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THE JUDGE

by

REBECCA WEST

Author of "The Return Of The Soldier"

New York
George H. Doran Company

1922,







TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER




BOOK ONE




     "Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of
     the father."




CHAPTER I

I


It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it
as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The
office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those
decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of Edinburgh
New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that opened just
opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock
and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the
southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that
strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it
keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the
cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy
with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and
remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms
beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was
ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched
it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate
and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly
night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of
dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a
past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and
said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one
had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it
its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough
stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked
desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was
nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months
since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by
this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in
Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult
people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known
as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.
Less than that would do: just to see people's faces doing something else
than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something
else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got
people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no
part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had
first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too
comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert
beginning.

"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this
rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere
congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did
the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time
she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy
of the twilight.

Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those
Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at
school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville
had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket
with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the
Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an
Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.

From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the
landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed
ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers
of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset
swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and
lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would
sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.

She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would
reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with
a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to
see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not
come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.
But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light
again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of
her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent
that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in
Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of
inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk
with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She
thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the
Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept
them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay
white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had
seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak
to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though
there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out
of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,
constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild
capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified
by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and
she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their
nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose
thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised
it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching
vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a
Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord
Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed
out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish
swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and
the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the
aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she
was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had
worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather
pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer
than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing
in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had
two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever
girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen
had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She
was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin
brown paper out of _Weldon's Fashions_ on to stuff that must not on any
account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with
the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her
shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the
good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her
thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had
always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,
as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now
dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in
Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been
hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used
to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the
housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered
it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At
the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these
accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....

The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly
on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles
against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their
persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the
representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised
his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most
impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,
and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a
high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing
his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right
of way, and Menzies & Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at
Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"--that greeting by which Scot links himself
to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.
Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth
he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that
led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would
prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the
respected townsman. He had meant from the first to end with a paunch.
But now wealth was inalienably his and Beauty could beckon him on no
strange pilgrimages, his soul retraced its steps and contemplated this
bright thing as an earth creature might creep to the mouth of its lair
and blink at the sun. And there was more than that to it. He loved her.
He had never had enough to do with pitiful things (his wife Elizabeth
had been a banker's daughter), and this, child had come to him, that day
in June, so white, so weak, so chilled to the bone, for all the summer
heat, by her monstrous ill-usage....

He said, "Nelly, will your mother be feared if you stop and take a few
notes for Mr. Philip till eight? There is a chemist body coming through
from the cordite works at Aberfay who can't come in the day but Saturday
mornings, and you ken Mr. Philip's away to London for the week-end by
the 8.30, so he's seeing him the night. Mr. Philip would be thankful if
you'd stop."

"I will so, Mr. James," said Ellen.

"You're sure your mother'll not be feared?"

"What way would my mother be feared," said Ellen, "and me seventeen
past?"

"There's many a lassie who's found being seventeen no protection from a
wicked world." He emitted some great Burns-night chuckles, and kicked
the fire to a blaze.

She said sternly, "Take note, Mr. James, that I haven't done a hand's
turn this hour or more, and that not for want of asking for work. Dear
knows I have my hand on Mr. Morrison's door-knob half the day."

Mr. James got up to go. "You're a fierce hussy, and mean to be a partner
in the firm before you've done with us."

"If I were a man I would be that."

"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good
man comes by."

She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to
defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,
but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late. Sometimes
she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an imaginary
group of people whom she desired to be with--well-found people who would
disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and beautiful results;
who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid social life that had
been previously nurtured by separate tender intimacies at hearths that
were more than grates and fenders, in private picture-galleries with
wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries adorned with big-nosed
marble busts. She knew that that environment existed for she had seen
it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League picnic in the grounds of an
Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the secretary had taken her up to the
house. They had waited in a high, long room with crossed swords on the
walls wherever there were not bookshelves or the portraits of men and
women so proud that they had not minded being painted plain, and there
were French windows opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on
an ornate balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many
flowering trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so
broad the intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered
river-bed below. On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few
unnecessary fires she had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity
that the books lying on the great round table were mostly the drawings
of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to
them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the
pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee
that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society
of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin
like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and
whose hair had no short ends round the neck.

But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had
chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and
restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the
plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh
to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town
she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there
flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad
in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a
more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,
than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a
string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her
neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody
of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the
Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the
pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious
stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down
into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,
but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it
dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by
the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the
town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the
English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade
unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir
Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a
facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on
the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested
that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and
dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of
which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as
inadequately represented by Æneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at
the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the
corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace
ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked
G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as
noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the
Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept
undisguisedly.


II

"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the
gas and seen that she was crying.

At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to
this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that
she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards
the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in
it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her
motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So
she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"

Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and
bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way
she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always
felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at
the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman
whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the
expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has
forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,
but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through
an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,
dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed
by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his
train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired
himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on
her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would
presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite
uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially
conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man
going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at
her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it
radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the
sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was
characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He
had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a
great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a
tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day
when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped
towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It
was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked
her very much.

He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what
should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"

She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of
shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh
accent and always carried an umbrella. He was so like hundreds of young
men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an
air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow,
that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other
representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the
impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity,
for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his
half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So
she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are
awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he's a
doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and
going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy. I don't
know what's the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and
see new people. This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw
the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit
heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was near
turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go
hang!"

They were both law-abiding people. They saw the gravity of her case.

"Not that I want the Pentlands. Dear knows I love the place, but I want
something more than those old hills. I want to go somewhere right far
away. The sight of a map makes me sick. And then I hear a band play--not
the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott's poetry, which I never
could bear, but a band. I feel that if I followed it it would lead me
somewhere that I would like to go. And the posters. There's one at the
Waverley station--Venice. I could tear the thing down. Did you ever go
to Italy, Mr. Philip?"

"No. I go with the girls to Germany every summer."

"My patience!" said Ellen bitterly. "The way the world is! The people
who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany. And I--I'll die if I don't
get away."

"Och, I often feel like this," said Mr. Philip. "I just take a week-end
off at a hydro."

"A hydro!" snorted Ellen. "It's something more like the French
Revolution I'm wanting. Something grand and coloured. Swords, and people
being rescued, and things like that."

"There's nothing going on like that now," he said stolidly, "and we
ought to be thankful for it."

"I know everything's over in Europe," she agreed sadly, "but there's
revolutions in South America. I've read about them in Richard Harding
Davis. Did ever you read him? Mind you, I'm not saying he's an artist,
but the man has force. He makes you long to go."

"A dirty place," said Mr. Philip.

"What does that matter, where there's life? I feel--I feel"--she wrung
her inky brown hands--"as if I should die if something didn't happen at
once: something big, something that would bang out like the one o'clock
gun up at the Castle. And nothing will. Nothing ever will!"

"Och, well," he comforted her, "you're young yet, you know."

"Young!" cried Ellen, and suddenly wept. If this was youth--!

He bent down and played with the fire-irons. It was odd how he didn't
want to go away, although she was in distress. "Some that's been in
South America don't find it to their taste," he said. "The fellow that's
coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he
doesn't mean to go back."

"Ah, how can he do that?" asked Ellen unsteadily. The tears she was too
proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby. "Property in Rio de
Janeiro! It's like being related to someone in 'Treasure Island.'"

"'Treasure Island!' Imph!" He had seen his father draw Ellen often
enough to know how to do it, though he himself would never have paid
enough attention to her mental life to discover it. "You're struck on
that Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn't so much. My Aunt Phemie was
with him at Mr. Robert Thompson's school in Heriot Row, and she says he
was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and
gossiping with the cabmen on the rank. She wouldn't have a word to say
to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when
all the English were licking his boots. I'm not much on these writing
chaps myself." He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he
had disposed of art.

"And who," asked Ellen, with temper, "might your Aunt Phemie be?
There'll not be much in the papers when she's laid by in Trinity
Cemetery, I'm thinking! The impairtinence of it! All these Edinburgh
people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once,
just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of
Edinburgh!" She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak
shutter.

Mr. Philip chuckled. When a woman did anything for itself, and not for
its effect on the male, it seemed to him a proof of her incapacity to
look after herself, and he found incapacity in women exciting and
endearing. He watched her with a hard attention that was his kind of
tenderness, as she sat humped schoolgirlishly in her shapeless blue
overall, averting her face from the light but attempting a proud pose,
and keeping her grief between her teeth as an ostler chews a straw.

"He had a good time, the way he travelled in France and the South Seas.
But he deserved it. He wrote such lovely books. Ah," she said, listening
to her own sombre interpretation of things as to sad music, "it isn't
just chance that some people had adventures and others hadn't. One makes
one's own fate. I have no fate because I'm too weak to make one." She
looked down resentfully on her hands, that for all her present
fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on
her lap, and thought of Rachael Wing, who had so splendidly departed to
London to go on the stage. "But it's hard to be punished just for what
you are."

He wondered whether, although she was the typist, there was not
something rare about her. He could not compare her in this moment with
his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for
bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing
to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with
which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and
violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have
evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than
that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they
could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite
distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she
was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name
that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of
beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed
for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform
these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because
human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. Suddenly he
wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of
naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying
there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh
his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a
thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was
but for participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so
suspicious of her vividness that he felt furtive and red-eared while he
searched in the purse of his experiences to find the coin that would
admit him to her world. The search at first was vain, for most of them
that he cared to remember were mere manifestations of the kind of
qualities that are mentioned in testimonials. But presently he gripped
the disappointment that would buy him her pity.

He said, "I'm right sorry for you, Miss Melville. But you know ... We
all have our troubles."

She raised her eyebrows.

"I wanted to go into the Navy."

"You did? Would your father not let you?" She said it in her red-headed
"My-word-if-I'd-been-there" way.

"Aye, he would have liked it fine."

"What was it then?" She leaned forward and almost crooned at him. "What
was it then?"

His speech became more clipped. "My eyes."

"Your eyes!" she breathed. He suddenly became a person to her. "I never
thought."

"I'm as short-sighted as a bat."

"They look all right." She frowned at them as though they were traitors.

He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the
University."

She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how
sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well,
well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed
to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw
you capped."

"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."

"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw
your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll
be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when
I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"

"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He
vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he
asked.

"I did at school--"

"Don't you go to dances?"

She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.

With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he
could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her
brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come
to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his
own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible
to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the
daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,
the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville
unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he
wished he could dance with her.

Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances
for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to
enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and
steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black
ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about
with in "La Dame aux Camélias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.
Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which
was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,
just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without
attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint
meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse
his private satisfaction. He was still aware that he was Mr. Philip of
the firm, so he was not going to tell her that for two nights after he
had heard the decision of the Medical Examiners he had cried himself to
sleep, though he was fourteen past. But it was exquisite to know that if
he had told her she would have been moved to some glorious gesture of
pity. His imagination trembled at the thought of its glory as she turned
to him with a benignity that was really good enough, and said
diffidently, because her ambition was such a holy thing that she feared
to speak of his: "Still, there are lots of things for you to do. I've
heard...."

He was kindly and indulgent. "What have you heard?"

Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why,
that you're going to stand for Parliament."

"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.

"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"

"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me
something safe."

"But what will you do?"

He didn't follow.

"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed
with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to
do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are
you going to do?"

"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence.
"We've always been Liberals."

"Ach! _Liberal!_" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep
the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards
by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed
again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to
discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on
her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her
clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to
the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's
heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.

"It is so. I asked her to do a chop for me, so that I won't need to dine
on the train...."

"Mercy me! We'll see the fine cook she is!" She ran out to the landing
(she had never known he was so nice). Mr. Philip found that her absence
acted curiously as a relief to an excitement that was beginning to buzz
in his head. Then she came back with the tray, her cheeks bright and her
mouth pursed, for she and the caretaker had been sandpapering each
other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil
a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's
not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father,
who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the
place."

He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment.
There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was
putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that
were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt
absolutely right.

"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when
he lunches in?" she said.

"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's
room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him,
fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt
for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the
bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went
back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not
be, as he put it, _infra dig_. And sure enough, when he entered the room
a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got
the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling
himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and
she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and
a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."

He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he
said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join
me...."

She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing
there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was
behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face
was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her
mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping
quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to
something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will
you have some Burgundy?"

She was shocked. "Oh no!"

He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although
principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to
it. Instead, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she
oughtn't to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.

He said, "But it's so pretty!" He could not imagine why he should have
said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an
argument that would weigh with her.

She sighed as who makes a concession. "Oh yes, it's pretty!" And then,
to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose. She was absorbed
in the red beauty in his glass.

It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing. "You'll have a
glass?"

"No, thank you."

"You'll surely have a taste?"

"Ah, no--"

"Just a drop...."

Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure
she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising
her infinite pleasure.

She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.

He passed her his glass.

"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"

Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink
it up! Drink it up!"

She raised the glass to her lips and set her head back that the sin
might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice,
but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for
such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind
cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is
played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....

"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the glass down on the table. "It's
horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her
knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought
wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth.
And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at
school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as
this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.

Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading
her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she
hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of
the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the
light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only
just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he
marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its
close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the
wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably,
"Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk--!" Again he felt
that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her,
walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud
knocking at the outer door.


