation had lasted for the best part of a year, because I
didn’t go home for the long summer holiday: Auntie came here instead.
And during that time we’d both developed, he and I.’

‘He was more Kayesque than ever?’

Sheila flinched.

‘Oh, don’t remind me of that detestable invention of mine,’ she
begged.... ‘He’d changed--oh, incredibly! Even his appearance. There
were still wonderful moments--sometimes when the light fell on his hair
... and he was slightly freckled, you know,’ she added.

‘But he was changed.’

‘He was just like his letters. And when he was saying certain
things--stuffy things--he even _looked_ like his letters.’

‘And the mute poetry?’ asked Hypatia presently.

Sheila stared miserably at her own feet.

‘I don’t know what became of that,’ she confessed. ‘It was there, you
know,’ she added, seeing a gentle incredulous smile flit over her
friend’s face. ‘Hypatia, it was, really. I _saw_ it.’

‘And then----’ suggested Hypatia after a silence.

‘Well, as soon as I was certain,’ said Sheila simply, ‘I had to tell
him, of course.’

‘That it was hopeless?’

Sheila nodded.

‘We lived in different worlds.... And of course he didn’t understand.’

‘No,’ said Hypatia. ‘He wouldn’t. That was the whole tragedy, wasn’t
it?’

‘He thought--’ Sheila began, with a little bitter laugh ... then
stopped, and looked at Hypatia with pain in her eyes. ‘He thought I had
stopped caring, Hypatia!’

She rose to her feet.

‘It must be getting on for teatime,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’


3

Seven years later, on the platform of Penny’s Heath station, Sheila
discovered a new Hypatia Fairfield: tall, dark, severe, with thoughtful
eyes and aggressive chin; by everyday standards a plain young woman,
but redeemed from unattractiveness by an air of absorbed interest
in some vision of her own. Since leaving school the two girls had
exchanged letters of prodigious length. Once or twice they had visited
each other’s homes, but these visits had provided an intercourse less
intimate, less real, than that of their letters. Into the bubbling
pot of that correspondence was poured all the raw egoism, all the shy
solemn discoveries, of two active minds passing through the adventure
of adolescence. Their knowledge of each other at school had been a mere
passing acquaintanceship compared with this new intimacy that only
distance and the postal service had made possible.

Recently they had begun to drift apart. Aunt Hester’s disapproval
of normal life made the house at Penlington something of a prison;
Aunt Hester’s friends were anæmic, uncongenial. ‘Nothing ever happens
to me,’ she said to herself. ‘I never meet anyone or do anything.
Things just go on, every day alike.’ She began to indulge herself in
pessimism. Compared with the soothing syrup of Aunt Hester’s religion,
despair was almost intoxicating: she tasted it eagerly, as though it
had been wine. In those days she and Hypatia had echoed each other
rapturously enough, agreeing--with what delight--that life was but a
dry husk and death a fit ending to a witless scheme. But now Hypatia,
with a fatal instinct for novelty, had subsided into the arms of a new
religion, a religion that made summary end of all problems by denying
their existence. It was this, Sheila divined, that had put that look of
assured calm into her eyes.

‘So here you are then,’ said Hypatia, shy, as ever, of demonstration.
‘Where’s your trunk? I’ve got the trap in the station-yard.’

With Sheila and her belongings safely in the trap Hypatia took the
reins between her capable fingers and drove away.

‘It’s very jolly here,’ said Sheila.

‘Yes. Much the same as before. Why, it must be a year since your last
visit!’

‘It is.’

‘Scandalous!’ Hypatia smiled reproof. ‘Well, has your quest succeeded
yet?’

‘My quest?’

‘You wrote some months ago saying that you could never rest until you
had found a philosophy that would hold water?’

‘I’m still seeking,’ admitted Sheila.

‘You’ll never find it,’ remarked Hypatia, with calm certainty, ‘in the
direction you are looking in.’

‘No?’ said Sheila good-humouredly.

‘Well, you’ll have plenty of chance here of inspecting every fad,’ said
Hypatia. ‘They’re a lively set, our neighbours. There’s almost every
shade of belief and unbelief possible to the human mind represented
here, you’ll remember, and every shade has its club or church or
soap-box.’

‘Even your shade?’ interposed Sheila.

‘Yes. Though that’s altogether different,’ Hypatia retorted. ‘Still I
can understand that you think it just one more little sect and nothing
else. When you are in science you will see everything more clearly.’

‘I shall see that there’s nothing to see at all,’ said Sheila. ‘Isn’t
that your fundamental doctrine?’

‘True, matter does not exist, if that’s what you mean,’ said Hypatia.
‘That is perhaps Our Leader’s greatest discovery. God is All-Good, the
very Principle of Goodness, and man is His reflection. Sin, disease,
and death----’

‘Exist in the reflection but not in the reflector,’ remarked Sheila.
‘Are your people of the same way of thinking?’

‘Oh no.’ Hypatia shook her head. ‘Mother’s _trying_ to understand, but
Father’s making no attempt at all.’

‘What about your brother?’

‘Of course, Edward’s hopeless. He’s utterly absorbed in his precious
book.’

‘I thought he was going in for law,’ said Sheila.

‘So did I. So did everybody. He got a good first in his Tripos. But he
doesn’t really care for law. History’s his great subject.’

‘What’s the book about?’ Sheila was excited by the thought of meeting
in the flesh this maker of books.

‘I believe he calls it _A History of the Religious Idea_, but he’s very
reticent about it. It’s a very proud exhibition of ignorance, no doubt.’

‘Hypatia!’ protested Sheila. ‘How very unkind of you!’

Hypatia sniffed.

‘Not at all. You misunderstand me. Edward, you see, is an agnostic.
_Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne sais rien_, you know. He
professes to know nothing about God and so on, and is just as proud of
his ignorance as I used to be of mine.’

‘It must be nice for you to know all about it now,’ said Sheila.

‘It is,’ agreed the seer. ‘But it’s knowledge anyone can share who will
try to understand.’

From the field they were passing _Fairfield’s Hygienic Corsets_ blazed
in letters of red above the hedge. The factory chimneys blotted out the
horizon.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hypatia’s father was a spare, bullet-headed man with mutton-chop
whiskers of a sandy hue and an indomitable nose that he had followed
faithfully _per aspera ad astra_. The stars of Mr. Fairfield’s
attainment were commercial prosperity and for his son the education
that he himself had been denied. It became more and more apparent to
Sheila, during that drive from the station, that for Hypatia’s parents
Edward, the firstborn, was the being round whom the world revolved. For
him the sun shone and the little stars clapped their hands. Fairfield
senior, at first indifferent to Edward, had been trained in son-worship
by his wife. Behind a brusqueness that passed for eccentric humour Mrs.
Fairfield concealed power. Worshipping her son, for his advancement
she had used her husband unsparingly, guiding his energy consistently
in the direction of most commercial gain, and curbing his desire
to spend himself, a prophet in the wilderness, in fruitless public
advocacy of freethought. Her subjugation of her husband, himself a
being of great though erratic energy, was the gradual achievement of
twenty-five years.

‘Well, Miss Dyrle,’ said Hypatia’s father briskly. ‘Here you are again!
We’re glad to see you. You know that.’

He looked at Sheila kindly, but as if to say: ‘Deny it if you can.’

‘Ah,’ he added, ‘here’s my wife. The honoured guest’s arrived, me dear,
and I’m just extending to her, in the name of the family, a hearty
welcome.’

The arrival of Mrs. Fairfield displaced a lot of air.

‘Now this _is_ a treat,’ she said, holding out both her hands. ‘My dear
Sheila! I may still call you Sheila, mayn’t I? You are so _often_ in
our thoughts!’

Sheila murmured her pleasure.

‘Must take us as you find us,’ admonished Mr. Fairfield. ‘We’re homely
folk with no airs. No education to speak of. Couldn’t afford it. And
now that we can afford it--it’s too late.’

‘Not too late for Edward, father dear,’ Edward’s mother reminded him.

‘Ah no. One scholar in the family at any rate.’

‘One scholar, three agnostics, and a religious crank, eh, dad?’
remarked Hypatia.

Her father laughed.

‘Heard the news?’ He turned to Sheila. ‘Hypatia’s saved. Got a new
religion. Mine wasn’t good enough for her.’

‘What is yours, dad? I didn’t know you had one.’

‘When you and Edward were nippers I told you my religion. Be afraid of
nothing except doing wrong. That’s mine. Everything in the garden’s
lovely: that’s yours.’

‘Well, stop arguing all of you, and come to tea,’ said Mrs. Fairfield.
‘Sheila must be ready for hers, I’m sure. Have you met Bunny, Sheila?’

‘No. Who’s Bunny?’

‘One of mother’s young men,’ explained Hypatia. ‘Quite an acquisition.
Aristocratic by birth, democratic in sentiment. Isn’t that it, mother?’

At tea they were joined by Edward, rather reluctantly, and by the
Honourable Richard Bunnard, _alias_ Bunny. Bunny was a fair freckled
youth, with sleek hair brushed straight back from his forehead and
well plastered to the head. His blue eyes followed Hypatia’s every
movement with patient doglike devotion, except when recalled from this
dereliction by the voice of Mrs. Fairfield.

‘Now then, Bunny! I want to hear what you think about this minimum wage
question. Is thirty-two shillings enough for a skilled worker like a
plate-layer?’

Bunny, very nervous, began opening and shutting his mouth soundlessly
like a goldfish.

‘Well, Mrs. Fairfield, I hardly think so. A fellow could hardly live on
such a mere pittance, could he? Forty-two or fifty-two or even....’

‘Sixty-two,’ murmured Hypatia.

‘Yes, sixty-two,’ he said, catching eagerly at a straw. ‘Or say three
guineas, sixty-three. Not much more than a hundred and fifty a year,
you know.’

‘There, father!’ cried Mrs. Fairfield. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘Of what, me dear?’

‘Why, the plate-layers are to have a minimum of sixty-three shillings a
week?’

Bunny laughed.

‘Oh no, Mrs. Fairfield. It doesn’t follow. I only said they ought to
have that.’

‘Well, you must see to it,’ retorted Mrs. Fairfield. ‘You young people,
that’s your work in life, to stir things up. I think you must go into
parliament, Bunny. Yes. I shall send you to parliament to put things
right for us.’

‘But perhaps Bunny would rather not be sent to parliament, mother?’
suggested Hypatia.

‘Indeed,’ said the young man, ‘I’d much rather not. Edward would make a
much better politician than I.’

Mrs. Fairfield proudly surveyed her son. ‘Ah, we must see about Edward.
We’re not quite ready for parliament yet, are we, Edward?’

Edward smiled. ‘For my part, I never shall be ready.’

‘Mother ought to go there herself,’ said Hypatia. ‘She’d put the world
straight in ten minutes.’

Her mother listened indulgently.

‘Do you know, Sheila, my children are very lucky children. They’ve
been brought up in perfect freedom. They’ve got the habit of freedom.
They do and think just as they like, have never known what compulsion
was. Here’s Hypatia now, with her religion: she’s never been taught
it by me; I’ve never forced anything down her throat. I believe that
everybody has a right to follow his own bent.’

‘It must be very nice,’ said Sheila, ‘to be brought up in an atmosphere
like that.’

‘It would be,’ Hypatia murmured, but Mrs. Fairfield did not take up the
challenge.

‘I wish you’d teach me your New Thought,’ begged Bunny of Hypatia.

‘Which is it, New Thought or Higher Thought?’ asked Sheila.

‘Neither,’ answered Edward. ‘It’s something newer and higher than
either. Unfortunately you have to believe it implicitly before you can
understand it to be anything but nonsense.’

‘You can be quiet, Edward,’ said his sister, ‘even if you can’t be
just.’

‘But, really,’ protested the scared Bunny. ‘I am quite in earnest,
Hypatia. I would listen respectfully to anyone’s religion, especially
yours. Won’t you tell me about it?’