III

She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked
as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just
part of his sea-going air.

He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I
want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."

"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr.
Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked
interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable
occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself
she stopped as they went along the passage and begged, "You'll not make
him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here
on the very clap of eight."

The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they
stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a
customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh,
certainly; he shall leave on the very clap of eight," he replied
earnestly.

He spoke without an accent and was most romantically dark. Ellen
wondered whether Mr. Philip would like him--she had noticed that Mr.
Philip didn't seem to fancy people who were very tall. And she perceived
with consternation as they entered the room that he had suddenly been
overtaken by one of his moods. He had taken up the tray and was trying
to slip it into the cupboard, which he might have seen would never hold
it, and in any case was a queer place for a tray, and stood there with
it in his hands, brick-red and glowering at them. She was going to take
it from him when he dunted it down on the window-seat with a clatter.
"What for can he not go on with his good chop?" thought Ellen. "We're
putting on grand company manners for this bit chemist body, surely," and
she pulled forward a chair for the stranger and sat down in the corner
with her note-book on her knee.

"You're Mr. Yaverland?" said Mr. Philip, shooting his chin forward and
squaring his shoulders, and looking as though his father were dead and
he were the head of the firm.

"I'm Richard Yaverland. Mr. Frank Gibson said you might be good enough
to see to my affairs for me. I've got a letter from him...."

Decidedly the man had an air. He slid the letter across the table as if
he did not care in the least whether anybody ever picked it up and
retreated into a courteous inattention. She felt a little cross at Mr.
Philip for not showing that Edinburgh too understands the art of
arrogance, for opening the letter so clumsily and omitting to say the
nice friendly thing. Well, if he was put about it was his own fault for
not going on with the chop, it being well known to all educated persons
that one cannot work on an empty stomach. If this man would go soon she
would run down to Mrs. Powell and get her to heat up the chop again. She
eyed him anxiously to see if he looked the kind of person who left when
one wanted him to, and found herself liking him for the way he slouched
in his chair, as though he wanted to mitigate as much as possible his
terrifying strength and immensity. What for did a fine man like him help
to make cordite, the material of militarism, which is the curse of the
nations? She wished he could have heard R.J. Campbell speak on peace the
other night at the Synod Hall; it was fine. But probably he was a
Conservative, for these big men were often unprogressive. She examined
him carefully out of the corner of her eye to estimate the chances of
his being brought into the fold of reform by properly selected oratory.
That at least was the character of contemplation she intended, but
though she was so young that she believed the enjoyment of any sensory
impression sheer waste unless it was popped into the mental stockpot and
made the basis of some sustaining moral soup, she found herself just
looking at him. His black hair lay in streaks and rings on his rain-wet
forehead and gave him an abandoned and magical air, like the ghost of a
drowned man risen for revelry; his dark gold skin told a traveller's
tale of far-off pleasurable weather; and the bare hand that lay on his
knee was patterned like a snake's belly with brown marks, doubtless the
stains of his occupation; and his face was marked with an expression
that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she
could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not
hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and
yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent
demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly
satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a
drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the
controlled but embarrassed movements of a highly-bred animal approached
by a stranger, that he knew she was watching him, and she took her gaze
away. But she had to look again, just to confirm her feeling that
however fanciful she might be about him his appearance would always give
some further food for her imagination; and presently, for though she was
the least vain person in the world she was the most egotistical, began
to compare the large correctness of his features with the less academic
spontaneity of her own. "Lord! Why has everybody but me got a straight
nose!" she exclaimed to herself. "But it's all blethers to think that an
indented chin means character. How can a dunt in your bone have anything
to do with your mind?" She rubbed her own chin, which was a little white
ball, and pushed it forward, glowering at his great jaw. Then her
examination ended. She noticed that all over his upper lip and chin
there was a faint bluish bloom, as if he had shaved closely and
recently but the strong hair was already pressing through again. That
disgusted her, although she reminded herself that he could not help it,
that that was the way he was made. "There's something awful like an
animal about a man," she thought, and shivered.

"Och, aye!" said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset,
for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by
exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred
in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some
well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property
in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it
appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five
years' lease, which had nearly expired. There was no likelihood of Capel
requiring any extension of this lease, for he was going back to the
States. So now Yaverland wanted to sell it. There ought to be no trouble
in finding a buyer, for it was a famous house. "Everybody in Rio knows
the Villa Miraflores," he said. She gasped at the name and wrote it in
longhand; to compress such deliciousness into shorthand would have been
sacrilege. After that she listened more eagerly to his voice, which she
perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with
suppressed laughter. The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a
straight face than he found in using the flat phrase. And as she
gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his
speech slipped the business leash. There were hedges of geranium and
poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless
palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the
courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many
fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of
precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house
was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a
_rastaqouère_. "Mhm," said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral
slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined
_rastaqouère_ to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost. She would have
laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still
upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he
would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable
expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had
noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and
cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been "done."

But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland's answer.
He hadn't the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa. It happened
this way. He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk! Tchk!" said Mr.
Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his
waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the
atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt
no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to
try to show that he wasn't a Jew. Ellen hated him for that. She believed
in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as
a propagandist measure. And then he had remembered that a friend of his,
de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move. Even
Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he'd given it plenty of fun.
There had been great times at the villa. His phrases, which seemed to
have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine
on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale's snout, and
hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in
his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this
delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that
time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money
from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the
servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a
sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the
dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing
white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the
Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of
birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he
so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and
were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a
good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed
by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment,
that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about
somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she
herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect
crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a
piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their
inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to
honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed
towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all
respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific
manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "Tits,
tits, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the
woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the
impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers
Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were,
as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by
the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by
intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the
cosmic process. It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the
truth....

Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had
knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had
posted to his agents without reading. He had only the vaguest idea how
much money had changed hands. Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled
knowingly, "Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in
Scotland," and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of
the property: the orange grove, for instance. At that Yaverland was
silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered
insolence that he couldn't see why he should, since he wasn't a
marmalade fancier. "Besides, that's an impossible proposition. It's like
selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium
bed...." In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation
of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed
under a tooth while one was eating a good cake. She was disturbed and
wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy
by talking like that. And the reflection came to her that it would be
sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever,
that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected
of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way. But it
struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose
that he would be interested. His talk was in the nature of a monologue.
He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.

Still, he was wonderful. She did not take it as warning of any coldness
or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a
human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are
pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being
particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out
his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have
no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he
was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.
Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the
Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a
packet of letters. "They hold the title-deeds and you'll see how things
are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a
difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on
the correspondence?"

"Och, we can send out to a translator--"

A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one
side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had
suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many
moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled
world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely
to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river
just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the
countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for
women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was
improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just
when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women
being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there
had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her
obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the
prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm
and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.
For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth
in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering
innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on
the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after
being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a
gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.

"Mr. Philip," she said.

Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark
glance on her.

"Mr. Philip," she said. He looked across at her with a blankness she
took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at
Skerry's. I took a first-class certificate. Maybe I could manage the
letters?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Yaverland explosively. He appeared to be about to make
some objection, and then he bit back the speech that was already in his
mouth. And as he tried to find other words the beauty of her body caught
his attention. It was, as it happened, very visible at that moment. The
fulness of her overall had fallen to one side as she sat on the high
stool, and so that linen was tightly wrapped about her, disclosing that
she was made like a delicate fleet beast; in the valley between her high
small breasts there lay a shadow, which grew greater when she breathed
deeply. He looked at her with the dispassionateness which comes to men
who have lived much in countries where nakedness offers itself unashamed
to the sunlight, and said to himself, "I should like to see her run." He
knew that a body like this must possess an infinite capacity for
physical pleasure, that to her mere walking would give more joy than
others find in dancing. And then he raised his eyes to her face and was
sad. For sufficient reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of
women, and he knew it was a tragedy that such a face should surmount
such a body. For her body would imprison her in soft places: she would
be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than
births. But her face was haggard, in spite of its youth, with appetite
for travel in the hard places of the world, for the adventures and
achievements that are the birthright of any man. "It's rotten luck to be
a girl," he thought. "If she were a boy I could get her a job at Rio....
Lord, she has lovely hair!" He perceived sharply that he was not likely
to be of any more use to her than most men would. All he could do would
be to avert the humiliation which the moment seemed likely to bring down
on her.

"Oh, this is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people
studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful
too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a
marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too
manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the
reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded
himself. "It's the language to learn," he said aloud. "It's the language
of the future. Ever been in Spain, Mr. James?"

"No," said Mr. Philip, "but I was thinking of going there--or mebbe
Italy--ma Easter holidays." Ellen smiled brilliantly at him, for she
knew that he had had no such thought till that evening's talk with her;
she had converted him to a romantic. He caught her eye, only to glare
coldly into the centre of her smile.

It was Yaverland's opportunity, for he had spent two years as chemist at
the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of
talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly
literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain,
but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of
social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance
them. "The mines are Baird's, you know--Sir Milne Baird; it's a Glasgow
firm...." "Mhm," said Mr. Philip, "I know who you mean." Detestable,
thought Yaverland, this Scotch locution which implies that one has made
a vague or incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence
of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself
suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its
disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater
willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the
commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their
own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by
Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general,
which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of
Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.
Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad
political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the
national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over
the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.)
Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few
difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was
sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who,
though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better
by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself
Algodonales on the map and calls itself Aooae.

He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.

It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by
forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,
as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and
a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her
mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed
through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to
Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a
dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt
attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks
deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,
describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow
decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled
with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the
Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius
Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women
that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered
by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He
was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase
that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such
things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,
advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip
could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere
foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the
country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows
what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks
and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and
carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness passed
over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as
though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had
scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes
became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader
streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the
tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became
charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The
people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating
themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or
cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.

He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of
loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had
revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to
the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and
had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any
of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and
the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to
match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of
being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone
into a café and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a
wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of
an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who
had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not
lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night,
forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit
here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl
who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and
famined...."

But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay
account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had
framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily
pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the
long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland
that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding
path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly
in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a
forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a
Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and
asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at
another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their
dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers
of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time there was
trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was
treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the
rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the
many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to
the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its
snowy crest. Ah, such a country!

He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged
bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation
settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely
they're crool. Bullfights and that--"

He could not let that pass. "You don't understand. It's different over
there."

"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.
Philip.

"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in
space...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much
crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of
view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other
and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's
life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there were the
horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from
the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that
gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,
rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it
wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far
back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified,
with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your
unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of
a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its
governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence
till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't
attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our
civilisation.

Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the
experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his
magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and
yet was as substantial as any man of action.

Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of
primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest
swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The
echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching
sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it
wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found
his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and
eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions
were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy
over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp
fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,
envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he
was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be
the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some
night the position might not be reversed--that it would not be he who
stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some
happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That
was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even
now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;
and Ellen thrilled to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to
a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to
persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern
history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the
visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and
the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling
lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times
existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive
man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the
bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were
the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much
decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of
meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and
dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't
see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by
the number of people who never saw.

"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get
over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."

Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and
perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk
in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is
buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread
out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.
Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,
thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for
themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they
repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had
responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't
perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this
fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that
all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a
national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns
sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the
British Empire--keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and
blows to mules and dogs.

It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new
that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He could give them another
illustration of that. He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a
flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo--"that's a street,"
he interjected towards Ellen, "called after a statesman they
assassinated, they don't quite know why." In the flat there lodged a
priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning,
as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an
automobile and took him away for an hour. Presently he was told the
story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had
listened to it as one didn't often listen to twice-told tales, for it
was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra
Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the
Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the
roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode. The man in the
automobile had lost his wife. He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he
had gone through a good deal to get her. When he first met her she was
another man's wife. He said nothing to her then, but presently the way
that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the
Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and
her husband called him out. The duel was fought on some sandy flat down
by the river, and the husband was killed. It was given out that he had
been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who
had killed him. In another year she was dead of fever. Her husband gave
great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house
where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable
gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad. When he returned
he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it
except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say
Mass over the woman's bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.
Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years
since she had died. That was a queer enough story for the present day,
with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the
lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it
was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron. But
the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the
automobile. For he was the Marquis d'Italica, the finest Spanish
aviator, a man not only of the mediæval courage one might have guessed
from the story, but also of the most modern wit about machines....

Yaverland bit his lip suddenly. He had told the story without shame, for
he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the
bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman's
bed may sometimes be an altar. But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and
his ears were red. Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.

For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen. "I had forgotten
she was a girl," he thought miserably. "I thought of nothing but how
keen she is on Spain. I don't know how girls feel about things...." But
she was sitting warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at
a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder. She had
liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made
her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her
sex always did. But the rest she had thought lovely. It was a beautiful
idea of the Marquis's to turn the bed into an altar. Probably he had
often gone into his wife's room to kiss her good-night. She saw a narrow
iron bedstead such as she herself slept in, a face half hidden by the
black hair flung wide across the pillow, a body bent like a bow under
the bedclothes; for she herself still curled up at nights as dogs and
children do; and the Marquis, whom she pictured as carrying a robin's
egg blue enamelled candlestick like the one she always carried up to her
room, kneeling down and kissing his wife very gently lest she should
awake. Love must be a great compensation to those who have not political
ambitions. She became aware that Yaverland's eyes were upon her, and she
slowly smiled, reluctantly unveiling her good will to him. It again
appeared to him that the world was a place in which one could be at
one's ease without disgrace.

He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was
gripping Mr. Philip's hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his
face. "Ah, there's one thing," he said quite lightly, though the vein
down the middle of his forehead had darkened. "You see from those
letters that a Señor Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house.
He's not to have it. Do you understand? Not at any price."

The effect of this restriction, made obviously at the behest of some
deep passion, was to make him suddenly sinister. They gazed at him as
though he had revealed that he carried arms. But Ellen remembered
business again.

"Those letters," she reminded Mr. Philip, "had I not better read them
over before Mr. Yaverland goes?"

Yaverland caught his breath, then spoke off-handedly. "You're
forgetting. They don't speak Spanish in Brazil, but Portuguese." And
added confidentially, "Of course you were thinking of the Argentine."

She was as hurt by the revelation of this vast breach in her omniscience
as the bright twang of knowingness in her voice had told him she would
be.

"Yes," she said unsteadily, "I was thinking of the Argentine."

He shook hands with Mr. Philip, and she took him down the corridor to
the door. She blinked back her tears as he stood at the head of the
stair and put up his collar with those strange hands that were speckled
like a snake's belly, for it seemed a waste, like staying indoors when
the menagerie procession is going round the town, to let anything so
unusual go away without seeing as much of it as possible. Then she
remembered the thing that she had wanted to say in the other room, and
wondered if it would be bold to speak, and finally remarked in a voice
disagreeable with shyness, "The people up on the Pentland Hills use that
word you said was in Shakespeare. Snow-broth. When the hill-streams run
full after the melting of the snows, that's snow-broth."

He liked women who were interested in queer-shaped fragments of fact,
for they reminded him of his mother. He took pains to become animated at
her news.

"They do, they do!" Ellen assured him, pleased by his response. "And
they say 'hit' for 'it,' which is Anglo-Saxon."

He noticed that her overall, which she was growing out of, fitted
tightly on her over-thin shoulders and showed how their line was spoilt
by the deep dip of the clavicle, and wondered why that imperfection
should make her more real to him than she had been when he had thought
her wholly beautiful. Again he became aware of her discontent with her
surroundings, which had exerted on her personality nothing of the
weakening effect of despair, since it sprang from such a rich content
with the universe, such a confident faith that the supremest beauty she
could imagine existed somewhere and would satisfy her if only she could
get at it. He said, with no motive but to confirm her belief that the
world was full of interest, "You must go on with your Spanish, you know.
Don't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine
stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to
whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young
girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who
had landed on his feet.

"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.

He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in
something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She
attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first
excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in
bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village
street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the
ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold
rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining
with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a
yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not
imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and
long scrolls.

Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a
second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on
his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to
lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not
half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up
your chop, if you'll wait."

"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.

She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and
winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days
before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her
departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes
came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was
watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a
conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was
standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though
he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not
step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was
set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew
what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the
door. Because the thing that he had meant to do seemed foul when he
looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,
he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to
have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that
had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always
thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,
dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with
such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which
she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they
became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until
it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him
stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than
the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was
making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his
degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and
the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then
she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this
trouble she had brought on him.

When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.
Yaverland's a most interesting man."

He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for
his heart was making him very uncomfortable. He wished some crude
gesture, some single ugly word, would do it. "You thought him an
interesting man?" he asked naggingly. "You don't surprise me. It was a
bit too plain you thought so. I'll thank you not to be so forward with a
client again. It'll give the office a bad name. And chatting at the door
like that!"

He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the
hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the
needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he
placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for
emergencies, a book of court plaster.

"I'm sure I'll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville," he
said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of
the door. "Good night."


IV

She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.

"It can't hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She
wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of
Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered
the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's
blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip
can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm
a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world
except the enfranchisement of women and getting on...."

She felt better. "There's nothing in life you can't get the better of by
thinking about it," she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes
with her handkerchief. She could easily pass off her tearstains as the
marks of a bad cold. "It's a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body's
affliction, but sometimes I'm glad mother's so short-sighted.

"He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how," she thought,
with a sudden renewal of rage. "Now I should have minded awful if he had
noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish. It was a
mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine." But
indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure
that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent. She began to
recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against
a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a
marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through
a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of
solidification of a sunset. Dreamily she moved to the little house in
the corner....

It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were
the man of the house.

"Mercy, Ellen, you're late! I was getting feared!" cried her mother, who
had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in
the lock. She liked that sound. Ellen thought herself a wonderful new
sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been
surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how
much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own
soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend
her daughter was a son.

"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with
masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."




CHAPTER II

I


Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold _Votes for Women_ in Princes Street,
and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green
poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.
This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for
it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should
be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been
sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as
there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady
Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many
bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had
lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty
she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a
careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the
passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to
tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.
For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds,
which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the
black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the
dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic
shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because
the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and
made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to
appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the
people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her
silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her
by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the
height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,
if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous
causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous
old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had
been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and
her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel
women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for
personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments
irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung
scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian
environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the
smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant
ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought
Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to
do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."

She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it
with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're
mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her
teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got
thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad
as you, my dear, thinking you look like Phyllis Dare with yon wee, wee
pigtail. You evidently haven't realised that a Scotch girl can't help
looking sensible. That graceful butterfly frivolity that comes so easy
to the English, and, I've haird, the French, is not for us. I think it's
something about our ankles that prevents us." She looked at the girl's
feet, said "Ay!" in a manner that hinted that they confirmed her theory,
and turned away, remarking over her shoulder, "Mind you, I admire your
spirit, setting out to look like one of these light English actresses
when your name's Davidina Todd." The wind was trying to tear the poster
from the cord that held it to her waist, the cold was making her sniff,
and as she gave her back to this flimsy little fool she caught sight of
a minister standing a yard or two away and giggling "Tee hee!" at her.
It was too much. She darted down on him. "Are you not Mr. Hunter of the
Middleton Place United Free Church?" she asked, making her voice sound
soft and cuddly.

He wiped the facetiousness from his face and assented with a polite
bob. Perhaps she was the daughter of an elder. Quite nice people were
taking up this nonsense.

"I heard you preach last Sunday," she said, glowing with interest. He
began to look coy. Then her voice changed to something colder than the
wind. "The most lamentable sairmon I ever listened to. Neither lairning
nor inspiration. And a _read_ sairmon, too."

As his black back threaded through the traffic remorse fell upon her.
"Here's an opportunity for doing quiet, uncomplaining service to the
Cause," she reproached herself, "and I'm turning it into a fair picnic
for my tongue." Everyone was rubbish, and she herself was no exception.
Her hair was nearly down. And she had to stay there for another hour.

But she determined to endure it; and Richard Yaverland, who afar off had
formed the intention of stopping and speaking to the girl with the
poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and
romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on
the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come
into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had
distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh.
He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his
emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being
and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his
desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for
their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it
was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does
not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was
not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and
kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but
powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to
himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying.
Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I
must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until
he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.

And Ellen thought, "Why, here is the big man who has been in Spain and
South America and has the queer stains on his hands! How big he is, and
dark! He looks like a king among these other people. And how wonderful
his eyes are! He is miles away from here, seeing some distant beautiful
thing. Perhaps that mountainside he told us about where the reflection
of the sky is like a purple shadow on the snow. A poet must look like
that when he is thinking of a poem. But--but--if he keeps on staring up
there he won't see me and buy a paper. I should like to interest him in
the Cause. And I daren't speak to him." She flushed. Though Mr. Philip's
claw had not done all the hurt it hoped, it had yet mauled its victim
cruelly. "That would look bold."

But in the nick of time his eyes fell on her. He gave a start of
surprise and said in his kind, insolent voice:

"Good morning. So you're a Suffragette."

She was pleased to be publicly recognised by such a splendid person, and
answered shyly; but caught a glint in his eyes which reminded her that
she wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of
the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it
possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not
have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had
given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her
brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with
such a pliable profile.

"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the
change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I
think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all
these blighters going by."

"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one
hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for
the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark
Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But
you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally
clear and audible speakers. Women are."

"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair,
or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"

"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff
that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never
admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she
was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment
someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a
schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.
But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen
past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."

"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded
it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better
write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow
and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of
person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket
they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she
wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get
it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that
vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find
out about this little girl--I who don't care a damn about anything or
anybody?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she
had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her
signature. Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most
beautiful people who have ever lived. It was like climbing to a towered
castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called
"Seaview." She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey
weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night
before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female
creature would have worn. But she had looked even younger then; he
remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and
receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a
party. It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had
been having in that dreary office could possibly be. And into the pretty
print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising
through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little
solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the
beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and
twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he
had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.
He looked at her sharply and said to himself: "I wonder...."

Oh, surely not! The note of her face was pure expectancy. As yet she had
come upon nothing fundamental of any kind. He had no prepossessions in
favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same
class as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved. He would have hated
this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.

There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any
longer. "Good-bye; I hope I'll see you at the meeting," he said; and
then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, "and
look after my villa for me."

"Yes, we'll do that," she said competently, and looked after him with
smiling eyes. "Oh, he looks most adventurous!" she thought. "I wonder,
now, if he's ever killed a man?"


II

"Is my frock hooked up all the way down?" wondered Ellen, as she stood
with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall. "Not that I care a button
about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry
was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind,
for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings. She had
taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling
up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss
Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had
spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her
grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of
love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the
hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and
up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near
unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people
were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as
herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic
women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by
sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were
making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl's
penknife and more like a soldier's sword. "I'm being a politikon Zoon!"
she boasted to herself. She had always liked the expression when she
read it in _The Scotsman_ Leaders.

And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause
and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their
way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a
viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered
her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of
the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a
heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of
dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark
Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved
swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily
choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous
of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to
say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone
might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there
was no doing anything for them.

But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances
on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a
peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a
heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring
at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against
his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent
interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the
woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of
the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took
his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like
him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."

She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his
neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and
oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes
maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the
platform. "How long he is looking at them!" she said to herself
presently. "No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle. I believe such
men are very susceptible to beautiful women. I hope," she continued with
sudden bitterness, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will
take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at
Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he
went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed
otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which
made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet
when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his
attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with
panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes. She did not permit herself
irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not
terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and
stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently: "What have I to do
with this man? I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.
Then I suppose I will have to use them as pawns in my political and
financial intrigues."

Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman's
speech. Dr. Munro had just sat down. Her sensible square face looked red
and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and
from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what
she had been doing. This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen,
who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic
of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its
affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the
bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and
untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality
but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet
this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which
nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn
a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered
activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"
she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the
grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the
doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner
all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a
community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly
be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was
content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her
perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous
and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend
with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought,
and her heart turned over with fear.

But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain
against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very
far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends
in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with
its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its
shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a
sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great
music. Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind
bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses
hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying--for
already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from
the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her
followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the
hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were
imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and
how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells,
huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats, clad in nothing but
coarse vests because they would not wear the convict clothes, breathing
the foul sewage-tainted air for all but that hour when they were carried
up to the cell where the doctor and the wardresses waited to bind and
gag them and ram the long feeding-tube down into their bodies. This they
had endured for six weeks, and would for six weeks more. She spoke with
a proud reticence as to her sufferings, about her recent sojourn in
Holloway, from which she had gained release by hunger-striking a
fortnight before.

"Ah, I could die for her!" cried Ellen to herself, wet-eyed with
loyalty. "If only it weren't for mother I'd go to prison to-morrow." Her
love could hardly bear it when Mrs. Ormiston went on, restrained rage
freezing her words, to indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her
and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous
education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional
distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the
meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind
her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things
Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life
with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views
confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt
an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had
always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were
sombre, such as deep symphonies of an orchestra, the black range and
white scaurs of the Pentland Hills against the south horizon, the idea
that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns
cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of
life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the
field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in
eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she
rapturously recognised that same authentic quality.

But what good was it if one woman had something of the dignity of nature
and art? Everybody knew that the world was beautiful. She sent her mind
out from the hall to walk in the night, which was not wet, yet had a
bloom of rain in the air, so that the lights shone with a plumy beam and
all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock
was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the
mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the
lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that
would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass
that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end
of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's
pictures--the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a
fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking
in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made
loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at
the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong
hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there
was no question!

But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly
parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could
hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the
Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure
motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face
about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like
that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was
seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.
Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride
up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that
shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting
policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could
not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in
geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat
brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and
she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her
yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at
the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones
lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen
had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John
Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anæmia or
spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within
themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of
hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of
actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to
assert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts
were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling
kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater
earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of
establishing their sex. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type,
who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political
abasement before the male, a new way of calling attention to what
otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would
detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the
Government and the majority of respectable citizens were on the side of
this pale, sickly, mad young woman against the brave, beautiful Mrs.
Ormiston. People were horrible.

And there was Mr. Philip.

Oh, why had she thought of him? All the time that she had been in the
hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her
untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for
her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the
accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not
then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that
anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers
sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror
of the event, called massacres. She had begun to know better late last
Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room after taking down
some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick,
ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr.
Mactavish James's desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom
that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before
she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.