Hypatia relented. ‘I will, some time. It’s useless with Edward about.’

‘It was founded by a woman,’ said Edward, ‘and she’s written a book
that is the beginning and end of all Truth. Read it, Bunny, read it and
live.’

‘You see.’ Hypatia smiled patiently. ‘That’s what I have to put up
with.’

‘It’s too bad,’ Bunny reproached Edward.

‘Oh, don’t sympathize with me, _please_!’ said Hypatia.

Sheila thought: ‘How hard she has grown!’ and, having already tasted
of her friend’s sublime certainties, she felt some relish for Edward’s
mockery.

Edward seemed the most likeable person in the room, except perhaps
Bunny. Edward was for the most part very quiet and self-contained. He
possessed rather an impressive dome of forehead, but he maintained
an impenetrable reserve without assuming that air of learning and
distinction in which his mother sought so earnestly to invest him. Mrs.
Fairfield’s maternal glance conveyed unmistakably to the rest: ‘We must
not trouble Edward with our trivial talk. His thoughts are not our
thoughts; neither are his ways our ways. He has taken his degree, and
he is writing a book.’ Sometimes she referred questions to him, as to
an authority; it was as though she was continually thrusting upon him
his bachelor’s hood, he as continually repudiating it with a confession
of ignorance or indifference. His anxiety to avoid oracular authority
kept him more silent than the rest; and this very silence gave him in
Sheila’s eyes a distinction that was almost fascination. She guessed
him to be modest, unassuming, and clever. The mystery of his inner life
drew her interest towards him.

But Bunny, too, was interesting; for Bunny had good looks and that
air of trustfully appealing for affection to which Sheila was so
susceptible. There was something pathetic about his obvious devotion to
Hypatia. Except the commanding Mrs. Fairfield he seemed to look at no
one else. He deferred to Hypatia constantly.

‘I suppose you would say that a headache is essentially unreal,
Hypatia? If we knew the truth about ourselves we shouldn’t have
headaches, should we?’

‘We shouldn’t have even heads,’ said Edward. ‘I see you’ve already had
a dose, Bunny.’

‘Shut up, Fairfield!’ said the Honourable Richard. ‘Give your sister a
hearing. Am I right, Hypatia?’

‘Certainly,’ agreed Hypatia. ‘Our failure to apprehend the truth is the
root of all so-called evil and pain.’

‘I see,’ said Bunny, wrinkling his brow.

Sheila was touched to see the poor boy falling so easy a pray to the
dominating Hypatia. But Mrs. Fairfield thought it was time to look
after her property.

‘You don’t, my poor Bunny,’ cut in Mrs. Fairfield. ‘Nor does anyone
else. No sense, anyhow. Don’t fill your mind with such stuff just to
please Hypatia.... You must be a good boy,’ she added, ‘and do as I
tell you.’

‘Mother means that, Bunny,’ said Hypatia. ‘She means every word,
although she tries to make a joke of it. If you want to please mother,
obey her in all things. It is the only way.’

Mrs. Fairfield became pale and distressed. Signs of an approaching
fainting-fit were perceptible. Observing them, her husband broke in
sharply. ‘Hypatia, hold your noise!’

So there was a feud, thought Sheila, between the young woman and the
old: a duel for the soul of Bunny. Since he had apparently no brains of
his own worth considering, the scalp would no doubt fall to Hypatia,
who had youth as an ally. And then what terrible vengeance would fall
upon him? Could nothing save him from them both? A highly dangerous
pity awoke in Sheila’s heart.

‘You shall all go to the Folk Dancing to-night,’ announced Mrs.
Fairfield.

       *       *       *       *       *

The lure of Folk Dancing led them across two fields to a turreted
eccentric stone building known as the Summer School, which was at once
a gigantic advertisement and a place of mental and physical recreation
for Fairfield’s factory hands. He had spent thousands of pounds on this
long-cherished scheme, and only a well-timed fainting-fit of his wife’s
had prevented his spending thousands more.

Fairfield’s Summer School was as hygienic as his corsets. It was a
curious horseshoe-shaped building enclosing a large well-kept lawn in
the middle of which, on festive occasions, a maypole was erected; a
tower and belfry loomed at the back. To these cloisters the factory
hands were wont to repair for free instruction in the theory and
practice of arts and modern languages, for lectures on history,
sociology, science, for concerts and dances on the green. It claimed to
be, and was, a local centre of liberal popular culture. Anything and
everything could be discussed there save one thing: it was a point of
honour with the founder that Fairfield’s Hygienic Corsets should never
be mentioned.

Dusk had already fallen when the Fairfield party reached the green, and
the dancing had already begun. Someone began lighting the lamps.

‘This is jolly!’ said Bunny with infectious good spirits. ‘Won’t you
dance with me, Hypatia?’

‘I’ve never been taken for Hypatia before,’ Sheila answered.

‘Oh, sorry! It’s Miss Dyrle. Do dance with me, Miss Dyrle. It’s a waltz
this time, without trimmings.’

They whirled away among the dancers.

‘I don’t know these old dances, do you?’

‘No. But what does it matter? They stick in a few ordinary things now
and again specially for Philistines like us.’

Her heart danced with the music.

‘You brought your violin, didn’t you, Mr. Bunnard? When are you going
to play for us?’

But Bunny did not answer. Sheila was rather chilled to observe his
abrupt change of mood. He had caught sight of Hypatia dancing with her
brother.

They finished the set in silence, and Sheila was immediately claimed by
Edward. She felt bitterly alone in the world. She and Hypatia had come
to a definite parting of the ways; and she had no other friend.

After a few moments she complained to Edward of giddiness. He led her
to a seat.

‘Feel better now?’

‘Quite, thanks. But I’d rather not begin again just yet.’

He studied the ground.

‘It’s a year since you were here.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve often thought of that visit.’

‘Have you?’ said Sheila. ‘I live with my aunt, you know, and she
doesn’t approve of my visits to a home of free-thinkers.’

‘But you are not of her persuasion?’

‘Obviously not. Hypatia was my best friend.’

‘Was?’

He seemed to be offering a far from unwelcome sympathy.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I wouldn’t have you tell her for the world. But
we’ve drifted away from each other.’

‘Yes? I fancied so.’

‘I suppose it’s this religion of hers,’ said Sheila. ‘Of course I don’t
care a rap what she believes, but she’s grown so ... so remote.’

‘I agree with you entirely. I’m glad she hasn’t converted _you_ anyhow.
My friend Bunny is doomed, I fear. Hypatia begs the whole question. If
matter is only an appearance it is none the less real to our minds: it
exists mentally. The whole philosophy is nothing but a silly quibble
about terms.’

‘How is your book getting on?’ asked Sheila.

‘Slowly, but it _is_ getting on. Writing a hundred thousand words is a
great labour. The mere pen-pushing alone is a bore.’

‘It must be. Couldn’t you dictate it?’

‘That would be difficult for me and very dull for the unfortunate
secretary. I’m afraid I should be too self-conscious to work well.’

‘At first, perhaps,’ said Sheila. ‘But that would wear off. And it
would be a privilege for the secretary, I should think.’

‘A privilege!’ He laughed. ‘Why, the book is scandalous and
atheistical.’

‘That’s why to help would be a privilege,’ she answered with a nervous
smile. ‘Would it really help you to be able to dictate to someone?’

‘That would depend, I expect.’

She summoned her courage.

‘Well, to me, for instance?’

‘_You!_’

‘Yes, me,’ she said humbly. ‘I _can_ spell, you know.’

‘You would do that for me?’ he exclaimed in amazement.

‘I’d willingly do it--for the cause,’ she added rather mischievously.

‘How astoundingly decent of you!’

‘It’s not very polite to be so surprised to find me decent,’ she said,
laughing at him.

He looked with undisguised admiration into her Irish eyes. ‘By Jove,
what things we could do together!’

A flame of comradeship leaped to life in Sheila. The word ‘together’
made an echoing music in her mind.

Mr. Fairfield stood before them.

‘Miss Dyrle, give me the honour. A real old-fashioned dance this time
instead of these new-fangled folk things. Sir Roger de Coverley. And
after that Bunny’s going to give us a tune on the fiddle.’

Later, feeling rather breathless and crumpled, she listened to Bunny’s
‘tune on the fiddle.’ She could see the violinist’s face, with a new
expression in his eyes, spangled grotesquely with a red light from a
fairy lamp. The moon was rising in a pale green sky. Two tall feathery
trees, swaying in the gentle wind, seemed to caress each other as
they merged for a moment and drew apart again. The music spoke--spoke
to Sheila intimately. It seemed to have for her a secret message. It
communicated a tremulous half-sobbing ecstasy of pain and beauty: it
drew her, shuddering with delight, through divers moods. Now she was
in a moonlit forest of tall poplars, walking, walking, alone in the
universe. Now there was a flowered field, full of white and green,
yellow and red, made glad with the twinkling feet of dancing shepherds
and shepherdesses.

As if in response to the music, stars began tremblingly to peer through
the luminous green curtain of the sky.

The next morning Edward invited her into the holy of holies where the
book was being written.

It was a small room having some of the austerity of a monk’s cell. Two
of the walls were lined with books, classified under such headings as
Ancient History, Mediæval History, Modern History, Sociology, Science,
Philosophy.

‘I do everything on a system,’ remarked Edward in a rather satisfied
tone; but Sheila only laughed at his labels.

‘I could never read here,’ she said. ‘I should put a ticket on myself
and stand in the corner all day. What a dreadfully orderly room!’

‘Don’t you like it?’ There was disappointment in his tone.

‘Yes, very much. It is little and quiet and studious. There’s no
cabbage pattern on the wall and no Jorrocks pictures. There are
no pictures of podgy children stroking big dogs, and no family
photographs.... I’m sure that gentleman over there isn’t in the
family.’ She pointed to a photograph of a Greek statue.

‘No, that’s Euripides. And yet there’s something about the room that
you don’t like. What is it?’

‘Well, you do everything on a system, you said. I think that’s what’s
wrong. You’ve done this room on a system. _Ars est celare artem._ Isn’t
it the same with systems?’

‘Do you read Horace much?’ he enquired.

‘Not at all,’ confessed Sheila. ‘I found that tag at the end of a
dictionary.’

He laughed. ‘You’re delightfully honest.’

A shaft of sunlight falling on his face made visible the little downy
hairs over his cheekbones. Sheila caught her eyes involuntarily looking
at them.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to work now?’

‘There’s no hurry.’

‘Come, come, I’m sure your system doesn’t permit loitering! Can you
provide me with pen and paper?’

‘Do you really mean me to dictate to you?’

She felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment lest she was pressing
unwanted assistance upon him.

‘You said I was honest just now. Will you be equally honest with me? If
my presence would disturb you, please turn me out.’

He considered gravely for a moment. ‘One can hardly tell--save by
experiment.’

‘You wouldn’t mind telling me, would you?’

‘No. I would tell you at once. You have sense enough not to be
offended.’

She was absurdly elated by this curt compliment.

‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the book comes first with me always. Nothing else
matters.’

She ruminated upon that thought for several seconds. The bluntness,
the ungraciousness of it at once repelled and attracted her. She could
not but admire Edward’s capacity for impersonal enthusiasm; it made
him great; and she found something fascinating in his indifference
to lesser things. Among those lesser things she was content, for the
moment, to include herself. To be his tool, to help him in his work:
such service, she felt, would be its own sufficient reward.

Noting her silence, ‘That seems to you inhuman?’ he asked.

‘It seems to me superhuman,’ answered Sheila. ‘Perhaps that’s the
secret of fine living: to subordinate all personal things to some great
impersonal passion.’

‘That’s just how I feel,’ he said.

Sheila continued. ‘Unless we’re content to be miserable and useless,
we must have a consuming passion, if it’s only for collecting beetles:
something that doesn’t depend on anybody else.... Persons change,’ she
added sadly.