"Have you come straight off the train?" it was in her mind to say. "Will
I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?" But he looked strange. The
driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the
shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was
performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and
hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his
breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and
has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved,
and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead
to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the
clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle
that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and
whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one,
and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this
accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity,
and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making
advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.

"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else
for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the
umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously,
and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no
need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of
hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could
not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit
he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top
window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a
cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her
alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual
refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and
ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's
all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence
fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are
you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in
typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness
with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.
Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always
made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a
gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and
drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made
him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and
set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you,
lassie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her
shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be
well spoken of. But there was worse than that--something so bad that she
would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought
of it in a harsh, short sentence. _"When Mr. Morrison went out of the
room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."_
Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip
being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I
will kill him...."

There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had
finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.
Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of
the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.
Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped,
but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the
advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in
the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call
sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced
that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.
Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument
between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an
indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment
against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried
mothers.

Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of
unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of
woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that
she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl
and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had
only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And
she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There
was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the
world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,
that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them
for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she
came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the
garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves
and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's
houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.
Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for
somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was
the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in
pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she
would not know.

Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna
McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair
and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about
married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had
broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and grass and
daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by
the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's
books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words
on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was
wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering
had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her
hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove
her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But
there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret
with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was leaning against
the wall in that dark place beyond the window laughing at her, partly
because she was such a wee ninny not to know, and partly because when
she did know the truth there would be something about it which would
humiliate her. She cast down her eyes and stared at the floor so that
none might see how close she was to tears. She was a silly weak thing
that would always feel like a bairn on its first day at school; she was
being tormented by Mr. Philip. Even the very facts of life had been
planned to hurt her.

Oh, to be like that man from Rio! It was his splendid fate to be made
tall and royal, to be the natural commander of all men from the moment
that he ceased to be a child. He could captain his ship through the
steepest seas and fight the pirate frigate till there was nothing
between him and the sunset but a few men clinging to planks and a
shot-torn black flag floating on the waves like a rag of seaweed. For
rest he would steer to small islands, where singing birds would fly out
of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run
aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long,
loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while
he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed;
at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there
would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful
kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away
from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died
there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and
princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern
face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now
they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of
course, but it was a joy to think of him.

She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.


III

There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his
motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this
ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors
in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas
made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd;
that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was
coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he
was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure
had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the
half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen
Melville. The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that
it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was
wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the
eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had
remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as
a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her
profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was
very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile
than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was
something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him
feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the
spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other
beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.

The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping
reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found
that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman
with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand
and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which
manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not
beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had
she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or
small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and
believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious
pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been
stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the
ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far
forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how
vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking--as just for the moment that
the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he
certainly had thought--that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the
discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.
The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a
cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch
face--the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the
world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was
sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the
_Gondomar_, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that
medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from
Mukden. Harsh things she was saying--harsh things about the decent
Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London
for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being
shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for
solicitation.

He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the
Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the
world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian
man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the
celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same
stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.
For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag
to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at
their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of
pity.

The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because
she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection
of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her
beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the
audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in
which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather
than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways
that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly
and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their
intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to
fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict
with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then
they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and
touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was
neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had
the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this
irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,
half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed
on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey
suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was
vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She
was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their
beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from
the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.
She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made
a garden of his soul, had any right to be.

That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at
grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of
shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of
the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as
she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under
her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him
haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he
nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught
her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious
swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.

But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention
to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way
she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged
body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his
mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was
one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern
for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often
thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by
those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the
chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting
their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the
tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening
to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.

The resemblance went no further than this spiritual attitude, for this
woman was second-rate stuff. Her beauty was somehow shoddy, her purple
gown the kind of garment that a clairvoyant might have worn, her
movements had the used quality of photographers' poses. Publicity had
not been able to change the substance of the precious metal of her soul,
but it had tarnished it beyond all remedy. She alluded presently to her
preposterously-named daughters, Brynhild, Melissa and Guendolen, and he
was reminded of a French family of musicians with whom he had travelled
on the steamer between Rio and Sao Paulo, a double-chinned swarthy
Madame and her three daughters, Céline, Roxane and Juliette, who sat
about on deck nursing musical instruments tied with grubby scarlet
ribbons, silent and dispirited, as though they were so addicted to
public appearance that they found their private hours an embarrassment.
But he remembered with a prick of compunction that they had made
excellent music; and that, after all, was their business in life. So
with the Ormistons. In the pursuit of liberty they had inadvertently
become a troupe; but they had fought like lions. And they were giving
the young that guarantee that life is really as fine as storybooks say,
which can only be given by contemporary heroism. Little Ellen Melville,
on the other side of the hall, was lifting the most wonderful face all
fierce and glowing with hero-worship. "That's how I used to feel about
Old Man Guthrie of the _Gondomar_ when I was seventeen," he thought.
"It's a good age...."

When he was seventeen.... He was not at all sure that those three years
he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life. It came back to
him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the
ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on
the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open
sea. The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the
sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a
brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a
sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the
southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were
at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen's dreams of land,
but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith
Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the
flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.
He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the
island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the
storms should take him. There were the four crumbling grey towers of
Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint
spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling
white speck which he knew to be his father's tomb. He hated that he
should be able to see it even from here. All his life that mausoleum had
enraged him. He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have
died before his son was a man. He suspected him of creeping into his
coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his
son's revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive
tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.

Eastward, a few fields' length along the ridge, was the belvedere on his
father's estate. He had not looked at it for years, but from here it was
so little like itself that he could bear to let his eyes dwell on it. It
was built at the fore of a crescent-shaped plantation on the brow of the
hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like
great green wings spread by a small white bird. And eastward yet a mile
or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of
Yaverland's End. Under that thatch was his mother. She would be asleep
now. Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn. With a
constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now,
lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head
and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn
across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.
Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead. At the picture
he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for
having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid
sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on
the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors. Then he
recognised the necessity of this adventure. It was his duty to her to go
out into the world and do great things. He had said so very definitely
to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.
So that boy, thirteen years before....

He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to
do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had
done nothing and was nothing. He saw his soul as something detached from
his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and
acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in
reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and
cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the
woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon
him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,
grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her
distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he
remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.

"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were
those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father
Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation
were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from
the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of
fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were
the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick
men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists
and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the
strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions
and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better
than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a
suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.
"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with
himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied
tartly.

There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably
good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington
till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of
adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his
imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the
result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women
about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite
with heat and that only with concussion--these facts had from his
earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it
had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere
diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had
read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But
now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of
no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the
special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches
without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his
results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors,
who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to
work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all
species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of
beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings
of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that
would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was
lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had
felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest
discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but
a Spirit.

But now none of these things mattered. He was caught in the net of life
and nothing that was above it was of any use to him; as well expect a
man who lies through the night with his foot in a man-trap to be
comforted by the beauty of the stars. The only God he could have any use
for would be the kind the Salvationists talk about, who goes about
giving drunken men an arm past the public-house and coming between the
pickpocket and Black Maria with a well-timed text. There was nothing in
Science that would lift him out of this hell of loneliness, this
conviction of impotence, this shame of achievementless maturity. He
perceived that he had really known this for a long time, and that it was
the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his
day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to
be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage
at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine
movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared
at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break
the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly
over the commercial uses that were to be made of his work. What was the
use of sweating his brains so that one set of fools could blow another
set of fools to glory? Oh, this was hell!...

The detestable blonde was now holding the platform in attitudes such as
are ascribed to goddesses by British sculptors, and speaking with a
slow, pure gusto of the horrors of immorality. For a moment her
allusions to the wrongs of unmarried mothers made him think of the proud
but defeated poise of his mother's head, and then the peculiar calm,
gross qualities of her phrases came home to him. He wondered how long
she had been going on like this, and he stared round to see how these
people, who looked so very decent, whom it was impossible to imagine
other than fully dressed, were taking it. Without anticipation his eyes
fell on Ellen and found her looking very Scotch and clapping sturdily.
Of course it must be all right, since everything about her was all
right, but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying
to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was
just the final proof of how very much all right she was. Only a girl so
innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical
presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and
made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind
was white as her hair was red.

He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was
powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no
good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that
makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men
act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an
end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that
these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women
whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most
casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's
entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he
was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her
honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but
would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their
responsibilities.

Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten
how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a
transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio;
back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner
at old Hermes Pessôa's preposterous house, that was built like--so far
as it was like anything else on earth--the Villa d'Este mingled with the
Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an
end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the
guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old
Pessôa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so
that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to
the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed
out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling
that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the
brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood
six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that
smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red
dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this
mad new house, in this mad new society. He had pulled one out and lain
back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was
beating violently. He hated being there, but he had to make sure. Much
rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of
those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay. "Then
marriage is right," he said to himself. "Where there is real love one
wants to go to church first."

Others who had wearied of the party drifted down to this recess of
peace. An elderly Frenchman with a pointed black beard, and a slim, fair
English boy with tears on his long eyelashes, sat themselves down in two
of these great chairs, with a bottle of wine at their feet and one
glass, from which they drank alternately with an effect of exchanging
vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all
never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the
Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally,
mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not
grieve. It is always thus when one forgets the Church."

There came later another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who
sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of
elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him
alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson
brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the
high windows, black with the outer night but streaked and oiled with
reflections of the inner feast. Opposite there hung a Bouguereau, which
irritated him--nymphs ought not to look as if they had come newly
unguented from a _cabinet de toilette_. Below it stood an immense
Cloisonné vase, about the neck of which was tied a scarlet silk
stocking. He remembered having seen it there on his last visit six
months before. She must have been an exceptionally careless lady. Out
here there were many ladies who were careless of their honour, but most
of them were careful enough about tangible possessions like silk
stockings. A fresh outburst in the babel at the other end of the room
did not make him turn round, though the French banker had cried in an
ecstasy, "_Tiens! c'est atroce!_" and had bounded up the hall. He sat
on, hating this ugly place of his delay, while the Frenchman and the boy
kept up an insincere, voluptuous whisper about God and the comfort of
the Mass....

At last he rose to his feet. It was a quarter to twelve, and time for
him to go. He went up the hall, treading on lobster claws and someone's
wig, and looking about him for a certain person. He could not see him
among the group of revellers that stood in the space before the large
folding-doors, and for a minute a hand closed over his heart as he
feared that for once the person whom he sought had gone home before
morning. But presently he saw a long chair by the wall, and on its
cushions a blotched face and a gross, full body. He bent over the chair
and whispered, "De Rojas, de Rojas!" But the fat man slept. Hatred
gushed up in him, and a joy that the night was secure, and he passed on
to the folding-doors. But from the little group that was gathered round
the table, which before the dinner had supported the Winged Victory that
now lay spread-eagled on the floor, there stepped Pessôa. He bade him
good-night and thanked him for a riotous evening, but perceived that
Pessôa was waving a cocked revolver at him and saying something about
Léonore. What could he be saying? It appeared incredible, even to-night,
that he should really be saying that every departing guest must kiss
Léonore's back and swear that it was the most beautiful back in Brazil.

He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see
how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor Léonore.
She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her
breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled
down to her waist so that her back was bare. Such a broad, honest back
it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood
as a model for Millet's "Angelus." She looked over her shoulder and
smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy.
They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had
gone with hopes of having a good night's rest for once, since Hermes was
giving a stag-dinner. They had not even given her time to wipe off all
the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples,
or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some
white snippets of the _Jornal de Commercio_. She bore no malice, the
good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she
likes to stay there: still, men are men, and mad, so what can one
expect?

He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one
woman. He flicked the revolver out of Pessôa's hand and flung it through
the nearest window. The thick glass took a little time to fall.

"My friends will wait on you in the morning," Pessôa had spouted, and he
had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to Léonore, and
kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she
smiled sleepily, and said in English, "Go on, you bad man!" She spoke so
slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a
foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost
that had found a lodging in her broad mouth. Then the men fell back to
let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the
Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple
livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass
of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays
of light which were pollutions of the moonlight. He thought of that
blotched face, that gross, full body.... It was a night of strong
moonlight. He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where
the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness. Palms stood up
glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight
fantasy of form. The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas'
villa gleamed like the spears of heroes. He stared between them at the
red façade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there.
The thought struck him with terror. If she were not waiting for him the
moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his
heart-beat turn to stillness.

Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores. This was his house. Yet he
entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall
that enclosed his own gardens. The magnolias stood blazing white on the
lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the
poising fireflies' weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a
smoke. He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but
he did not dare to go out into the light. He passed the door that led
from his to de Rojas' garden, which had been made when a father and son
had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up
because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours. If it had not been
unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty.... He stood in
the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple,
not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his
mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if
Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to
him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her
to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the
summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw
the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his
woman in his arms, finding her lips....

It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember
nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its
ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He
knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it
meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved
Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the
magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.
Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her
fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go
on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable
of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to
remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything
that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan
a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan
to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy
if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind
himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.
Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real
to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest
had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a
blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these
Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.