‘You’re thinking of Hypatia,’ he suggested.

‘Hypatia, yes. And someone else. It’s like building your house on sand,
you know, ever to rely on persons.’

‘Still,’ said Edward, ‘if a person’s rational and consistent--and there
_are_ consistent persons.’

‘Yes, and there are clockwork toys. A perfectly consistent person must
be very much like them, I should think.’

‘But surely you agree that man _is_ just that: a mechanical toy in
the hands of Necessity. The illusion of freewill is only disguised
mechanism.’

‘How dreadful!’ Sheila exclaimed. ‘Then Henley’s lines:

  I am the master of my fate;
  I am the captain of my soul--

are meaningless to you?’

‘The man who thinks that he is master of his fate is the most enslaved
of all persons,’ said Edward. ‘For he is not even master of the facts.’

‘That’s a quotation from your book, I believe,’ said Sheila. And the
young man blushed.

This was the beginning of a long and animated discussion, the first
of many. In Edward Sheila discovered that reliability which she had
thought could be attributed to no person. His mind was keen and
critical: it worked with a certain deadly precision that was as
impressive and at times almost as terrifying as a piece of gigantic
machinery. He had doubts and hesitancies indeed: the hesitancies of one
aware of the subtleties, the baffling complexity, of problems which
less careful minds deemed simple; but once he had reached a definite
decision, nothing short of overpowering ratiocination, no consideration
of comfort or sentiment, could shake him from it. And while her sense
of poetry revolted against a certain aridness in his philosophy,
the very magnitude and the shattering presumption of his attempt to
rationalize the universe overpowered her imagination and thrilled her
with a sense of great adventure.


4

In sharp contrast with this austere enthusiasm for Edward Fairfield and
his work, there flickered up in her heart a secret romantic compassion
for the Honourable Richard Bunnard, that fair-haired, frank-eyed,
simple-minded young man, whose nickname, Bunny, appeared even to the
eye of affection so entirely suitable. For his youth and good nature,
for his docility, for the irresponsible levity that even the Fairfield
atmosphere could not entirely inhibit, and still more for the less
definite charm he unconsciously exercised over her, Sheila conceived a
liking that trembled sometimes dangerously on the verge of tenderness.
She was stirred by his voluntary surrender of his personality into the
grasping hands of Hypatia, the high-priestess of a new oracle, and
trembled at the thought of his being immolated, a blood sacrifice,
upon that godless altar. But, most of all, the memory of his music
troubled the deep cool waters of her mind. She sought in him often, and
sometimes for a fleeting instant found, the transfigured face of the
violinist who had once laid his spell upon her.

She swayed for a while between these two magnetic points: Edward’s
intellectuality and Bunny’s manifest need for being looked after;
but if the one’s self-sufficiency sometimes repelled her the other’s
comparative vacuity of mind no less tried her patience. With such an
alternative, perhaps her womanhood would have urged her irresistibly
towards Bunny, in spite of discouraging precedent, had not that youth
remained unaware of her claim to be anything more exciting (and that
was exciting enough, no doubt) than Hypatia’s friend.

‘If only he had Edward’s brains as well as his own niceness,’ Sheila
said to herself; and humour compelled her to add, self-scornfully:
‘Well, what if he had? He’d perhaps be even more indifferent to me
than he is now.’ And that would have been hard; for his absorption in
Hypatia was so complete that he could even sing her praises in little
solitary interviews with Sheila contrived for that very purpose.

‘Don’t you think she’s very clever?’ he said one day, incredulous of a
hint of criticism.

‘I know she’s got wonderful brains,’ Sheila assured him. ‘But at
present I believe they’re under a cloud. That sounds horribly dogmatic,
I expect. But I really think Hypatia’s a little bit of a fanatic
nowadays.’

He rebelled against that. ‘She’s an enthusiast, if you like.’

Sheila smiled. ‘Perhaps that’s all. I suppose fanaticism’s only the
name we give to the other person’s enthusiasm.’

‘I must say she often puzzles me,’ admitted Bunny. ‘You know her very
well, don’t you?’

‘Not so well as you do, I expect.’

‘Oh, but you were at school with her,’ he urged.

‘That’s five, six, seven years ago.’

‘Still....’ He ached to believe that Sheila out of the fulness of her
knowledge of Hypatia could help him. ‘Do you think she’s capable of
liking anybody?’

‘Liking?’ The clear inadequacy of the word arrested her.

‘Liking very much, I mean, don’t you see? It’s this way: supposing you
wanted....’ He waited as if for her to help him out. But she rather
pointedly didn’t. ‘She seems so aloof very often, don’t you think?’

To this mild proposition Sheila assented. ‘A little cold, you think,
perhaps?’ She guided his stumbling feet thus far.

‘Cold, but not,’ he hoped, ‘incapable of--well, affection, as it were.’

Sheila agreed gravely that ‘incapable’ would be too absolute a word.

‘She is very fine-looking.’ He had the air of submitting this idea for
her acceptation.

‘Fine is quite the right epithet,’ Sheila assured this incredible
youth. ‘She has always been fearless; you can see that in her face. And
she had a sense of humour once.’ To herself she added: ‘Am I so very
maternal that he must confide in me?’

After a brief transitional hovering, when he was neither quite in
Sheila’s company nor definitely out of it, he went away, no doubt to
treasure all these things in his heart, leaving Sheila in a state that
oscillated between amusement and a half-ashamed regret. And that night
Hypatia, joining her friend in the spacious bedroom that they shared,
displayed unwonted animation. Whether it was Bunny or the stirring in
its sleep of old friendship that loosened her tongue, Sheila patiently
waited to have revealed to her.

Hypatia was in a reminiscential mood. She sat on Sheila’s bed and
talked of Selborne days, of feuds with Miss Fry, of Sheila’s Aunt
Hester, and of what little she knew of Kay. She appeared rather to
dwell on Kay. She called up once-familiar faces from the pit of
oblivion and set them again speaking forgotten parts. And presently,
without preamble, she remarked: ‘There’s more in Bunny than he allows
to appear, don’t you think?’

‘Very likely,’ Sheila said, sleepily. ‘But you know him so much better
than I.’

‘He’s ductile,’ said Hypatia, rather consciously selecting the word.

‘Too much so,’ Sheila ventured. ‘How beautifully he plays the violin.
That night at the Folk Dancing he was wonderful.’

‘Yes. In his way he’s quite a genius. Though of course this musical
glamour is not really healthy. It’s a kind of delusion, a magnetism. In
Real Knowledge it doesn’t exist.’

‘He’s rather marvellous, your friend Bunny,’ Sheila said tritely,
chilled by Hypatia’s eternal prosing.

‘He’s a very nice boy. But under mother’s thumb at present. I shall
change that.’

Sheila shivered. ‘You! How?’

‘He proposed to me to-night.’

Sheila was dumbstruck for a moment. Then, ‘You’re very calm about it,’
she said. ‘Did you...?’

‘Not yet. But if I do accept him there’ll be a fine tussle with mother.’

‘Doesn’t your mother like him?’

‘Immensely. But mother has an inordinate appetite for affection. She’s
like a spider with a fly. She won’t share him.’

‘How bitterly you speak!’

Hypatia loftily repudiated the suggestion. ‘Not at all. I’m merely
stating a fact. You will see, if you’re here long enough.’

‘Poor Bunny!’ said Sheila.

‘Oh, don’t worry about him. I shan’t let mother gobble him up, you may
be sure.’

‘I’m sure you won’t,’ Sheila replied, biting her lip. ‘You’ll marry him
sooner than that.’

But irony was lost on Hypatia. ‘Mother shan’t have him,’ she reiterated.


5

Edward found the presence of another person distracting. The dictation
of his book was soon abandoned, and he pursued his solitary way.
Yet not solitary, for he was not unconscious that his solitude had
been invaded, destroyed; and he was not yet sure whether he liked or
resented the invasion. In spirit another walked by his side. For Sheila
this book, child of his brain, became a living thing to be thought
about with a reverent excitement. She was still enough of a child to
find this making of books miraculous: it was like that creation of
something out of nothing which the church attributed to God. The best
of Edward went into his book, and Sheila was quick to remember this in
his defence when vitality or humour seemed lacking in him. He worked
with clocklike regularity. He wrote from nine till twelve-thirty. He
resumed work, after lunch, at one-thirty and wrote till, at half-past
four, some toast and tea was brought to him on a tray. For this
refreshment he allowed himself twenty minutes, and for ten minutes he
systematically did nothing. From five till seven was his final daily
spell.

Seven o’clock released him from his self-imposed task. At half-past
seven he dined with his family, and having dined was free to cultivate
such social amenities as he did not utterly despise. He formed the
habit of seeking out Sheila; he persuaded her to go for walks with him:
strenuous almost racing walks, conscientious and concentrated exercise,
essential to the maintenance of physical and therefore mental fitness.
She, glad of an antidote for the daily dose of omniscience forced down
her throat by Hypatia, welcomed this new friendship. She was a willing
and intelligent listener; the quickness of her mind delighted him,
and his appreciation evoked an answering delight in her. The variety
and colour of her thinking, a habit she had of investing with emotion
even the dry bones of argument, provided a foil for Edward’s exact
logic. She took imaginative leaps in metaphysical speculation, while
he plodded laboriously on from point to point, never retracing a step.
They sharpened their wits against each other and felt marvellously
stimulated by the process. And still it was of the book, and of cognate
subjects, that he talked, in an unending torrent of discourse. He
involved himself in sentences so prodigious that Sheila sometimes got
lost in a labyrinth of phrases and subordinate clauses. More than once
she felt rising in her a secret impatience; she even got to the point
of contemplating the discontinuance of an intercourse that became daily
more overpowering. Yet looking back, as the days passed, upon that
vista of intimate, flushed, excited talk, she could not find heart to
cut adrift from him; moreover, he had made her feel, not without a
sense of her presumption, that she had somehow become necessary to his
literary scheme. These enormously distended monologues of his helped
him to clarify his thought, and her occasional interpolated criticism
freshened his dialectic processes. She felt a certain responsibility
for him.

Mrs. Fairfield observed this ripening intimacy with a curious
admixture of benevolence and displeasure. One evening she came upon her
son and Sheila sauntering in the garden together a few minutes before
seven, and smiled at her guest with an inimical glint in her eye.

‘Sheila dear,’ she said bitter-sweetly, ‘you mustn’t take my son from
his work.’

Sheila, flushing with resentment, could make no reply.

‘Mother,’ said Edward, neither hotly nor coldly, ‘you interrupt the
thread of my argument.’

Mrs. Fairfield flashed a point of jealous fire at Sheila, who turned on
her heel, biting her lips in vexation. She was astounded and ashamed by
this momentary and involuntary revelation of a woman’s soul.

Edward followed her without an instant’s hesitation.

‘See you at dinner, mother,’ he said casually, over his shoulder....
‘The matter is not quite so simple as that,’ he went on, speaking
to the girl at his side. ‘The vitalist hypothesis has implications
that lie deeper than that altogether, and that run, in my opinion,
altogether counter to the ascertained facts of experience. Chemical
analysis....’

Sheila let him ramble on, grateful that he took no notice of her
evident embarrassment. She wished he had left her. She wanted to
escape from the intolerable sense of having been delivered an insulting
ultimatum, a warning, by Edward’s detestable mother. Yes, Edward’s
detestable mother: that was how she thought of the woman in whose mien
she had read ‘Hands off my property!’ Her instinct was to run away from
the house and never return; but slowly, as Edward’s sentences gathered
length and momentum, she came to regard such an action as merely
melodramatic.

She cut one of his clauses in half by asking abruptly: ‘What did your
mother mean by that?’

He was pulled up short, and left floundering.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sheila; ‘I’m very rude. I’m afraid I wasn’t
listening. I was thinking of what your mother said. What makes her hate
me so?’

‘Hate you! Dear me, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re too sensitive. Mother is
hurt because I give my confidence to you and not to her. Don’t worry
about her. She’ll have to get used to it.’

‘Oh no, she won’t. I am going home to-morrow.’

‘To-morrow?’

‘I had already arranged to, you know,’ Sheila untruthfully assured him.

‘I hope you will stay longer,’ he said earnestly. ‘If mother has
offended you she shall apologize. I’ll see to it.’

‘Pray do nothing of the kind. And let’s drop the subject.... Won’t you
forgive my inattention and tell me what you were saying?’

They had by now reached a remote part of the garden, a part from
which the house was hidden by a mass of sweet peas clustering over
trelliswork. A rustic seat on the gravel path by the trim croquet-lawn
invited them to rest.

‘By the way,’ he said, when they had sat down. ‘I’ve finished the
_magnum opus_.’

‘Finished!’ she exclaimed, glowing with excited pleasure. ‘How fine!
Aren’t you tremendously glad?’

‘It’s a relief,’ he admitted. ‘I shall take a week’s rest and then
start the revision.’

She, exulting still in the accomplished work, could spare no thought
for the revision.

‘How jolly to have finished! You didn’t tell me you were near the end?’

‘Ah, you’d forgotten then.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘I told you a
fortnight ago that I should finish on the thirteenth of this month.’

She was suitably astonished.

‘You mean to say you knew to a day?’

‘I work on a programme, you see,’ he said, relishing her surprised
admiration.

Now that the work was done he seemed to have time for human weaknesses.
This unexpected boyish vanity made Sheila like him more than she had
ever done before.

‘I suppose you’re pleased with yourself now!’ she mocked him gently.

‘Very!’ he confessed. They both laughed.

‘There was another thing that might have told you,’ he said. ‘I came
out of my room before seven o’clock to-night. Have you ever known that
happen before?’

‘You see, my watch had stopped,’ she explained. ‘So that is what your
mother----’

‘Probably.’

‘Why didn’t you explain to her?’ she asked him.

‘I refuse to propitiate her,’ he said. ‘Besides, I wanted you to know
first.’

She was silent.

‘Sheila,’ he said gently, ‘we could do such a lot together!’

She began to rise from her seat, but he placed on her knee a strong and
strangely reassuring hand.

‘It’s a year since your last visit to us, isn’t it?’

Sheila found her voice, a very small voice now, and answered ‘Yes.’

‘Well, a year ago I made up my mind to ask you to marry me. Will you?’

There was a teeming silence. Sheila’s mind was in a whirl. There seemed
something wanting in the richness of this moment, a disconcerting gap
in the happiness that had come within her reach. But another feeling
conquered. She looked at him with her heart in her eyes.

‘If I can help you.... Oh, Edward, I _do_ want to help you!’

‘My dear!’ he said. He kissed her cheek in warm brotherly fashion. ‘We
shall be very happy together, you and I.’ He took her hand in his.

For a moment they contemplated this prospective happiness without
speaking. The gong summoned them to dinner.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sheila accompanied Edward into the house with a numbed feeling in one
corner of her mind. She could not banish a vague half-formed doubt
that had crept into the heart of her new happiness. There was so much
that was fine, so much that was bracing, about her relationship with
Edward, and she told herself that this lurking discontent was mere
perversity. A feeling of comradeliness struggled with a sense of
chill. She was to be his friend, his wife, the partner of his life’s
work; they were intellectually in tune: what more could she ask of
life? What was this secret craving for tenderness, for romance, but a
foolish lapse into the sentimental dreaming of her school-days? Edward
offered her in abundance what that boy-lover Kay Wilton had been so
conspicuously unable to offer: the sympathy of an alert mind. Sympathy
and comradeship--were not these the fairest flowers of life? The rest
were gaudy hothouse plants, nurtured in an artificial warmth and unable
to endure the healthy rigours of continual daily intimacy.

She tried by such reflections to still the whispering voice within
her; nevertheless she was not herself during dinner, and it was with a
catch of the breath, afterwards, that she heard Edward announce their
betrothal to his parents. Stated coldly, the compact had the terrifying
air of something irrevocable. She controlled with effort an impulse to
flee from the room.

Mrs. Fairfield was exclamatory and encouraging, and Mr. Fairfield
vaguely echoed his wife’s expressions of pleasure. Mrs. Fairfield
opened her plump arms and wrapped them round Sheila as though taking
permanent possession of her.

‘My dear Sheila!’ she exclaimed. ‘A new daughter for me!’

From that capacious and efficient embrace Sheila emerged with a sense
of having been rescued from a yawning gulf. The one thought in her
mind was that she did not wish to be a daughter to Mrs. Fairfield.
She felt that Edward’s mother would as readily take, if she could,
the globe itself into that large embrace, and exult greedily in her
newly-acquired property, like a child with a big ball that it may
bounce to its heart’s content.

‘Now that _is_ nice!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Very pleasant arrangement
indeed! Well, well!’

A diversion was created by the entry of Bunny. He tried to conceal an
air of desperate purpose under the affectation of breeziness.

‘Hullo, by Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘How are you, Mrs. Fairfield? How are
you, sir? How do, Ted? And how are you, Miss Dyrle? Myself, I’m jolly
fine. Thanks for kind inquiries.’

‘That’s a comfort anyhow,’ said Mrs. Fairfield grimly. ‘You seem a
little upset.’

‘Upset! Me!’ cried Bunny. He calmed a little to add: ‘Bit excited
perhaps. Got some news for you, Mrs. Fairfield.’

‘Ha!’ The light of triumph gleamed in Mrs. Fairfield’s eye. ‘You’ve
agreed to be president of the Workers’ Federation after all.’

‘No, not exactly.’

‘You haven’t!’ Mrs. Fairfield became the picture of righteous
indignation. ‘You refuse to do a little thing like that for me, when
your name would be so valuable to us!’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to my father. He’s a bit old-fashioned, I dare
say, but there it is. He can’t help being an earl. He makes rather a
point of my not getting too deep in the movement.’

The Honourable Richard Bunnard stood on one toe and twirled once round
to assure every one that he was perfectly at ease.

‘Please don’t fidget, Bunny, when you’re talking to me, even though I
_am_ only an old woman. Once again I ask you, and for the last time:
will you do the right thing, the public-spirited thing?’

Bunny tried to soothe the exasperated lady.

‘My dear Mrs. Fairfield, I’ve already promised my father.’

The storm burst.

‘Your father! Fiddlesticks your father! Hypatia’s at the bottom of
this!’

‘Don’t get excited, mother,’ urged Edward.

‘I will, I will,’ retorted his mother. ‘I’ve a perfect right to get
excited. You young people, you’ve got hearts of stone. All the love we
mothers lavish on you is nothing to you. Do we get any gratitude? Not a
bit! _Scorn_, yes, plenty of it! Scorn of our grey hairs and our silly
ways and our ignorance. But gratitude--the last thing in the world....
Some chit of a girl comes....’

Edward shrugged his shoulders in cold disgust.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mrs. Fairfield. There was an ominous pause. Her husband
rushed towards her.

‘It’s all right, me dear. I’ve got you safe and sound. Sit down and
have a bit of a rest.’

The afflicted lady sighed.

‘She’s going to faint,’ cried Mr. Fairfield. ‘Why didn’t you let her
have her way, you young devils, you!’

‘Of course she’s going to faint,’ said Edward. ‘That is the last scene
of the melodrama.’

Sheila watched the scene with a mixture of indignation and compassion.
The indignation was short-lived: it died suddenly at sight of Edward’s
complete detachment. He seemed utterly devoid of the filial sentiment
that would have made allowances for his mother. For she was, after all,
his mother, Sheila reflected. She had faced death to bring him into
the world. He was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: for him she
had spent herself, and he was still the centre of her life. Had Edward
shewn anger, Sheila would have been wholeheartedly with him, but this
cold disdain, this resolute refusal to be stirred a hair’s breadth
either to pity or to wrath seemed to Sheila’s warmer heart almost
inhuman, although it extorted from her an unwilling admiration.

‘I think I’d better clear out,’ said Bunny, moving towards the door.
‘Sorry to have been the cause of a disturbance.’

But Mrs. Fairfield’s recovery was as abrupt as her collapse had been.
From the arm-chair into which her husband had placed her she urged the
young man to stay.

‘Don’t go, Bunny. I’m better now. It was my son upset me, not you. Come
and tell me your news?’

She spoke in a languid faded tone, the tone of one bearing bravely an
immense burden of wrongs.

‘Well ...’ began Bunny nervously, glancing towards Sheila.

Edward, intercepting the glance, asked: ‘Are we _de trop_, Bunny?’

Mr. Fairfield intervened. ‘Edward and Miss Dyrle have just come to an
understanding, Bunny.’

‘An understanding?’ asked Bunny.

‘Yes. Bit of sweethearting, you know.’

‘Really!’ cried Bunny, beaming. ‘I congratulate you. Well, that makes
it easier for me. There’ll be a double event.’

‘A what?’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield, all the languor gone from her.

‘You see,’ Bunny explained, ‘I’m engaged to be married.’

‘Well I declare!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Engaged! Why, everybody’s
getting engaged. Time we set about it, mother, eh?’

Edward made a congratulatory noise. Only Mrs. Fairfield was silent,
watching Bunny with feline intentness.

‘Well,’ she said sharply. ‘Who’s the young lady, Bunny?’

Bunny, with his hands in his pockets agitating a bunch of keys, stood
first on one leg and then on the other.

‘That was what I came for,’ he said, blushing, ‘to ask your blessing,
don’t you know. You see, Hypatia....’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Fairfield curtly. ‘What about Hypatia?’

Even the amiable Bunny had not unlimited patience.

‘Hypatia?’ he said. ‘Well, nothing about her. You asked me who was the
young lady. I’ve told you.’

‘Hypatia!’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield.

‘Exactly,’ answered Bunny, and strode out of the room.

‘Herbert!’ cried Mrs. Fairfield to her husband. ‘Go after him. At once.
Hypatia shan’t have him. She shan’t!’

‘You’d better faint again, mother,’ remarked Edward.

‘Oh, Edward, how can you!’ cried Sheila, stung to speech.

She beckoned him to the bay window, as Mrs. Fairfield followed her
husband to the door.

‘Edward,’ Sheila said, ‘are you sure you want me?’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘You know I do.’

Sheila felt that her question needed an apology. ‘It’s only that I hate
to cause a fuss. Your mother does loathe me, I’m sure.’

He took both her hands in his for a moment. ‘Sheila, you’re not going
to forsake me, are you?’

‘Not ... if you really care,’ she answered in a low voice.

Mrs. Fairfield from the passage stepped back into the room.

‘Children!’ she muttered, regarding the lovers with malevolence,
‘children ... no, vipers!’

Her husband returned, followed by Bunny wrapped in his dignity and by
Hypatia armed with invincible placidity.

‘Now understand this,’ began Mrs. Fairfield. ‘We old folk refuse to
be ignored. We just won’t put up with this insulting behaviour. You
think we don’t count, but we’ll see. Bunny, let’s hear no more of
this nonsense about marrying Hypatia. You shall not marry her. You’re
a young snob. And Sheila shan’t marry my Edward either. I won’t be
robbed of my children by young stuck-up creatures who despise me and my
husband because we’re in trade.’

‘What a wicked lie!’ exclaimed Sheila, with flashing eyes. ‘You know we
don’t despise you! Everybody’s parents are in trade ... except Bunny’s,
I suppose.’

‘Herbert!... Edward! Will you stand here and hear this girl call your
mother a wicked liar?’

‘Where do you want me to stand?’ enquired Edward. ‘Besides, I’m not
Sheila’s controller. I’m not even her parent.’

‘You will leave my son alone,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, struggling with her
rising passion. ‘Marry the Honourable Richard, if you want to marry.’