He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that
last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one
she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this
unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour
should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out
their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two
children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting
each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and
unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his
comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church,
who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her
not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two
tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only
promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought
of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her
were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.

Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest
of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They
stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from
the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon
immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of
life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the
courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that
questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated
brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats
that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars
because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately
because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality
that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet
surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who,
if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either
bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it,
but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film
of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one
could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a
chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came
to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could
laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with
speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this
woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing
satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.
He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite
lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen
Melville.

He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.


IV

When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at
him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set
eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she
was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the
face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she
couldn't come it over _him_. And he asked if he might see her home.

She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some
tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air
of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you
stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian
Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park
Square out by the Meadows!"

"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.

"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a
queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I
suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit
down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the
takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought
R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has
paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so
full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured
velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal
for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a
minute."

He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became
melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to
summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place
were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood
about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on
the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown
surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would
jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left
higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And
doubtless, if there is a beneficent Providence that really picks the
world over for opportunities of kindliness, halls which are habitually
let out for political meetings are allowed means of relieving their
feelings which are forbidden to other collections of bricks and mortar.
But he mustn't say that to Ellen. To her political meetings were plainly
sacred rituals, and in any case he was not sure whether she laughed at
things.

She called to him from the doorway, "I'm through, Mr. Yaverland!" She
was wearing a tam-o'-shanter and a mackintosh, which she buttoned right
up to her chin, and she looked just a brown pipe with a black knob at
the top, a mere piece of plumbing. He thought it very probable that
never before in the history of the human race had a beautiful girl
dressed herself so unbecomingly. But that she had done so seemed so
peculiarly and deliciously amusing that as he walked by her side he
could hardly keep from looking at her smilingly in a way that would have
puzzled and annoyed her. And outside the hall, when they found that the
mist, like a sour man who will not give way to his temper but keeps on
dropping disagreeable remarks, was letting down just enough of itself to
soak Edinburgh without giving it the slightest hope that it would rain
itself out by the morning, he caught again this queer flavour of her
that in its sharpness and its freshness reminded him of the taste of
fresh celery. He asked her if she hadn't an umbrella, and she replied,
"I've no use for umbrellas; I like the feel of the rain on my face, and
I see no sense in paying three-and-eleven for avoiding a positive
pleasure."

By that time Ellen was almost sure that he was smiling to himself in the
darkness, and was miserable. It was a silly, homely thing to have said.
"Ah, what for can he be wanting to see me home?" she thought helplessly.
"He is so wonderful. But then, so am I! So am I!" And as they went
through the dark tangle of small streets she turned loose on him her
enthusiasm for the meeting, so that he might see that women also have
their serious splendours. Hadn't it been a magnificent meeting? Wasn't
Mrs. Ormiston a grand speaker? Could he possibly, if he cared anything
for honesty, affirm that he had ever heard a man speaker who came within
a hundred miles of her? And wasn't Mrs. Mark Lyle beautiful, and didn't
she remind him of the early Christian martyrs? Didn't he think the women
who were forcibly fed were heroines, and didn't he think the Liberal
Governments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times?
"Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only
give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy
barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed
little things about her. She had had very little to do with men,
perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not
naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft
and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do.
Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as
though she trod on grass.

Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you
must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's
fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with
herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she
was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear
infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.

To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could
listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My
mother's keen on the movement."

"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she
speak, or organise?"

"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a
little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary
gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his
mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland
was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the
stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and
weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived
as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the
darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the
infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor
souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which
disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It
makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there
in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any
more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be
continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware
that those questions existed. He simply noted that she was being happy.
Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each
other, going home in the rain.

They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like
shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope.
"Edinburgh's a fine place," he said. "It can handle even an asphalt
track with dignity."

"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from
it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman
want to go wandering about the world?

From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you
a sailor?"

"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."

Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"

"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he
was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she
thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of
men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a
channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man
who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his
head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a
mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the
reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked
like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She
wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her,
which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that
even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were
passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything,
when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that
softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel
anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for
there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that
was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of
soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors. If she lived
near here she must be very poor. But without embarrassment she turned
to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and
pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by
the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained
window, to be a very mean little house. "The Square's through here," she
said. "Come away in and I'll find you a membership form for the Men's
League...."

Beyond the archway lay the queerest place. It was a little box-like
square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat
houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its
shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its
neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews. They sent out in front
of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a
paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a
lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as
a terrier shakes a rat. Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued
bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins. On the
fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public
park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by
garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and
beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with
that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night. He,
too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible
that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole
business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were
sleeping in these little houses. They were probably poor little people,
for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one
lighted window. And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in
the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he
had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner
house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon,
the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the
door and invited him in with something of an air.

"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness,
"Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out
light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said,
"What's that you say, Ellen?"

"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a
minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client
from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find
him a membership form."

She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and
fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew
she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to
carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a
little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it
were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr.
Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit."
A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook
his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a
large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured
by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that
someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too
gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had
not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as
well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare
bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet
once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a
fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip,
though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no
present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.
The aged are terrible--mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which
none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered
round them.

She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had
been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes
and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so
dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself.
The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the
wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so
unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather
upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big
steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse
climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by
signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers
Bibles--engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and
there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn
from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand
dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered
somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.

The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if
he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had
been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite
she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made
when they heard that his work lay among high explosives. And Ellen's
rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper
stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, "Ellen, it
beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy
girl about the house!" and Ellen exclaimed, "Och, drat the thing, it
must be upstairs!" and ran out of the room with her face turned away
from them.

They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises
overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on
the floor. "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly. She began
to look him over with a maternal eye. "For all you've been six months in
the North, you've not lost your tan," she said.

"Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America," he answered.
Their eyes met and they smiled. In effect she had said, "Well, you are a
fine fellow," and he had answered, "Yes, perhaps I am."

"I like a man to travel," she went on, tossing her head and looking
altogether fierce Ellen's mother. "I never go into the bank without
looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on
their high stools." She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat
him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the
mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a
sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him. "I hope
you don't think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all
alone. It's not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for
this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused. I'm not much of a
companion to her. I'm getting on, you see. She was my youngest."

"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only
child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.

"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was
born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and
I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as
the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot
of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he
was taken ill."

He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."

"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his
age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I
knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New
Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of
the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed
by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There
was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and
disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back
of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave
birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was
disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her
protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very
meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had
been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she
was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody
would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.
Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional
people who are old or not perfectly happy.

"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he
knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naïve and
touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as
he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now
that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming
into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.

"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex
for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that
most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent
people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother
was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"

It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on
a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin
dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed. Only the continued calm of Mrs.
Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through
the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial
human activity.

"Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger," said Mrs. Melville. "We
hardly hear it now. You see, they've turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs
on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they
make with their feet. It's not a nice place. 'Gentlemen a shilling,
ladies invited,' it says outside. Still, we don't complain, for the
noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent."

This was a masterpiece of circumstance. By nothing more than a thin wall
which shook to music was this little home divided from a thick-aired
place where ugly people lurched against each other lustfully; and yet it
had been made an impregnable fort of loveliness and decency by this
virtuous ageing woman, whose slight silliness was but a holy abstinence,
a refusal to side with common sense because that was so often concerned
in cruel decisions, by this girl who was so young that it seemed at the
sight of her as if time had turned back again and earth rolled unstained
by history, and so beautiful that it seemed as if henceforth eternity
could frame nothing but happiness. The smile of Ellen had made a faery
ring where heavy-footed dancers could not enter; her gravity had made a
sanctuary as safe as any church crowned with a belfry and casketing the
Host. And he, participating in the safety of the place, pitied the men
behind the shaking wall, and all men over the world who had committed
themselves to that search for pleasure which makes joy inaccessible.
They had chosen frustration for their destiny. Because they desired some
ecstasy that would lighten the leaden substance of life they turned to
drunkenness, which did no more than jumble reality, steep the earth in
aniline dyes, tinge the sunset with magenta. Because they desired love
they sought out women who, although dedicated to sex, were sexually
cancelled by repeated use, like postage-stamps on a much re-directed
letter, who efficiently went through the form of passion, yet presented
it so empty of all exaltation that their lovers left them feeling as if
they were victims of a practical joke.

And here, not half a dozen yards from some of these seekers, was one who
could bring to these desires a lovelier death than they would meet on
the dirty bed of gratification or the hard pallet of renunciation.
Because the untouched truth about her could give ecstasy one would not
lose the power of seeing things as they are, and she made one forget the
usual sexual story. Although she was formed for love and the intention
of being her lover was now a fundamental part of him, she was so busy
with her voice and body in playing quaint variations on the theme of
herself that he did not mind how long might be the journey to their
marriage. She was more interesting than any other person or thing in the
world. She was going to have more interesting experiences; because her
unique simplicity comprehended a wild impatience with lies she would
have a claim on reality that would give her unprecedented wisdom. Now he
could understand why saints in their narrow cells despise sinners as
dull stay-at-homes.

And when she burst into the room again he saw that all he had been
thinking about her was true. It might be that everybody else on earth
would see her as nothing but a red-haired girl in an ill-fitting blue
serge dress with an appalling tartan silk vest, but still it was true.

"Here you are," she said, "you put your name _there_." She bent over him
as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how
magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.

Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor
old lady was yawning behind her knitting. He rose and said good-bye,
wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how
he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that
he came for love. If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and
daughter how easy it would have been! The elder woman's eyes would have
crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her
daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they
contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle
hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have
stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty,
very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if
to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she
knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything. But here was
Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would
drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that
warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she
would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh
inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people
delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored
them because they were difficult.

"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the
courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw
that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the
evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an
honoured guest. They were dear people.

As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open
the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have
been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings,
which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to
picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the
coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a
tea-biscuit.

"You seem to admire Burns," he said.

"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of
the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."

"That's a proposition he never butted up against--"

"What?"

"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.
You're one of Time's revenges...."

She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with
pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully
wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some
disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to
stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a
queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some
nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness
beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it
could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had
second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that
something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.
"Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man
being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in
the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony
transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this
glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes
blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be
subject to death.

"Good-night," he said. He did not know why her breath had failed and why
she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was
doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were
beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on
till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful. "Good-night," he
said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path
simply that they might speak to each other again. "You must shut the
door. You're letting in the rain and cold."

"No," she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.

He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married
and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his
marriage.




CHAPTER III

I


When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from
a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry's College, and sat down
in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the
kitchen, "Ellen, I've got the grandest surprise for you!"

These fanciful women! "And what's that?" she cried back tolerantly,
though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees. She thought
she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had
sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing.
But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and
ask like a little anxious mouse, "You're sure you've not said anything,
dear? You're sure you've been a careful girl with your work, dear?" and
would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating
misfortune. "Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post
we must just manage." So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though
that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.

"Away into the dining-room and see what it is," said Mrs. Melville,
coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand. She had put on her brighter
shawl, the tartan one.

"You look as we'd been left a fortune," said Ellen.

"No fear of that. If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred
pounds that's all we can expect. But there's something fine waiting for
you. Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come. Now!"

She flung open the door.

"Roses!" breathed Ellen. "Mother--roses!"

On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled
with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long
held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection
joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars.
Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of
the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have
jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed
her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. The flowers
were beautiful in so many ways. They were beautiful just as roses,
because "roses" is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white
because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose
has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first
white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that
dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled,
attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in
stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a
faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.

They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against
the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.

They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers. They were an outburst
of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to
anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here
though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an
immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very
enjoyably if one had the money to buy things. It really was worth while
struggling to get on....

"Mother, where did they come from?"

"Ah!" said Mrs. Melville waggishly.

"Och, tell me! I don't imagine you went out and pawned the family
jewels. Och, do tell me! Come on!"

"A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist's, this morning. I could
have fallen down when I opened the door. And the wee brat of a boy tried
to convey to me that he wasn't used to coming to such a place. He wore a
look like a missionary in Darkest Africa. They were left for Miss
Melville, mind you. Not for your poor old mother. And they're from Mr.
Yaverland. Yon's his card sticking up against your grandmother on the
mantelpiece."

Ellen's hands, outspread over the roses, dropped to her side.

"I would have thought he had more sense," she said sulkily. "If he'd
money to burn he should have sent this lot to the infirmary."

"Och, Ellen, are you not pleased?"

"What's the man thinking of to fill us up with flowers as if we were an
Episcopal church on Easter Sunday?"

"Ellen, you've no notion of manners. Gentlemen often send flowers to
ladies they admire. When your Aunt Bessie and I were girls many's the
fine present of flowers we got from officers at the Castle."

"I've neither time nor taste for such things. It makes me feel like a
hospital. He'll be sending us new-laid eggs and lint bandages next. The
man's mad."

"Ellen, you're a queer girl," complained. Mrs. Melville. "If this
argy-bargying about votes for women makes you turn up your nose at bonny
flowers that a decent fellow sends you I'm sorry for you--it's just
tempting Providence to scorn good mercies like this. I'll away and take
the fish-pie out of the oven."