‘But that would still leave Edward and Hypatia unmarried,’ objected
Bunny, lapsing into weak humour. ‘They can’t marry each other, you
know.’

‘And you leave Hypatia alone!’ Hypatia’s mother turned upon Bunny.
‘I’ll make father disinherit them both if they disobey me.’

‘Is that all you have to say, mother?’ asked Hypatia, with the patient
smile of the Christian Scientist.

‘No, it is _not_....’

‘Well, it’s quite enough,’ Hypatia assured her. ‘Come along, Bunny.
Come and buy the licence.’

Without a word, the young man followed Hypatia out of the room.

The flame of battle was awake now in Sheila’s heart, burning away all
lingering reluctance, all doubts and fears. If there was to be a feud,
there was no doubt upon which side she would fight. Age had declared
war upon Youth, and all the spirit in her woke to the challenge.
Edward, her comrade, was being threatened with disinheritance. Sheila
knew now that she was irrevocably his: a hint of doubt would have been
shameful treason. She forgot the cold formality of his attitude to
his mother: she remembered only his strength, his glorious unyielding
strength.

‘Look here, mother,’ Edward was saying, ‘you’ll have to readjust your
ideas a little.’ He waved aside a hysterical interruption. ‘No, it’s no
use indulging in heroics: your storming only makes me tired. Storm in a
teacup, that’s all. Listen to me.’

Mrs. Fairfield turned her back on him.

‘Yes, listen like that, if you wish. It’s extraordinarily rude, but
never mind. I was saying that you’ve got to readjust your ideas a
little. They’re about a hundred years behind the times. We young
people, as you call us, have as much right to live as you, and as much
right to freedom.’

His mother wheeled round swiftly. ‘Freedom! You’ve had too much
freedom!’

‘Please don’t interrupt,’ said Edward. ‘There’s been quite enough
shouting and stamping. I want you to reason the thing out calmly.
Freedom consists in being left alone, left with room to grow, not in
being penned round with affection and told every minute of the day that
of course we can do as we like if we don’t love mother and father.’

‘You’re hitting too hard,’ whispered Sheila.

‘You think,’ Edward continued, ‘because you’ve born and bred us and
sacrificed yourself for us that Hypatia and I belong to you.’

‘Oh no, you don’t belong to me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield in fierce sarcasm.
‘I’m only your mother: that’s all.’

‘Precisely,’ said Edward. ‘Our mother, not our owner. We belong to
nobody. We have our separate lives to live, and we intend to live them
in our own way.’

‘You’re mine, mine, mine!’ protested his mother. ‘Don’t you feel any
common gratitude for what I’ve done for you? I gave you life; I fed you
with my body; and now--is this the end?’

‘Those are services that cannot be repaid,’ he answered, without any
trace of emotion. ‘If in return for what you did for me I had to submit
to be your doll for ever, it were better that I had not been born at
all.’

‘Brutal, brutal!’ interjected his father, waking from a spell of
bewilderment.

‘Perhaps,’ conceded Edward, ‘but it’s nature. Nature is brutal. Do you
think that because you gave me life, as you say, that you have the
right to take it away, or smother it, or confine it, at your pleasure?
You shut your eyes to logical inference. See to what absurd conclusions
your wild unreasoning would lead you if you dared follow it to the
end. Time and again civilization has been hindered in its march....’

For a moment Sheila ceased her loyal silent applause to ask herself:
Why does Edward talk like a parliamentary candidate? But Mrs. Fairfield
quickly distracted her attention from that question.

‘I see,’ she said, ‘I’m nothing to you. I’m only your mother. This bit
of a girl, who’s done nothing for you, whom you’ve known ten minutes,
is more to you than your mother is.’

Edward assented gravely. ‘So much more than I propose to live with her
and not with you. You were a bit of a girl yourself once, mother. If
father had been more devoted to _his_ mother than to you, you might
have been a childless spinster at this moment.’

‘Now then,’ said Mr. Fairfield, briskly asserting himself. ‘We’ve had
about enough of this. Mother’s had her say. And you’ve had yours.
You’ve got the gift of the gab all right. Now just you cut along and
leave your mother alone.’

‘Herbert, he shan’t have a penny of your money!’ Mrs. Fairfield turned
confidently to her husband for ratification of this threat. ‘Tell him
so.’

‘We’ll see. We’ll see. I’m not dead yet,’ said the little man, with
unwonted independence. ‘I hadn’t any pennies myself when I was his age.’

His wife turned upon him a terrible _Et tu Brute_ look.

‘Never you mind,’ he retorted, with incredible courage. ‘There’s sense
in what the lad says, even though he is a bit of a hard nut. Gets that
from his father perhaps.’

‘His father!’ cried the mother in scorn. ‘They’re their mother’s
children, both of them. Else they’d never dare to treat me like this.’

There was pride as well as anger in the glance she flashed at Edward as
she gathered up her skirts and rustled out of the room.


PART THE THIRD

_Sheila Fairfield_


1

All roads led to Edward Fairfield. His atheism, his sister, Aunt
Hester’s opposition, all conspired to fling Sheila into the polite
dispassionate arms of that rational young graduate from Cambridge.
Kay had offered romance without intellectual comradeship: Edward
offered a kind of business partnership in the propagation of rational
atheology, and this proved an irresistible bait for a spirited girl
hustled by disaster into premature cynicism. Edward concerns us no
further, save that he married her, respected her, and practised upon
her the editorials that appeared week by week in his own paper _The
Iconoclast_. Everything that he did was in perfect taste and supported
by a perfect reason. When, for example, she declared their marriage a
failure, he provided her with a pair of admirable rooms in his own
well-appointed house, and lived thereafter in contented celibacy. He
was just to the point of inhumanity; but she, a disappointed woman,
was not just. The efficient elegance of her home afflicted her. It
seemed a mere piece of machinery for the daily manufacture of well-bred
happiness. Her two rooms, until she had transformed them, seemed sleek,
complacent: they announced to her, with the patient smile and in the
incisive tones of a secularist lecturer, the supremacy of Reason. In
herself, reason was far from supreme.

A woman with love must bestow it somewhere: Sheila poured it without
stint upon her dream of Kay. Ten years divided them, and more, before
that dream was finally destroyed. Sophie, his wife, gave birth to
a child, and Sheila, impelled by who knows what medley of motives,
visited her. They sat and talked about nothing in a room pervaded
by yellow. A pale-brown flower perpetuated itself at intervals on
the walls; a small occasional table set in the middle of a dark
yellowish carpet was covered by a buff cloth; a gilt-framed oval
mirror surmounted the mantelpiece. There were photographs on the
mantelpiece of Sophie’s father, of Sophie’s child, of Sophie, and one
of Kay standing stiffly with a book in his hand--a cruel photograph,
courageously signed by the photographer. Sheila gave no second glance
to it.

She interrupted a remark of Sophie’s about the chapel Dorcas Society by
saying, ‘Oh I forgot to ask--you don’t mind Bernard being here, do you?’

‘Bernard?’ Sophie was mystified.

Sheila pointed to the Irish terrier that was frisking round her.

A little ripple of merriment came from Sophie.

‘Do you call the dog Bernard? How funny! I love dogs, but father
doesn’t care for them.... But of course he won’t mind yours,’ she added
hastily.

Sheila tried to puzzle out how Mr. Dewick could even have a chance
of objecting to her dog, but just then a diversion was created by
the entry of a rather plump old-young man in a morning coat rubbing
his hands together and making an indeterminate noise in a vague
endeavour to be hospitable. He wore a little brown moustache and short
side-whiskers near the ears. His hair had receded considerably, more
especially where the parting was, and had left an expanse of shining
brow.

‘Well, well,’ he said, nervously cheerful. ‘How are you after all this
while? I’m sure we’re very pleased.’

Sheila recognized him instantly, although there seemed indeed nothing
of the old Kay left to recognize. Yet this was Kay. This was he who
years ago under the moon had whispered to her, with eyes full of
dreams, his boyish love. Shades of the meeting-house had closed on that
boy for ever.

Almost sick with disappointment, she shook hands with him, and
quickly sought refuge in responding to the terrier’s still frantic
demonstrations.

‘I hope you like my dog,’ she remarked to Kay, shy of using his name.

‘Yes, yes, fine fellow,’ responded Kay. ‘Come on, good dog, good dog!’

He patted the dog awkwardly.

‘We call him Bernard,’ explained Sheila, afraid of the smallest hiatus.
‘George Bernard, because he’s Irish and vivacious.’

Kay looked puzzled. ‘But why ... do you call him George Bernard? I
didn’t quite catch....’

‘After Shaw, you know,’ Sheila explained. ‘We suspect Bernard of having
been a distinguished playwright in a previous incarnation.’

‘Oh I see!’ said Kay, his brow clearing.

But it was knitted again the next moment.

‘What was it the Reverend Aitken was saying about Shaw last Sunday,
mother?’

‘I remember something,’ Sophie answered. ‘I think he said he was a
mountaineer, didn’t he?’

‘Mountaineer,’ murmured Kay. ‘I think not. Ah no, mountebank! That was
the word.’

Here Sheila joined the conversation in a mildly argumentative vein, but
Kay sidetracked by waxing indignant over the attempted introduction of
a liturgy into divine service. He had set his face against _that_, he
assured them: every true nonconformist at the church meeting had set
his face against _that_, and right feeling had ultimately triumphed
over the incipient popery. It appeared indeed that the cosmos was being
conducted in an entirely proper manner, except for the wanton behaviour
of the east wind. He considered the east wind very dangerous. He became
impressive and told a long story about a man of his acquaintance who
ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat, caught a chill,
developed pneumonia, and had to take to his bed.

‘Dead in a week!’ finished Kay, dramatically and with relish.

Except for an appreciative murmur from his wife, the story was
received in silence. Sheila with a stunned sensation was telling
herself: ‘I would never have let him get like this.’ But Kay,
misinterpreting the silence, began another story. It concerned another
man who ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat. This man had
a similar series of adventures, his experience differing from the first
man’s only in that he lingered for two days and then died, leaving a
widow and five children. Kay could not remember whether there were
three boys and two girls, or three girls and two boys. He began naming
them on his fingers. There were Horace and George, Margaret and Vera.
That made four. He was sure there was another one--he remembered the
child perfectly as a baby, but he could not for the life of him recall
its sex. He felt sure that its name began with F.

He became perplexed.

‘Mother, can’t _you_ remember?’ he asked. The question was an
accusation.

‘Remember what, dear?’ inquired Sophie in her gentle way.

‘The name of Tomlinson’s youngest. You remember Tomlinson.’

‘I don’t believe I do,’ said Sophie.

Sheila sat silent, limp under the burden of her disillusionment. She
felt something like fear when Sophie, with a rapturous cry, ‘She’s
awake!’, rose and darted from the room to fetch her little girl. To
hide her nervousness she said, ‘Such an unusual name you gave her,
didn’t you? What made you think of Robina?’

While Kay was losing himself in explanations Sophie came back, leading
her baby daughter by the hand. The mother’s face was shining.

‘Oh!’ A passionate cry broke from Sheila. In a moment she was on her
knees gazing with adoration at the flaxen-haired, elf-like child.
For from the big dreaming eyes her vanished Kay looked at her; the
wonderful boy dead and buried in a prematurely old man, lived again in
this two-year old girl. Hungrily Sheila kissed the tiny face ... and
once again she felt his arm about her and heard his boyish whispers.

‘Oh, give her to me!’ she cried, looking up over the child’s head at
its father.

Kay’s face lit up.

‘I’ve got it now. I remember,’ he said triumphantly.

‘What?’ asked Sophie, troubled by Sheila’s emotion, and yet gratified
by it.

‘Why,’ said Kay, ‘the name of Tomlinson’s youngest. It was Freddie. I
told you it began with an F.’

He looked round with modest pride, and was surprised to see Sheila
burst into tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

So that was the solution of the problem. The beauty of life was only
for the young, the very young. In a child’s heart and nowhere else the
kingdom of heaven was to be found, a frail gossamer thing vanishing
with the years. This was the common lot: by contact with the world
to rub the down of paradise off our souls, to grow drab and dull in
spirit, drab and dull in mind, even before that waning of physical
strength which alone could assuage the bitterness of the process. In
Kay youth had died; in Edward--Edward had never been young; but in
herself youth lived and craved more life. Yes, it lived still, but now
it was stricken and dying.

It flashed upon her then that she too could renew her youth. In a child
she could live again.

But a child had been denied her.

She deemed her life to be already virtually finished. She would age
from this moment: after a brief fever her mind would dim and even the
desire for beauty would sink into oblivion. She tried to hope it would
be soon, but the struggling youth in her cried out against the hope.


2

The struggling youth in her cried out, and, years later, the cry was
answered. Beauty became incarnated in the person of Stephen Redshawe,
whose son she later encountered in the house at Maadi. The past rose in
sad loveliness, enveloping her with the fragrance of pressed flowers;
but of all the memories that surged in her, this one alone broke in
pitiless splendour over her consciousness. In that moment Stephen
Redshawe lived again, less as a man and a lover than as a gleam, an
ecstasy, a chord of divine music, a symbol of all that she had longed
for and lost. Other things she could recall minutely, but Stephen
remained a vague splendour. She recalled how, in her little cottage
near Mundesley, she had waited for his promised coming; how she had
looked again and again, in wonder, to find in her mirror the face he
had called lovely. It was a face ravaged less by her thirty-three years
than by discontent. His sisters and his mother she remembered only as
so many bundles of feminine hostility. They disapproved of her, and no
wonder: was she not a married woman, holiday-making alone, who yet
suffered gladly the admiration of an infatuated boy? They called her
adventuress, no doubt, and she, even in the midst of the adventure,
made allowances for them. She had neither the strength nor the will to
renounce the fairest gift that life offered.

‘May I come in?’ Stephen’s tall figure filled the doorway.

‘You must,’ Sheila answered, with a smile. ‘I’m not going to give you
any tea while you stand there keeping the sunshine out.’

‘This is our last meeting,’ blundered Stephen. ‘I want to tell you....’

Suddenly dreading to hear the words for which she longed, Sheila fended
them away. ‘Eat your pretty cake,’ she admonished him.

After tea they went out into the sandy paddock and talked for an hour
of indifferent things, of trains, of luggage, of books and bad music
... until a stillness fell, heralding dusk. Evening became personal
and urgent to enfold them: they could hear in the wash of the water,
rhythmically plashing the sand, the rise and fall of her bosom; they
could feel her breath sweeter than apples in the autumn air. And all
the skies that during the past weeks of stolen companionship they
had seen together, all the tides they had watched moving upon the
shore, became fused with that sky, with that tide; all the hours of
their comradeship were gathered up into that hour. They surrendered
themselves to the embracing arms of silence.

To Sheila it was as if infinity had been spilled into time: the moments
throbbed by, brimming with beauty, until the silence that these two
guarded became a music, a poem, a flower of loveliness. It was a flower
that budded and blossomed till their vision dimmed with the glory of
it, a flower that burst and fell scattering pollen and perfume.

He bent towards her, with cheeks flaming. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he
said, and for a moment could not go on. To Sheila life was become
exquisitely unreal, a work of art. ‘You must know,’ he said brokenly,
‘that I adore you.’

Compassionately she laid her cool hand on his.

‘Yes,’ she said, in a low tone tenderly soothing.

‘Ah!’ His breath fluttered. She gave him her trembling lips.

They kissed, first, like boy and girl, timidly; then like comrades
united after a long parting; again, and a red splendour flamed through
the throbbing world. He lifted her into his arms, and divine madness
seized her. He carried her with strong unfaltering stride into the
house.

And this day, which they had called the end, was really the beginning.
She returned on the morrow to Edward’s house and confided to her
husband that she wished him to divorce her. Edward listened patiently,
like the disinterested friend he was; but his disinterestedness made
her pride wince, and the old hated surroundings were bleak about her.
Yet on that night of her return, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she
undressed with a new joy. She stood nude before the wardrobe mirror
and gazed with awe upon the pure rounded loveliness of her own form.
She stroked gently her white velvet skin. Her body, so long disdained,
had become sacred to her again. As she laid her head, that kingdom
of heaven, upon her pillow, and murmured Stephen’s name, Stephen
himself, in a suburb fourteen miles away, posted his weekly letter
to the girl--no adventuress, she--who was to become his wife and the
mother of his only son. For Stephen, too, was back in the old routine,
enfolded and pressed close to the bosom of his family, conscious of
his mother’s eyes watching him with an angry solicitude. Not without a
struggle did he succumb. To Grace, whose pretty simplicity no longer
held him, he hinted dire things; but at the first gesture of suffering
from her he winced, and surrendered. And he wrote to Sheila in his
best literary style. She carried the letter, as she had carried its
predecessors, into the summer-house, that she might commune with her
lover undisturbed.

‘Darling,’ she read, ‘the thought of how I must hurt you is hell to me.’

She caught her breath, looked once upon the sky, and then bent her eyes
again to receive the blow....

With mind benumbed she looked up from the fastidious caligraphy to find
Stephen himself standing, like a whipped dog, before her. For a moment
they strangely stared.

‘Why have you come?’

He broke out into self-pity. ‘Oh, I can’t bear it. Don’t for God’s sake
look like that.... I couldn’t leave you without a word from your lips.’

She tried to harden her heart. ‘Is that all?’

His hands made a helpless gesture. ‘I’m such a despicable coward. I’ve
lived always among dreams. Real life is too hard for me--I’d be better
dead.’

‘Why have you come?’ she asked. ‘Have you anything to add to this?’
She held out his letter. ‘Why not leave it at that?’

‘I had to see you,’ he said. ‘I had to ask your forgiveness. I hoped to
get here before that thing. Oh, how detestable I am!’

He dropped on to the seat beside her and sat, hunched and shaking, a
figure of desolation.

‘Never mind,’ said Sheila firmly. ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk. You’re
quite free now to go back to her. And you’ve done me no harm.’

He stammered in amazement. ‘You can say that! Don’t you see how
contemptible I am! I would like to kill myself!’

He brooded on that thought. Death was the only escape from his own
insufferable egoism. Then he began to perceive that he was extracting
enjoyment even from the savour of his own self-loathing. He was rolling
the bitterness round on his tongue till it had a certain sweetness for
him. He was indulging in an orgy of painful emotions that was delicious
to the very egoism it wounded. He was discovering hitherto unplumbed
depths in his nature and being fascinated by the stupendous spectacle
of his own soul’s suffering. And he knew that the experience was far
too morbidly interesting to drive him to suicide.

The perception of his self-pity afflicted Sheila with a new and more
sickening pain. Something of this change must have been visible in her
face, for with a manifest effort he became calm, and began speaking in
more normal tones.

‘Perhaps we shall be glad afterwards,’ he said slowly. ‘The scandal
would have killed my mother....’

Sheila winced. ‘Oh, Stephen, are you trying to make me hate you? Why
did you say that?...’

‘Why----’

‘Why do you talk in that unreal way? Why do you pretend ... try at the
last moment to blind me with false pious reasoning!’

‘But what I said about my mother----’

‘--Was false as water. You didn’t mean a word of it. You are too
dreadfully sorry for yourself to care about your mother. You’re
breaking faith, and because it hurts you you’re trying to feel good
about it. God knows I haven’t disputed your decision--nor even blamed
you for it. But now, please go!’

He rose. ‘I am not to come back?’

‘No, no. Go away.’

‘But, Sheila----’

‘Why will you torture me so?’ she cried. ‘It’s your own choice. If only
you’d never come to-night--it would have been so much kinder.’

‘Oh, I can’t bear this!’ He trembled towards her.

She rose, to confront him with lustreless eyes.

‘Are you made of straw? Can you neither take me nor leave me?...
Good-bye.’

‘God, how you hate me now!’ he murmured, as she swept past him.

She paused to say: ‘That should be nothing to you. But it’s not true.
You have done me no harm. I had never known happiness before you came
... but,’ she added, with his child in her womb, ‘I shall soon forget,
and you will have made no difference. None at all.’

She stumbled out into the hateful sunlight and went, half-running,
towards the house.


3

In Edward’s house, and with Edward’s bored approval--for he was busy
at the time on a scathing history of the Jesuits--Stephen’s child was
born. And, in the triumph that followed agony, the spirit of Sheila
rose from the dead. Four years later, determined to purge herself of
bitterness, she visited the scene of her love. When she entered the
paddock again, her silent but excited child at her side, her eyes
filled with tears at the sight of the old romantic disorder that had
once so charmed her. ‘These poppies,’ her heart said, ‘are children
of flowers that witnessed our love.’ The paddock was shut in on three
sides by a hedge of briar. In the long rank grass numberless weeds had
rioted unchecked for many years, and the hand of the picnicker lay
heavy on the land. A medley of docks, nettles, thistles, poppies, empty
cigarette packets, paper bags, ginger-beer bottles, and corks, greeted
Sheila’s eyes. ‘What a pickle!’ she said.

‘What a lovely pickle, Sheila,’ the little girl echoed. She began
collecting corks with the solemnity of an elderly spinster gathering
a cautionary nosegay for a drunkard’s grave. This was a simile that
Sheila, gravely nonsensical, suggested to Rosemary, who with perfect
dignity assented. ‘How fortunate that Edward isn’t here to be shocked
by my vulgarity,’ Sheila thought.

Entering the house she found there matter for surprise: a greasy
plate, a crust of bread, and a breakfast cup, caked with tannin,
standing ankle-deep in a saucer half-full of spilt tea. The next moment
Mrs. Boddy arrived, a little red berry of humanity to whom had been
entrusted a duplicate key and the duty of preparing the place for
habitation.

‘Oh, ma’am!’ said Mrs. Boddy. ‘To think that you should have got ’ere
before me, without a bit of tea ready or nothing.’ The sight of those
inglorious festal remains was the culminating assault on her feelings.
‘There! Just look at that.’

Sheila nodded, smiling. ‘Some one’s been here evidently. The question
is, Who?’

‘And how?’ added Mrs. Boddy. ‘’Ow?’ she repeated, by way of emphasis.
‘And oh,’ she cried, enveloping Rosemary, ‘here’s the dear little ducky
duck. Hasn’t she got a kiss for the wicked old woman that didn’t get
her mother’s tea ready?’

Having released Rosemary, Mrs. Boddy stood brooding. ‘There’s been a
man here. One of those persons of the tramp class.’

After a moment’s contemplation of this hypothetical tramp, ‘It’s not at
all nice,’ she added, and drew away from the polluted table. ‘You might
be murdered in your beds.’

‘Well, if one must be murdered, one could hardly choose a more
comfortable place,’ said Sheila. ‘Let’s try to make a fire to boil the
kettle on, shall we? I’m longing for my tea.’

Mrs. Boddy became the embodiment of bustle. She shot out of the house
in search of dry sticks for the fire.

‘And do you know what I would do if I were you, ma’am?’ she enquired,
reappearing after a brief and successful forage. ‘I’d have my tea
and go straight back to town. Straight back. I wouldn’t stay another
minute.’

‘Not stay!’ echoed Sheila in weak astonishment. ‘Not stay for a
holiday?’

‘Not to be murdered, I wouldn’t.’

‘After coming all this way?’

‘Not to be murdered,’ repeated Mrs. Boddy firmly.

‘But perhaps we shan’t be murdered.’

‘You mark my words,’ Mrs. Boddy admonished her.

Sheila laughed. ‘I’m not going to be frightened away by a dirty cup and
saucer.’

‘Well, let’s hope for the best,’ said Mrs. Boddy, with an unexpected
access of cheerfulness. ‘And after all, if anything nasty _does_
happen, I’m not above half a mile away, am I?’