It was strange that as soon as her mother had left the room she began to
feel differently about the roses. Of course they were very beautiful;
and they were contenting in a quite magic way, for besides satisfying
her longing for pretty things, they seemed to have deprived of urgency
all her other longings, even including her desire for a vote, for
eminence of some severe sort, for an income of three hundred pounds a
year (which was the most she believed a person with a social conscience
could enjoy), for a perpetual ticket for the Paterson Concerts at the
MacEwan Hall, and for perfect self-possession. She felt as if these
things were already hers, or as if they were coming so certainly that
she need not fret about them any more than one frets about a parcel that
one knows has been posted, or concerning some desires, as if it did not
matter so much as she had thought whether she got them or not.
Especially that dream of being one of a company of men and women whose
bodies should be grave as elms with dignity and whose words should be
bright as butterflies with wit struck her as being foolish. It was as
idle as wanting to be born in the days of Queen Elizabeth. What she
really wanted was a friend. She had felt the need of one since Rachael
Wing went to London. Surely Richard Yaverland meant to be her friend,
since he sent flowers to her. But she wished the gift could have been
made secretly, and if he came to pay a visit she should be quite alone.
For no reason that she could formulate, the thought of even her mother
setting eyes on them together seemed a threat of disgrace. She wished
that they could be standing side by side at the fire in that five
minutes when it is sheer extravagance to light the gas but so dark that
one may stare as one cannot by day, so that she might look at what the
driving flamelight showed of his black, sea-roughened magnificence. At
her perfect memory of him she felt a rush of exhilaration which left her
confused and glad and benevolent.

"Mother, dear," she said, for Mrs. Melville had come back with the
fish-pie, and was bidding her with an offended briskness to sit forward
and eat her meal while it was hot, "they're the loveliest things. I
can't think what for I was so cross."

"Neither can I. There's so little bonny comes our way that I do think we
might be grateful when we get a treat."

"I'm sorry. I can't think what came over me."

"Never mind. But, you know, you're sometimes terribly like your father.
You must fight against it."

They sat down to supper, looking up from their food at the roses.

"Mother, the gas is awful bad for them. Carbonic acid is just murderous
to flowers."

"I was thinking that myself. It was well known that gas was bad for
flowers even when I was young, though we didn't talk about carbonic
acid. But if you don't see them by gaslight you'll never see them, for
it's dark by five. They must fall faster than they would have done."

"Och, no! I'd rather you had the pleasure of them by day, and let the
poor things last. I must content myself with a look at them at
breakfast."

"Nonsense! They're your flowers, lassie. But do you not think it would
do if we brought in the two candles and turned out the gas? It'll be a
bit dark, but it isn't as if there were many bones in the fish-pie."

And that is what they did. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for then
there was a bright soft light on the red and white petals, and a drapery
of darkness about the mean walls of the room, and a thickening of the
atmosphere which hid the archness on the older woman's face, so that the
girl dreamed untormented and without knowing that she dreamed.

"Ah, well!" sighed Mrs. Melville after a silence, with that air of irony
which she was careful to impart to her sad remarks, as if she wanted to
remove any impression that she respected the fate that had assailed her.
"I don't know how many years it is since I sat down with roses on the
table."

"I never have before," said Ellen.


II

It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the
declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park
Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the
careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had
meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when
the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every
time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood
red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew
more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he
wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that
he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused
consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present
course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in
open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There
was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his
love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man
commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research.
Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh
he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her
youth could hold.

But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter;
and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was
in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and
exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was
larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like
that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of
sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her
something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting
of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and
characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great
pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace
with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He
found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a
complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his
return in the New Year, which was a breach of her habitual pretence,
which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for
that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.

"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her
as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room,
which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver
fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map.
Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of
power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just
finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her
merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have
made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin
leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene
she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face
would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness
would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had
reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she
and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along
the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east
sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the
bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she
had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of
starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his
head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.

It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it
seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because
he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover
would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably
glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet
suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant
wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his
mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to
Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.

And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else
happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him
with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch
that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten
minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its
inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling
wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood
spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from
the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village
three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be
need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood
by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's
suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was
disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little
fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland
himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known
from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen
they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand
the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay
among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily
of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave
conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell
spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.

But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when
it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the
door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage
where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He
shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had
heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was
twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of
his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he
was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a
lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but
went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail
all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so
he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out
into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking,
lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.

She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she
stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows
were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as
well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the
marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without
intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the
death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac
and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the
bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen
panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their
coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not
spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those
books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft
voice.

For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and
dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled
his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It
must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the
hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that
this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she
had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew
followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet
three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued
scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his
arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He
held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to
the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But
I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face
away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to
talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a
thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so
far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded
the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly,
glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if
you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had
slept....

And she was going through a bad time like that now.

When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not
greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not
reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any
particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this
afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.
But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist
desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of
the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He
certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so
wonderful as he had remembered her.

But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to
solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the
Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the
white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast
of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the
summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by
his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to
Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up
to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous
thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her
immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly
conscientious woman would have gone on selling _Votes for Women_ for at
least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her
mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because
after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the _Scotsman's_
report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an
impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed
even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock
came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told
herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there
had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew
nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the
other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of
him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.

The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much
lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and
pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea,
though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want
any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation
to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or
cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but
always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill.
The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically
irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the
right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it
all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how
he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious
and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of
phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative
gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word
contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually
turned on the rest of the world....

But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by
candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her
mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less.
"But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That
was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious
and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an
excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of
course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll
keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop
you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."

He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had
given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their
stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in
their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the
fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented
them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering
murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at
all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed
that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very
pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the
wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers,
and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had
been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of
tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period
of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention,
which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.

But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift.
They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them
wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall
and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic
("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to
her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and
laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by
those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of
the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey
into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the
happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a
magical power to give each other the things they wanted.

But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed
perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the
frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.

"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."

"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"

She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last
instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if
anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy
and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh
evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of
malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr.
Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her,
things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark
thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."

"Ju--?"

"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that
Cæsar was much addicted to."

When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had
put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the
mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the
glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the
coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,
evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while
her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as
if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same
time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would
come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures
of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she
should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden
tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to
be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on
the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to
add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she
smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one
beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,
and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it
became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into
a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or
say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because
he perfectly knew what she did not.

One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of
shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed
to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to
each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an
exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that
his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But
there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it
killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was
inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an
exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light,
and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a
richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold
her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail
substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out
like comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to
crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set
out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of
course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world
was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the
table, and she seemed very real.

She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I
can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her
pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched
a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go
on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went
and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the
path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the
evening as if it were a refuge from him.

But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had
a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes
and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a
trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their
appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about
George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had
he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the
privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat _ss. Glory_ with
Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her
that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of
London, and not a few came from the special schools for the
feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper
that makes a good boxer.

So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was,
he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other
place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops
that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took
the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its
narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked
briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed
at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other
trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their
slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was
aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent
than going home to supper.

It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering
black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the
midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east
wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy
quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much
aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a
marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that
resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and
circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a
shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an
iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a
wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as
though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of
a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever
seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's
carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled
to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the
price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that
he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen,
and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such
occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy
texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness
in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was
plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual,
intellectual energy.

In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put
in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that
hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like
a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under
the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.
Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage,
for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it
seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his
white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however,
in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was
the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary
life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that
magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life. The old man
seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said,
"If that's the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately."
Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not
so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations. But after they
got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his
mind: "Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?"

"Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay."

They had come to the end of Ellen's shopping list and she was taking him
home through St. Patrick's Square. "Look at that lighted window, where
they've got a blue blind! That's where de Quincey stopped!" she said
excitedly, and he answered, "Oh, is it?... I say, why did the old chap
offer to give you change in halfpence?"

"Well, to-morrow's Sunday, you see."

"I'm afraid I don't. I'm stupid. Why do you want halfpence more on
Sunday than on any other day?"

"Why, for the plate. For the collection. In church. But we always put in
threepenny-bits. Mother's picked up a lot of English ways. What's taken
you?" She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her
that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly
English taunt that the Scotch are mean. "Och, you don't understand," she
began to stammer hastily. "I didn't mean that exactly."

And then a hot rage came on her. Why should she make excuses for her own
people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to
giggle? Wasn't he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences
in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness,
which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to "come it over"
her? She said acidly, "I'm glad you're amused. I suppose you don't do
such things in England?" and at his laughing answer, "I don't know; I've
never been to Church in England. But I shouldn't think so," her
neatly-brushed and braided temper came down. She came to a sudden stop.
They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of
tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had
none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate
with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs
she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping
from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of
her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side
lest he should drop any parcels.

He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that
it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his
mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as
she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were
held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that
English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers,
and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were
no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the
implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than
the English, had defended a larger country....

He woke up at that. He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for
though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry. She was
running away from him, but in a circle.

"Scotland bigger than England!" he jeered. "Think of the map! Bigger
than England!"

She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round
dismayed hole. But she was not to be beaten. "I was alluding to its
surface," she said coldly. "It being such an elevated country, there
must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking
hardly any space on the map. Consequently I was correct in saying that
Scotland is bigger than England." She drew breath to go on, but her lips
began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she
began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined
her. They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their
laughter, from which they did not wish to move. They were standing quite
still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other's faces,
trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the
strong moonlight. It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not
quite know what to do with it. They did not even know whether to be
grave or gay. It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue
and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its
merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.

But indeed they had no choice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I
didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person
all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."

"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an
expense."

He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur
the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last
manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face,
which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high
cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I
didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said
could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that
wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of
tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all
delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and
self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to
acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance,
accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a
boy.

And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that
Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of
wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she
should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of
course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and
turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these
desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would
look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward
tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the
ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that
she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be
able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would
prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men
are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or
persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which
he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of
everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body
to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in
spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though
that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly
disliked that obligation.

She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And
Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig.
Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands
yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs
hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The
water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."

"Take me there, Ellen."

"Would you like to come? Let's go next Saturday. I've got the whole day
off. Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I've been
doing. It'll be lovely. I've had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing
went to London. But would you truly care to come? It's just moors.
You'll not turn up your nose at it?"

"Anywhere I went with you I'd like."

She started and began to walk on. It was as if the sheet of tissue had
grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it. Although he
went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he
found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly
answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by
its collar. Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so
eagerly? And ought he to have called her by her Christian name? Of
course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to
do it. When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a
light in the dining-room window and said, "Mother's home before us."

She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her
life. For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed,
and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because
soon they would no longer be alone together. Perhaps something like fear
would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with
victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of
timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to
star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how
even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily
contriving their immediate marriage. For there was a steely quality
about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive
purpose.

It was apparent to him, when they went in, that Mrs. Melville understood
what was going on, for she threw him a glance which was not quite a wink
but which clearly suggested that had she been just a common body it was
conceivable that she might have winked. As soon as they were alone he
told her that he loved Ellen, that he wanted to marry her, that he had
plenty of money, that he was all right, that they must marry at once.
She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had
tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her
with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of
moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the
walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and
the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob
like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and plainly trusted him, but
at the same time she was pitifully alarmed. "Mercy me! you've not been
long.... Well, you've caught a Tartar and no mistake. Never say I didn't
warn you.... But you'll let the bairn bide for a wee bit longer! She's
but a bairn!"

It was as if she quite saw that a husband was necessary for Ellen, and
wanted her to have one, and at the same time believed that any husband
would inevitably bring her pain. He set it down as one of the despondent
misinterpretations of life that the old invent in the depression of
their physical malaise, and answered, reassuringly, insincerely, "Yes,
yes, I'll wait...." But why should they wait? They were going to be
radiantly and eternally happy. It might as well begin at once.


III

"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed
at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping
from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she
had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland
an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing
that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the
village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and
now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by
daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke
and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the
upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men
working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural
disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of
the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them,
laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do;
there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had
seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought
tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to
the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person
who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic
hues.

But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there
had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the
trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in
face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward
was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a
slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black
hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields,
set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road
dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate
frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of
clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines
against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride
and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of
mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its
immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it
was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and
it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he
had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood
showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather,
and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of
response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under
changing skies even as the seas.

Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting
towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the
coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly,
"Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity,
and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which,
when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs
and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind
was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of
wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a
track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously
between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old
lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her
bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes
had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a
new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed
on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted
everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country,
these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.

"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a
voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up
to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed
a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind
without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was
glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the
hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at
his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her
velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler
that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big
for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of
large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of
flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort
of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the
slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she
would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music
heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of
his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the
whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the
range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would
tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine
what manner of place it would be--whether there would be grass or
heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.

"Well, it's no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if
we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes," said Ellen. "We'd
best step forward. I'm glad you like the place. I love it. And this bit
of the road's bonny. When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the
ploughman's cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one
day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four. And if
you'll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as
bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians. The poor things
ran like the wind when they saw us. I wish we could have explained we
meant no harm, for I suppose it's the one time in the day when they
count on having the world to themselves."

"I've felt like that about a jaguar," he said. "Came on it suddenly, on
a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina. It had been tidying up a
monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy. Lord, the sick fright
in its eyes when it saw me. I'd have given anything to be able to stand
it a drink and offer to see it home."

"Och!" she murmured abashed. "Me talking about rabbits, and you
accustomed to jaguars. I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit
except to look down your nose at it. But we can't rise to jaguars in
Scotland. But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt."

"I've seen a red deer too," he said, "when I was motorcycling up to Ross
this summer." It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across
the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and
then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, "The sunset was
on it. It looked the colour of your hair."

"Well, if it did," she cried with sudden petulance, "pity me, that has
to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast's back. Och,
come along! Let's run. I like running. I'm cold. There's a bonny bridge
where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir. Let's run." And for a
hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then
stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath. "I don't like
this," she said half laughingly. "I've a poor envious nature. I'm used
to running everybody else off their feet, and here you're holding back
to keep with me. I feel I'm being an object of condescension. We'll
walk, if you please."

Yaverland said, "Oh, what nonsense! I was just thinking how rippingly
you ran."

"Havers!" she replied. "You were thinking nothing of the sort. You were
wondering what for I carried an iron-monger's shop in my pocket. But
yon rattling's just a tin with some coconuts I've in it that I made last
night and slipped in in case you'd like it, rubbing up against my
protractor."

"But why in Heaven's name," Yaverland asked, "do you carry a protractor
about with you?"

"Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch,
and I just keep a protractor handy."

Yaverland stopped. "Ellen," he said, "I haven't known you very long."
There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, "I
may call you Ellen, mayn't I? This modern comradeship between men and
women...." "Och, yes," beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic
catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her
pure enthusiasms for his own purposes. Sometimes he was conscious of a
detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not
respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but
he could not take back the insincerity. "As I say, I haven't known you
very long. But may I ask you a favour?"

"Surely," said Ellen.

"Turn out your pockets."

"But why?"

"I want to see what's in 'em."

"Well," said Ellen resignedly, "there are worse vices than
inquisitiveness. Both pockets?"

"We'll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor,
please."

"It's too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you'll have to
take them from me as I get them out. Well, there's the protractor, and
there's the coconut ice. Have a bit? Ah, well, I notice that
grown-up--that people older than me don't seem to care for sweeties
before their dinner. I wonder why. And there's a magnetic compass I
picked up on George the Fourth Bridge. There's a kind of pleasure in
finding the north, don't you think? And--fancy this being here! I
thought I'd lost it long ago. It's a wee garnet I found on the beach at
Elie. I was set up all the afternoon with finding a precious stone. I
would like fine to be a miner in the precious stone mines in Mexico. If
I was a boy I would go. And the rest's just papers. Here's notes on a
Geographical Society lecture on the geology of Yellowstone Park I went
to last spring. Very instructive it was. And here's a diagram I did when
I was working for the Bible examination on the Second Book of Kings--the
lines of the House of Israel and the House of Judah drawn to scale on
square paper, five years to a square and set parallel so that you can
see which buddy was ruling on the one throne when another buddy was on
the other. I came out fifth in all Scotland. And this is a poem I wrote.
It's not a good poem. The subject was excellent--reflections of an
absinthe-drinker condemned to death for the murder of his mistress--but
I couldn't give it the treatment it desairved. No, you will _nut_ see
it. I'll just tear it up. There. It'll do the whaups no harm scattering
over the moor, for they've no æsthetic sensibilities. But I shouldn't be
surprised if you had, though I've heard that the English don't care much
for art. I'm not much good at the poetry, but I have the grace to know
it, and so I've just given it up. I make my own blouses, though I know I
can't equal the professional product that's sold in the shops, because
it comes cheaper. But with the Carnegie library handing out the
professional product for nothing, I see no reason why I should write my
own poems. That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the
other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen
gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole
in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real
nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it
can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after
all."

"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.

"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No
wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the
English if they're all as easily amused as you."

"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like
a boy."

"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing
before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were
nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because
she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?
Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!
And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I
came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A
bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!
Is it not just fine?"

Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he
perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than
anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as
bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.
He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,
and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,
represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing
for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody
fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and
swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her
soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this
country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like
her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that
stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was
fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills
around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with
some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and
utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a
glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the
very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into
shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue
that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the
hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not
unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.

But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort
which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt,
some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it
could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden
from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and
jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy
might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible
lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating
of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat
under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the
thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see
if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the
south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and
said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."
To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone
spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.

There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn
floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an
invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.
But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than
anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy
and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight
squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her
balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky,
the stern grey stream, the amber grasses that shook perpetually in the
stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the
water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.

There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened
every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a
windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the
Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy
confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its
yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this
brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it
an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath
the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a
kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will
that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall
from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.
Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should
sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow
lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined
in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of
whitish grasses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the
unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake
perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It
suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed passion of malice. It was
like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in the log
bubbles slowly floated up through the dark water, wavered a little under
the glassy surface, and then popped up and made a dirty trail of spume.
That was like the way Mr. Philip sat in the dark corner beyond the
fireplace and showed by the way the whites of his eyes turned about that
something bad had come into his mind, and let a space of silence fall so
that one thought he was not going to say it after all, and then it would
come out suddenly, cool and as mean as mean could be and somehow
unanswerable.

With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver
birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless
on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of
malice. Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed
with the grassy rottenness beside the whitish grasses. It had had no
chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that
although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time
when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and
stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave
him the chance to make a fool of her. It was all right to be here on the
Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and
work under Mr. Philip. She could not go on like this. She would have to
kill herself. She would jump over the Dean Bridge. Mother would just
have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.

Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the
rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you
talk about? Aren't you still pals?"

Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's
gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on.
She's never written since the first month."

"Probably she's having hard luck."

"Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside
her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.
She's not a bit like me."

"But that's just what you look like."

"Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as
the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the
presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the
disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with
success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to
her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face
and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he
followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.

When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and
taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her
breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she
said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."

"Why don't you cut yours off then?"

"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she
answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun
that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all
right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere
nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little
child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while
yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl
was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from
womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He
would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right
angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds
marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her
scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman
smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from
a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning
herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult
love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by
some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and
they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.

He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before
her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary
austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he
recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she
still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss
her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when
she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands
roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as
children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was
a woman the passion between them was so strong that the delight of
touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to
support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that
they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and
invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was
what he had to say....

It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He
could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening
of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great
height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He
found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul
shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let
his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the passing moment
as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from
a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that
rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life
because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a
relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black
regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt
of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to
brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did
not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness
than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever
known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.
And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness,
the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race
among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.
She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of
women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon
her lips.

Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you,
she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think
that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in
the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless
moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South
America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her
mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was
too young.

There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was
with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long
way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the
whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two
servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes,
the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down
on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that
distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the
whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all
human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young
girl.

The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin
along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked
by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited
to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder
of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where
there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely
perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the
clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on
either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain
herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated
animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the
extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on
ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her
pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor,
her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so
greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight
over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he
wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course
he never had. There was no one in the world like her.

"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried
back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun
to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown
waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with
an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in
the hills where the Logan Burn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark
polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee
one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose--was it
not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into
his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"

"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here
than anywhere else in the world."

"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted,
uninterested in the loving things that he had said.

"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."

"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for
adventure, "I will go there some day...."

That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern
himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train
of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it
like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the
waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled
by a ready, embarrassed murmur from her.

"I can't...."

He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had
been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly:

"Why not? You've got nailed boots."

But she continued to stand stiffly on a rock by the edge of the red
pool, and stared over his head at the spray and repeated, "I can't."

He wondered from her blush if in his ignorance of girls he had done
something to offend her, and turned away; but she misunderstood that,
and cried fierily:

"Och, I'm not feared! I've done it twenty times. But I took a vow. Oh,"
she faltered, suddenly the youngest of all articulate things, "you'll
laugh at me!"

"I won't!" he answered fiercely and gripped one of her hands.

"It was like this," she said, looking round-eyed and dewily solemn like
a child in church. "Climbing up there used to be a great pleasure to me.
I used to come here a lot with Rachael Wing. And then I heard Victor
Grayson speak--oh, he is a wonderful man; he seemed hardly airthly; you
felt you had to make some sacrifice. I made a vow I'd never climb it
again till I had done something for the social revolution. And I've not
done a thing yet."

They exchanged a long, confiding look, a mutual pressure of their souls;
but before he could say something reverently sympathetic she had uttered
a sharp exclamation, and was looking past him at the waterfall, which a
sudden gust of wind had blown out from the rock like a lady's skirt. "If
we were climbing that now, yon spray would be on our faces, and I love
the prick of cold water!" she burst out. "Whatever for did I make that
daft-like vow? A lot of good it's like to do the social revolution! I
really am a fool sometimes!"

Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if
he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite
exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal
they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to
him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.
She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the
early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her
beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her
soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of
her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have
been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional
languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces
expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about
the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so
busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the
lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave
naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing
the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more
certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing
with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of
the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough
stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made
him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead
for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had
come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the
loch.

"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this
bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig.
The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a
gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a
good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies."
But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him,
though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black
wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile
long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of
desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art;
one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist
divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human,
grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so
thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked
like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this
there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that
it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of
hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing
that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no
ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its
graveyard.

"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on
Bell's Hill--do you see it?--told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising
up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most
interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit
of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in
Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"

He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own,
and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said,
"A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what
cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears
came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the
Scotch is your one accomplishment."

But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between
them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a
sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical
changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call
his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This
was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world
became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a
dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long
steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and purple leaves looked like
snips of painted tin; and the Glencorse Burn on the other side of the
field was overhung by bare trees of gold. Every window of the farmhouse
across the valley was a loophole of flame; and here it was evident, from
the passing of a multitude of figures about the farm buildings and a
babblement that drove in gusts across the valley, there was happening
some event that matched the prodigiousness of the strange appearance
lent it by the sunset.

"There's an awful argy-bargying at Little Vantage," said Ellen, "I
wonder what's going on."

When they crossed over the burn and turned into the road that led back
to the farmhouse they found the dykes plastered with intimations of a
sale of live stock. "Ah, it's a roup! Old Mr. Gumley must be dead, poor
soul!" And indeed the road was lined with farmers' gigs, paint and
brass-work blazing with the evening light till they looked like fiery
chariots that would presently lift to heaven. About the yard gate there
was a great press of hale farmers, gilt and ruddy from the sunset they
faced, and vomiting jests at each other out of their great bearded
mouths; and in the yard sheep with golden fleece and cattle as bright as
dragons ran hither and thither before the sticks of boys who looked like
demons with the orange glow on their faces, and who cursed and spat to
show they would some-day be men. Richard and Ellen had to stand back for
a moment while a horse was led out; and as it passed a paunchy farmer
jocularly struck it between the eyes and roared, "Ye're no for me, ye
auld mare, wi' your braw beginnings of the ringbone!" And there was so
much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much
patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the
incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster
who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest
sound of a whimper from Ellen.

"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.

"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening
sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was
something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was
so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from
which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is
like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. "A lot of beefy, red-faced angels
buying us up and taking us off to their own places without a word to us
of where we're to go to, and commenting most unfeelingly on all our
failings...."

"You funny person," he murmured, "you're tired. Probably hungry. Where's
that cottage you talked about where they'll give us tea?"

"Over yonder," she quavered, "but I'm not wanting any tea."

But just then a gig drew up beside them, driven by an old man and laden
with a couple of tin trunks and a cornucopia of a woman, who had
snatched the reins out of the old man's hands. "What's this? A roup at
Little Vantage! Feyther, what's happened?" The old man shook his head.
"Feyther, ye niver ken onything." She raised a megaphonic voice.
"Moggie! Moggie Gumley!" A fat young woman with a soap-shining face ran
out of the farmhouse. "Wha's calling me? Och, it's you, Mistress
Cairns!" "Ay, it's me. What's ta'en ye all here? I've been awa' for two
months keepin' hoose for ma brither Jock while his wife's been in the
Infirmary wi' her chumer. I didn't think I'd come back to find a roup at
Little Vantage." "So ye've not haird?" gasped the fat young woman
delightedly. "Feyther's deid o' his dropsy, and Alec and me's awa' to
Canady this day fortnight." She panted it out with so honest a joy in
the commotion, so innocent a disregard of the tragedy of death and
emigration, that Yaverland and Ellen had to turn away and laugh; and he
drew her across the road to the cottage.

The door was opened before they got there. "It's me, Mrs. Lawson!" said
Ellen. "Indeed, I kenned that!" replied the housewife. "I was keeking
out of the window when you came up the road, and I said to masel',
'There's Miss Melville, and she'll be wanting her tea,' so I awa' and
popped the kettle on. Bring your gentleman in. He's a new face, but he's
welcome. Ye'll pardon the parlour being a' of a reek wi' tobaccy, but
Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Borthwick cam' in and had a cup o' tea and a bit of
a crack. They were both bidding at the roup and some business thegither.
I think Mr. Laidlaw means to buy Cornhaven off Mr. Borthwick and give it
to his son John, wha's married on a Glasca girl, a shelpit wee thing wi'
a Glesca accent like skirling pipes played by a drunken piper." They
watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry
jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip,
their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the
superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them
they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the
mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires.
All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; and farmers
hawked out their last jests at one another, mounted their gigs and drove
home; and the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle pattered by, bleating
and lowing not so heartrendingly.