She emerged, goggle-eyed, from the pantry.

‘And blest if me lord haven’t helped himself to the stores I got in
for you!’ she exclaimed, shrilly indignant; and then, with lingering
pathos: ‘Oh, _ma’am_!’

After tea Mrs. Boddy went home, and Sheila took her child into the
belittered paddock, and sat in a deck-chair, crocheting, and watching
the shadows lengthen, while Rosemary in her busily silent fashion
wandered in the long grasses. From time to time the little girl took
an occasional bite out of an apple with which Mrs. Boddy had sought to
win her regard, until she made a discovery that sent her running to her
mother, somewhat sternly demanding why she had been given an apple from
which the cork had not been removed. Later, the paddock was invaded by
a sleek brown dog with melancholy eyes, velvet ears, and a general air
of unctuous virtue, with whom Rosemary instantly made friends.

‘What a dear dog,’ she said, returning to Sheila’s chair after spending
twenty minutes in the company of this engaging creature.

‘Yes. He seems at home here,’ replied Sheila, thinking of Mrs. Boddy’s
tramp.

‘Of _course_ he’s at home,’ said the child with magisterial emphasis.
‘I asked him to make himself at home. And he did.’

‘How friendly of him.’ Sheila’s eyes drank in eagerly the absurd
delicious gravity of Rosemary’s thought-puckered face. ‘I wonder what
his name is.’

‘His name,’ answered the child casually, ‘is Poker.’ After a pause she
added: ‘Poker Morgan his name is. He’s just come home from school.’
Sheila waited with becoming seriousness for further details of Poker
Morgan’s eventful life. ‘He goes to school every day,’ Rosemary went
on. ‘Every day except Sunday. On Sunday he doesn’t go to school, he
doesn’t. He stays at home with his mother.’

‘How nice for Mrs. Morgan,’ said Sheila. ‘And what does Poker learn at
school?’

‘Oh, just lessons; that’s all.’ Rosemary dismissed the question with
the air of having sufficiently explained everything. ‘May I have
another sponge finger, please, Sheila?’

Irresponsibly light-hearted, Sheila retired to bed, joining Rosemary
in the little attic room with the homicidal slanting roof. She stood
for some time at the east window, bathing in the moonlight, and looking
towards the sea which broke within twenty yards of the crumbling wall.
The wind fluttered her night-dress.

Nocturnal calm was abruptly shattered by a beer-thickened voice
uttering a passionate demand for admittance. Sheila stepped quickly
across the room to the western window.

‘You let me in before yourrurt,’ urged the voice. And Sheila, leaning
out of the window, saw a gentleman in baggy corduroys that were tied
with string at the knees peering up at her malevolently from under a
huge cloth cap. The moon focussed her light upon his impressive figure.

‘Mrs. Boddy’s tramp,’ murmured Sheila, secure in the knowledge of
having made fast all doors and windows.

‘I’ll soon show you whose ’ouse it is,’ promised the gentleman in the
garden.

‘Please go away,’ Sheila advised him. ‘I’m sure you must be ready for
your bed.’

Mrs. Boddy’s tramp found this well-meant counsel literally staggering.
He executed a series of curious plunges, and having described a
complete circle resumed his original stance.

‘Oh, it’s go away, is it?’

‘It really is,’ Sheila assured him. ‘I’m too tired to entertain a
strayed reveller. Please go away. I’m going to shut the window.’

‘Oh, it’s shut the window, is it?...’ enquired the strange gentleman,
in a slightly more conciliatory tone. ‘’Oose window? Answer me that.’

But the spirit of nonsense in Sheila had tired itself out. She withdrew
into the room, and when the voice broke loose again from its owner’s
control, she began to feel impatient. Presently this nuisance would
waken Rosemary, and perhaps even frighten her. This fear sent her
quickly back to the window.

‘If you don’t go away at once my husband will fetch a policeman.’

‘I’m a Nopper by trade,’ continued the visitor, unaccountably and
savagely hurling his cap on the ground. ‘Can’t I turn me head a minute
without a mob like you stealing the ’ouse off me back? Answer me that.’

The serene little figure of Rosemary sat up suddenly in bed.

‘Who’s that shouting to you, Sheila?’

‘The gentleman’s a hopper, dear. Go to sleep again, like a good girl.’

‘I don’t like him,’ said Rosemary. ‘Tell Mr. Hopper to go away.’

Sheila shut the window; and after a while the visitor withdrew, leaving
behind him a dirty cloth cap and the germ of a new mythology.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the morning Rosemary found inscrutable but sufficient cause to
reverse her condemnation of Mr. Hopper. She spent the odd moments of
the next day embellishing the ideal portrait that her surprising young
fancy had drawn. At breakfast Mr. Hopper was a nice large gentleman;
by lunchtime he was wearing blue spectacles, had developed a taste
for sponge fingers, and was clad in a velvet jacket, like Edward’s,
with cavernous pockets containing a clockwork train and a woolly-pated
black doll. The next day he mysteriously acquired a brown beard and
a pair of spotty trousers similar to those of a certain harlequin
prominent among Rosemary’s cherished memories, and before the week
was out he was provided with a Botticelli halo that added sanctity to
an already distinguished appearance. Stories of his wonderful doings
began to circulate: how he had travelled in a train to the City to
buy feeding-bottles for Rosemary’s children; how his several mothers
(a generic term that included wives) had had to physic his cough; and
how bravely he could ride elephants. Mr. Hopper had various secondary
designations: sometimes he was known as the man with a lot of mothers
(a distinction he perhaps derived from Bluebeard); sometimes, more
tersely, as ‘my friend’; and sometimes as Poker Morgan’s father. In
short Mr. Hopper was canonized; Mr. Hopper became a legend. He went
triumphantly upon his swaggering, nonsensical, polygamous, but none
the less kindly way in Rosemary’s mind, a figure of flaming glory and
infinite adaptability; until abruptly, and without pity, she tired of
him and turned to other joys.

On Sunday morning she was taken, for the first time, to church; whence
she returned consumingly curious. To Sheila, who had hoped for no more
than a vague æsthetic enjoyment, the ceremony had been disappointing.
She felt unequal to explaining why Rosemary must on no account bestow
the big pockets and spotty trousers of her generous imagination upon
members of the Holy Trinity, whose names the little girl had fatally
remembered. But blasphemy being so clearly imminent, Sheila addressed
herself with a sigh to the task of averting it.

‘Jesus, dear, was the name of a real person, someone who really lived.
Not like Mr. Hopper.’

Rosemary’s intense dark eyes grew profoundly reproachful. This lapse
from poetic faith on the part of so skilled a fellow-artist as Sheila
was terrible. It was as though the whole beautiful city of pretence was
threatened with hostile invasion.

‘But Mr. Hopper is real too,’ Rosemary said, with quivering lip.

‘Of course he is,’ agreed Sheila hastily. ‘How silly of me! But he is
different. You mustn’t mix him up with these others.’

When some working agreement in this delicate matter had been reached,
they went to the beach together to dig sand castles and tell each
other stories: an idyllic experience, type of many shared during this
magical holiday.


4

Then upon the smooth sands of this quietude Terror planted his ugly
hoof. Rosemary was seized with illness. Unaccountably, in spite of
Sheila’s lavish care, she had caught a dangerous chill.

Sheila locked up the house, and ran, already feverish with anxiety, to
Mrs. Boddy. She arrived breathless, to find that amiable woman with her
arms up to the elbows in soapy water.

‘It’s Rosemary--she’s ill,’ gasped Sheila. ‘Please fetch someone
quickly.’ She dropped into the nearest chair, breathing hard.

The red hands leaped out of the wash-tub and were rubbed on an
immaculate white apron.

‘Pore lamb!’ cried Mrs. Boddy. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

Sheila was now upon her feet again, her breath recovered. ‘I don’t
quite know. She caught cold yesterday. I doctored her as best I could.
But this morning she’s worse--breathing badly and almost delirious.
Please go at once. She’s alone in the house--I’m going back.’

The vision of the sick child calling in vain for its mother stabbed
Sheila to an impossible speed. After running a few hundred yards she
was overtaken and picked up by a man driving a trap.

Back in the cottage, ‘I must keep calm. I mustn’t lose control of
myself,’ she urged upon her wildly beating heart; and she climbed the
stairs trying not to be terrified by the deathly silence of the place.
When she opened the bedroom door she could hear the sawing noise of the
child’s breathing, and fear laid a cold finger on her brain: could that
be what they called the death-rattle?

‘Ah,’ she said, half-aloud, ‘if I lose my nerve I shall be useless to
her in her greatest need.’ And, deciding that she could do no more, she
forced herself to sit down and await with iron patience the doctor’s
coming. She wondered whether she would do wrong if she opened the
window she had in her first panic shut. The room was unbearably stuffy.
‘Pure air _must_ be better than bad,’ she told herself; and unfastened
the catch. The garden seemed full of sunshine and birds and the smell
of honeysuckle.

She turned her head at the sound of steps on the stairs. ‘At last!’

A commanding and resolute female figure appeared in the doorway:
Edward’s sister, Hypatia.

‘Well, Sheila,’ said Hypatia, humorously grim. ‘You keep open house, I
see.’

Sheila stared, unable and uncaring to hide her disappointment. ‘Oh, you
mean my leaving the front door open. That’s for the doctor.’

Hypatia stepped into the room. ‘Something’s wrong.’ Her tone became
gentle as her glance fell upon Rosemary. ‘Rosemary--she’s ill?’

‘Yes ... Rosemary.’ Sheila’s voice lingeringly caressed the name.

‘Poor little kid,’ Hypatia murmured. ‘What is it?’

In an undertone Sheila began repeating her simple story. ‘Oh, I do
wish the doctor would come!’ she broke off. ‘It may be pneumonia or
something even more dreadful.’

Instantly forgetting Hypatia, she paced to the door and began running
downstairs. And at that moment a trap drew up outside the house, and
the doctor entered, followed at a respectful distance by Mrs. Boddy.
He was a tall curvilinear man with a stoop and an air of intense
preoccupation. With a perfunctory response to Sheila’s eager greeting
he followed her upstairs. Furtively, with eyes veiling mistrust, she
watched him approach the bedside.

Twenty seconds later her feelings towards him had totally changed.
He won her heart by the smile that flickered for a moment in his
face at first sight of his patient, and by the gentleness with which
he unclasped Rosemary’s fingers from the woolly bear that her arm
embraced. Sheila gave herself to the answering of his professional
questions.

       *       *       *       *       *

Her fears a little stilled by the doctor’s reassurances, she
surrendered to Hypatia’s importunity by withdrawing with her into the
garden for a few moments.

‘Now, Sheila, my dear,’ Hypatia urged, taking her arm with a sisterly
caressing, ‘you’re not to worry. Worry’s fatal. The kid’s going to get
well quite soon.’

‘Do you really think so?’ asked Sheila, pathetically eager.

Hypatia feigned exasperated wonder. ‘Well, I’m dashed!’ she exclaimed,
in the old school-girl tone of nearly forty years ago. ‘What’s the good
of calling in a doctor and paying him ridiculous fees if you don’t
believe what he tells you? Didn’t Mr. New Moon say she’d be out of bed
in a fortnight?’

‘With care,’ supplemented Sheila, on whose brain the doctor’s words
were indelibly written.

‘Of course, with care. Without care we should all come to grief.’

Sheila faintly smiled. ‘Do you remember when you so hotly denied the
reality of sin, sickness, and death?’

‘Ah, that’s long ago,’ said Hypatia good-humouredly. ‘I’ve had a varied
career since then. Still, we live and learn.’

‘What’s the latest?’ asked Sheila.

‘The latest?’

‘The latest religious nostrum.’

‘Back in the fold for a time.’ Hypatia seemed to enjoy the new-found
pleasure of poking fun at herself. ‘Do you remember Herbert Spencer,
Sheila? But one can’t rest there. For me it’s Woman Suffrage now.
It’s got to come. And I’m reading Butler again. Good stuff. _Life and
Habit_ especially, and _Unconscious Memory_. Jumps on Darwin for having
banished mind from the universe. But you haven’t asked me why I’ve come
yet. Aren’t you surprised to see me?’

‘Why have you come?’ Sheila asked obediently. ‘I’m very glad you did
come,’ she added.

‘I wonder if you are really,’ mused Hypatia. ‘We’ve been too polite
to each other since we were married, Sheila, too polite to be quite
good friends. Never mind. I came to say good-bye. Bunny’s got a job in
Cairo. Something to do with irrigation. The sort of thing he wanted.’

‘Must I congratulate you?’ said Sheila. ‘No, I won’t. You two are going
to Egypt, and I shall never see you again. How very unpleasant of you.’

‘I wish you could come too. But Edward couldn’t very well move his
little pet idol _The Iconoclast_ to Cairo.’

‘Oh, that wouldn’t matter to me.’ Sheila was too weary to maintain a
pretence.

Hypatia raised her eyebrows. ‘You’ve quarrelled?’

‘My dear Hypatia, can you imagine Edward being so unreasonable as to
quarrel? We could part without tears, I assure you. But that doesn’t
mean I can come to Cairo with you. There’s Rosemary to consider.’

Hypatia smiled grimly. ‘That’s very thin. Go and pack your trunk for
Egypt, Sheila.’

Conversation was cut short by the arrival of the doctor.

‘She is already a little more comfortable,’ he assured Sheila, ‘and
sleeping.’ A fugitive smile crossed his face. ‘She is talking in her
sleep about fire-irons, so far as I can make out. A certain poker....’

‘Oh, that’s Poker Morgan,’ interposed Sheila, happy at the sound of so
friendly a name. ‘When will you come again?’

‘Mrs. Boddy is with the patient. An admirable person. I shall call
again to-night. Now, Mrs. Fairfield, are you a sensible woman?’

Sheila, eagerly submissive, hoped that she was. ‘I’ll do anything for
her that you tell me. She’s all I’ve got.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ he said. ‘But if you’re a sensible woman you’ll
not be alarmed when I suggest taking a second professional opinion.’

‘Please do,’ begged Sheila, who had long made a secret determination to
insist on such a precaution.

‘It’s not that I’m afraid about the child. But I’m a cautious man. And
I’ve never held omniscience to be part of a physician’s equipment. She
has had these chills before?’

‘Frequently, but never so badly.’

‘The nose and throat are affected,’ said the curving doctor. ‘She’s
acutely susceptible to cold. Treacherous east winds about. Bad place,
England, for a constitution like hers. You should take her to a warm
climate: warm and dry.’

With a boyish air of having finished a necessary recital he raised his
hat and began picking his way across the wilderness of paddock.

Sheila glanced at her friend’s face. Triumph danced in the eyes of
Hypatia.


PART THE FOURTH

_Evening of the Same Day_

‘Slip away while you can, and have a look at my Thought Forms,’ Mr.
Bunnard had urged the agitated young man; and by politely acquiescing
Stephen Redshawe’s son had condemned himself to suffer a two hours’
mystical monologue illustrated by coloured drawings. When they at last
emerged from what the old gentleman termed, with accidental aptness,
his den, the Egyptian dark had come, not at one stride yet swiftly, to
envelop the house at Maadi.

But the darkness of this particular April evening was but a more
exquisite light: day seen through a veil of mystery, purged of its
glare. Moon shed her unearthly pallor over the piazza with its pattern
in ochre and green, and silvered the leaves of the lebbek trees in the
garden. The intense dark blue of the sky was numerously divided by the
fine mesh of the mosquito netting that clung to the supporting white
columns. When Rosemary left the piano and sat down in the deck-chair
opposite Redshawe, only the incessant dry rattle of crickets remained
to make the stillness musical. She came like cool rain; she seemed
to bring with her a dewy grace that dispelled the languor wrought in
him by the too-intoxicating syringa; and he reposed gratefully in the
unmeasured comfort of her nearness.

Redshawe, dilettante in letters, groped in his mind for a phrase that
should symbolize the baffling quality in her: a quality as indefinable
as the fragrance of musk-roses. ‘Incarnate stillness’ hovered for his
choosing; but the futility of his efforts becoming thereby so patent,
he abandoned the search, quite reverently sighing. Stillness, silence,
the very spirit of quietude, in her became personal. She had light
brown hair and olive skin; she was perhaps twenty-five years old; but
her unfathomable dark eyes gazed from an oval face absurdly angelic
with the sublime gravity of a child. With Mrs. Bunnard rasping on one
side of him and Mr. Bunnard chirping a high-pitched chorus part on the
other, Redshawe strained his ears to catch Rosemary’s soft tones. In
conversation she palpitated an innocent curiosity. She focussed those
twin orbs of mystery upon his religious doubts; and not all the mature
intelligence of her arguments could obscure for him the shining of her
angel-infancy. That very phrase flashed on him while they talked, an
echo from his reading, suggesting another, from the same source, that
for a while almost satisfied his longing for an adequate symbol. ‘A
white celestial thought.’ Yes: Rosemary herself was a white celestial
thought.

‘The fundamental cause of reincarnation,’ said Mrs. Bunnard firmly,
‘is, as you know, the lust for sentient life. Once we have conquered
that----’

‘We shall have reached a consummation,’ interpolated her husband,
‘much, as Shakespeare says, to be desired.’

‘The law of periodicity, Mr. Redshawe,’ Mrs. Bunnard assured him,
‘is perfectly obvious and understandable. Night and day, life and
death, sleeping and waking--all these simple alternations are but
manifestations of a universal rhythm.’

Not to be outdone, ‘The systole and diastole,’ cried Mr. Bunnard,
deftly inserting a smile and a phrase into the manifest gap, ‘the
systole and diastole of the Cosmic Heart.’

Desperately, like a goaded animal, ‘But what,’ asked Redshawe, ‘has all
this God-throb....’

A surprising ripple of laughter arrested his question and drew his eyes
back to Rosemary. Sheila came generously to the rescue and distracted
to herself the enemy’s fire. In a little while Mrs. Bunnard withdrew to
her bedroom with the announced intention of meditating; and the battle
raged less furiously between the two remaining elders: so healingly
less that Redshawe had a beatific sense of being alone in the universe
with his divinity.

He plunged deeply into the cool waters of her elusive beauty, and they
talked eagerly, yet with harmonious pauses ... until he chanced to see
that on the third finger of her left hand she wore a plain gold ring.

       *       *       *       *       *

Too desperately stricken to pay another moment’s homage to his ideal
English reticence, he in effect ran like a hurt child to Rosemary’s
mother by contriving an early opportunity of solitary speech with
her. He the more readily exposed his wound to Sheila because he now
perceived what until the shattering to bits of his fool’s paradise had
been beyond his vision: that Sheila too was suffering.

‘She’s married!’ he protested to her.

‘Rosemary?’ she wearily answered him.

‘Rosemary, of course,’ he cried, forgetting both patience and
ceremony. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I didn’t tell you?’ Sheila repeated in astonishment.

Flushed and gloomy, he made equine plunges towards the explanation he
considered so superfluous.

‘Well, didn’t you know? Of course, you must have known. Yet how should
you?’

‘Know!’ echoed Sheila. ‘Know that she was married?’

‘No, no.’ Impatiently he shook the suggestion away. ‘What it means to
me--you must have known that?’

‘My poor boy! What _does_ it mean to you?’

They stared at each other with troubled eyes.

‘Everything,’ answered his helpless gesture.

Her face contracted with pain. She bowed her head. With pain, swiftly,
she bowed her head. For one terrible moment he thought she was going to
weep.

He put his arm round her shoulders.

‘It must be much worse for you,’ he said vaguely, wishing to help.
Already he knew dimly that he, being young, would forget some day.

She moved gently away from him. ‘But we mustn’t be tragic, must we?’
she said, trying to smile. ‘You don’t quite understand.’

‘I understand something,’ he pleaded, lest his sympathy should be
repulsed. ‘So very little, but something. I’ve loved her for weeks ...
but she must be infinitely more to you.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of Rosemary,’ said Sheila. ‘Please don’t look quite
like that,’ she almost passionately added.

He trod the fringe of the incomprehensible. ‘Ah, you were thinking....
My way of speaking perhaps reminded you....’

‘I was thinking of Rosemary’s father,’ Sheila abruptly assured him.
‘And so you are in love with my daughter, are you?’ She spoke almost
coldly. ‘Would you think me very bitter if I congratulated you on
losing her?’

His face was all question.

‘She would have broken your heart. She is very hard to those that love
her.’

‘Hard!’ His tone was almost scornful in its incredulity. ‘With the face
of an angel and the wondering eyes of a child!’

‘Yes. Have you never seen a child pick wings off flies? Rosemary is
still a child. Enchanting. Sweet beyond words. But with a child’s
incapacity for love.’

‘But she’s _married_!’

‘Yes,’ Sheila answered, with dreadful serenity. ‘She was married this
afternoon, when I supposed her to be at the Lodge with her aunt. She
dropped in somewhere to be married, and picked up Hypatia on the way
home.’

‘But....’ Redshawe was helpless.

‘Oh, I knew it must come soon. She had been engaged for some years.’

‘May I ask to whom?’

‘The Reverend Oliver Wendell Brunt, an American gentleman.’

Redshawe paced the room. ‘And where in thunder is he?’

‘On his knees, no doubt, invoking God’s blessing on his work in China.
He is a missionary. They leave to-morrow together. They’ve just had
the call from God and must obey at once. Rosemary has apologized very
nicely for her eccentricity. She was afraid I might make a fuss, and
cry at the ceremony; so she arranged it this way. And she just doesn’t
understand what it all means to me.’

‘What an inhuman crowd they are!’ muttered Redshawe. And he gasped to
recall Rosemary’s serene bearing, her untroubled beauty, her lucid
reasoning, her faultless rendering of Scriabine, and the placid prattle
of her uncle and aunt. An incredible household.

Silence fell between them.

‘Forgive me, Mrs. Fairfield,’ broke out Redshawe after a while. ‘I
shouldn’t have blundered in with my self-pity. But mine isn’t a boyish
fancy or any rot of that kind. To me she is just pure beauty. I’ve
always worshipped beauty. I could have poured out my life like wine at
her feet.’

‘And to me,’ said Sheila, ‘she was a little helpless thing that fumbled
at my breasts. She’s been my whole life for twenty-six years. I waited
for her coming as for the coming of God.... Let’s go in: they’ll be
waiting supper for us!’

Sadly, ‘Life seems to promise so much,’ Redshawe began, with the unique
solemnity of adolescence. ‘Beauty stands in the doorway and beckons ...
and when we follow she’s vanished.’

‘Lucky boy!’ with a wan smile Sheila said to him. ‘You’ll be busy
writing lyrics about this to-morrow.’

The door opened noiselessly, and in the doorway, two slender white
fingers resting on the handle, stood Rosemary, lightly poised on her
toes as though for celestial flight. Her eyes sparkled with an almost
stellar radiance; her cheeks were delicately flushed, and her lips
a little parted, like the petals of an awakening rosebud. Redshawe,
abashed at the memory of having criticized her for inhumanity,
worshipped once more her divinity, lapsed into mute adoration; and
Sheila held her breath, telling herself: ‘I may never see her stand
like that again.’

‘Supper’s ready, mother. I’m sure you’re both hungry.’ The words did
but tremble in the air for a moment, and then became no more than an
imperishable memory for mother and lover.

‘Do let me take you in, Mrs. Fairfield,’ said Redshawe, affectionately,
compassionately gallant; and as Sheila, a little tremulous but gravely
mistress of herself, took the arm he offered, ‘Thank you, my dear,’ she
rewarded him. But in her heart she was saying: ‘The last supper.’




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.





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