Ellen rose, went over to the mantelpiece and stroked the china dogs, and
sat down in an armchair by the fire. "This has been a lovely day," she
murmured. She joined her hands behind her head and crossed her knees and
smiled blindishly into the shadow; and his heart turned over in him. All
his life he would remember her just as she was then: the lovely attitude
of body that was at once angular and softly sensuous, like a
blossom-laden branch; the pure pearl colour of her skin, the pure bright
colours of her hair and eyes and mouth; the passionate and funny, shrewd
and credulous pattern of her features; and that dozing smile, that
looked as if her soul had ceased to run up and down enquiringly and was
resting awhile to enjoy the sweetness that was its own climate. He would
never forget her as she was looking then. She might turn away from him,
she might get old, she might die, but the memory of her as she was at
that moment would endure for ever in his heart, an eternally living
thing. He was aware, reluctantly enough, for he hated such mystical
knowledge, and would have given the world to see life as a plain round
of dicing and drinking and wenching, that real love was somehow a cruel
thing for women; that the hour when she became his wife would be as
illimitably tragic as it would be illimitably glorious. But love was
also very kind to women, since it enabled them to live always at their
loveliest in their lover's memories, there perpetually exempt from the
age and ugliness that even the bravest of them seemed pitifully to fear.

Yet, of course love was not so kind to every woman. No one remembered
his mother as he would remember Ellen. He began to ponder what his
mother must have been like when she was that age, and it marked a
certain difference between him and other men, that he was grudgingly
surprised that the girl he meant to marry was as beautiful as his
mother. Certainly, he reflected, with a bitter, gloating grief, Marion
Yaverland must have been beautiful enough to deserve a lodging in some
man's memory. She must have been brilliantly attractive in the obvious
physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit
must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he
suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that
other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which
showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark,
silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.

There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant
that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come
back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had
grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that
climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull,
and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her
hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then
spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and
cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality
flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had
not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her
lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who
stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good
repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on
the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the
unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their
cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from
her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble
that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost
strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands
over her face.

Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the
clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to
catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."

Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we
must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its
intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that
almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her
arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her
red hair. But when they got into the lane outside she hurried towards
the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath
sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run,
although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See,"
he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't
anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware
that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he
asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it
possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark?
He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she
had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit
that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of
matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her
ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of
discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for
the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of
self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no
witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened
with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them
between sleeping and waking.

It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely
impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal
ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.
It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things
which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer
sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy
shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He
perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way
she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her
hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver
with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her
hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of
fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated
with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in
women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's
life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of
worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee
contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt
for those other women.

The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and
lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats,
who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the
soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen.
"And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat
extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and
found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.
Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to
which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength
too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the _Gondomar_ had been
scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a
cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with
inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all
right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an
hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the
station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone
that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half
asleep."

The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take
a seat in it while he got the tickets. But she did not. Its carriages
were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those
burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want
to take that train. She would have liked to turn back with him through
the dark avenues into the Pentlands. The sunset, which had somehow been
as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before
the kind, sleepy darkness, undisturbed there in the valley by the
wee-est cottage light. It would be good to lie down for the night on the
heather of some ledge on the hillside where one could hear the Logan
Burn talking as it ran from the fall, and to look up and see Mr.
Yaverland sitting in that nice slouching way he had, a great black shape
against the stars. But that was a daft idea. She was annoyed for
thinking of anything so foolish, and when he came out and chid her for
standing about on the windy platform she found nothing on her lips but a
cross murmur.

That did not really matter, for one could not hurt grown-up people. They
were always happy. Everybody in the world was happy except her. Without
doubt he would think her quite mad if he knew that she was in the grip
of a depression that seemed to be wringing misery out of her body and
brain as one wrings water out of a bathing-dress, so when they got into
the train she turned away, muttered yawningly that she was very tired,
and buried her face in the crook of her arm so that he might think she
slept. It puzzled her that she felt so disappointed. What had she
expected to happen to-day that hadn't happened? Everything had been
lovely. Mr. Yaverland had talked most interestingly, and the hills had
been very beautiful. She was ashamed of all those tears that she shed
more frequently than one would have expected from an intending rival of
Pierpont Morgan, but these present tears filled her with terror because
they were so utterly irrational. Irrational, too, was the sudden picture
that flashed on her mind's eye of Mr. Philip sitting in the opposite
corner of the carriage, screwing up his dark face with mocking laughter.
"Mr. Philip is driving me mad," she thought to herself. "Some day soon
I'll find myself in Morningside Asylum, sticking flowers in my hair and
flattering myself I'm Queen Victoria. But I will not go mad. I am going
to get on. I am going to be great. But am I? I think I am not." Her face
made a wet contorted mask against her sleeve, and a swallowed sob was as
sharp in her throat as a fishbone; and there struck through her like an
impaling sword a certainty which she could not understand, but which was
surely a certificate that there was to be no more happiness, that even
if Mr. Philip ceased to persecute her she would still be hungry and
tormented.

Perhaps if she could go to some new country she would escape from this
misery. She saw a sky like stretched blue silk, stamped with the black
monograms of palms; a purple bay shaped like a shell and edged with a
white embroidery of surf. Surely such fair weather killed with sweetness
such coarse plants as her stupid gloom, as the foul weather here killed
with its coarseness all sweet-flowering southern plants. She turned to
Yaverland to ask him if he could help her to find work abroad, but she
became aware that she was in the grip of an unreasonable emotion that
prevented her from this. It was as horrible to her to see the coldly
logical apparatus of her mind churning out these irrational conclusions
as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in
drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery
would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed
disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery
unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the
way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level
save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that
he was standing over her, and her heart almost stopped. He said, "I
think we're just coming into Edinburgh." There was no reason why she
should feel chilled and desolate when he said that. She must be going
out of her mind.

And he, since she had shown by the simplicity of her movements that she
was not afraid of him, was quite happy.

He could see the picture of himself sitting beside the sleeping child as
if it were printed in three colours on glossy paper. But he was a little
troubled lest she had walked too far, and as they went up the stone
steps from the station to Princes Street he bent over her and asked in a
tone of tenderness that he enjoyed using, "Are you tired?"

"Oh, very tired," said Ellen, drooping her head, and aping a fatigue
greater than anything she had ever felt in all her young life.




CHAPTER IV

I


Mr. Philip was crossing Princes Street when he saw them standing in the
white circle under the electric standard by the station steps. The
strong light fell on them like a criticism, and it seemed to him brazen
the way they stood there being so handsome that the passers-by turned
about to stare at them. Doubtless, since folks were such fools, they
were whispering that the two made a fine pair. Surely it was the vilest
indecency that there, under his very eyes, that great hulking chap from
Rio bent his head and spoke to Ellen, and she answered him?

"She's standing there making herself as conspicuous as if she were a
street girl!" he screamed to himself, and other shouts filled his ears,
and he became aware that a cursing driver had pulled up his horse a foot
away and that the loafers at the kerb were lifting jeering cries. He
charged it one more offence to Ellen's account that she had caused him
to make a fool of himself, and vowed he would never think of her again,
and ran among the people to see where she had gone. Yaverland was
leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now
nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did
not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and
a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet
treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised
with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this
was anybody but Ellen--Ellen, who was far different from every other
woman in the world and more desirable. She slowly turned, as if her
spirit had felt this rage at the fact of her running at her heels, and
wished to have it out with him. He gripped his stick and raised a hand
to hide his working mouth, and waited for the moment when she would see
his face, but it did not come.

The man Yaverland had put out his great ham of a hand and hailed a cab.
When Mr. Philip tried to stop a cab he usually had to run alongside it,
and often the driver was most impudent, but this swaggering bully
checked the thing on the instant, and handed in Ellen and drove off in
style as if he was a duke with his duchess in their own carriage. What
did they want in a cab anyway? He followed the black trundling square on
its spidery wheels as it turned round by the Register House to cross the
North Bridge, and imagined the fine carryings on they were doubtless
having in the dark in there. He called Ellen a name he had not thought
of before.

There was nothing to be done about it. He stood for a while at the
railing of that strange garden of concrete walks and raised parterres
and ventilating-shafts that lies at this end of Princes Street, built on
the roof of the sunk market. Its rectilinear aspect pleased him. It was
not romantic, the gates were locked, and one could be sure that there
were no lovers trysting there. Presently he moved along towards the West
End, keeping still on the side of the street where there were no men and
girls prancing about and grinning at each other like dirty apes under
the lights, but only empty gardens with locked gates. What had those two
been doing? They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very
long journey it must have been dark before they started. They had been
in the country alone together when it was quite dark. There came to him
memories of sounds he had once heard when walking through a twilit wood,
the crackling of twigs, a little happy cry of distress, and again the
crackling of twigs; he had been compelled by something, which was not
specially in him but was a part of the damned way life went, to stand
and listen, though he knew it was not decent. He saw before him Ellen's
face lying white on her spilt red hair, and it added to his anguish that
he could not see it clearly, but had to peer at this enraging vision
because he could not make out what her expression would be. He had seen
her look a thousand ways during these last few weeks when she had kept
on drawing his attention to her with her simpering girl's tricks, but he
could not imagine how she would look then. It seemed as if she were
defying his imagination as she defied him every day in the office, and
he turned his mind away from the matter in a frenzy, but began soon to
wonder what those two had been doing. They had come in by train. Unless
they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before
they started....

He knew he must not go on like this, and looked round him. He had passed
the classic portico of the Art Gallery and was walking now by the wilder
section of the gardens, where the street lights shone back from the
shining leaves of bushes and made them look like glazed paper, and with
their glare made the trees behind seem such flat canvas trees as they
set about the stage at theatres when there is need for a romantic glade
for a lovers' meeting. How often had Ellen met Yaverland?

He ran across the road. It would be better among the people. It was not
so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were. Everybody
in the world was happy except him. No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were
just bursting with merriment in that cab. Would they be at home yet? She
would be telling him all the office jokes. Well, she might, for all he
cared. He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip
Hop-o'-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn't give a straw for it. He
stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to
bottom of its window with strings of actresses' photographs, and stood
there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an
exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that
indicated the glittering facades of these charmers' smiles, the milky
smoothness of their bean-fed femininity. Ah, these were the really fine
women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin
slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne. Who
would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the
world?

But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so
beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she
insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who
had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience
that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such
as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller
than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He
hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and
began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his
mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness
of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of
contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and
what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social
contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still
until one had finished swearing at her.

But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that
Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would
have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she
had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in
Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among
the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one
can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside
the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found
it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so
ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage
of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen
without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one
did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at
one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He
had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side
of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she
took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an
iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.
Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not
been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office
fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and
a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had
fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men. She had been a
cruel beast. For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might
have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering
things so loud. Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to
those depths.

He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the
decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense
to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved
accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could
not come to harm. But that would not alter the fact that he had once
come to harm. As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw
that a "To Let" board had been put up since the morning. He wondered why
the Allardyces were leaving it. He had been at school with the boys. He
and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school
sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy. He
remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy
sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved
in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all
behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see
them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his
body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh,
giving him a cold, pure feeling. Well, he was not a boy any longer. The
Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that;
nothing would be the same again....

The solidity of his father's house, the hall into which he let himself,
with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting
of his mother's father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him
feel better. He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most
respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset
about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the
dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with
deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings. There was a very
handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights
and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on
the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table. "Mhm!" he sighed
contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the
whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.

The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He
put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was
immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red
hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He
met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak
to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so,
but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.

There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from
top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a
bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which
contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary,
which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a
manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.
Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a
stranded whale, reading the London _Law Journal_ and breathing
disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when
in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip
came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the
entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr.
Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking
this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He
sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather
than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only
sons. But he went at it.

"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."

Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the
faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"

"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just
seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from
Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."

"What for should they not?"

"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of
night."

"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn
over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet.
Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs
we shouldn't be long."

"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He
forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like
that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."

At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were
still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a
good girl, Philip," he said.

The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those
inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew,
where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and
unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any
mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial
tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were
his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.
There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his
urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the
onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If
she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her,
father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"

Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the
discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could
surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned
towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to
Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up
at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a
word."

It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father,
thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office
discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he
said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He
ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had
always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her
conduct....


II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk
was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was
sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and
staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance
entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue
overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and
the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk
hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at
anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in
Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she
had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew
she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still
knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be
looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting
Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the
desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella
Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like
the hand of a young man.

But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose
the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention
began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony,
the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay
athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when
I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every
room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a
caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it
like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan
is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my
own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I
keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with
a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the
progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright
head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his
thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not
like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both
very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be
sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she
was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I
had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh
that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin
who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a
suitable marriage."

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which
although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have
behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors
which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the
gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could
turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he
had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns'
love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to
passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had
persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the
high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny
warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening
years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety
darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in
moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been
to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been
to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could
reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her
who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady
young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all
his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.

But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away
when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to
marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered
how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head
and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she
forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to
make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after
all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed
himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a
time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she
had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark
eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though
tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her
cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such
modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a
capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If
she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would
have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had,
although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his
first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm,
and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But
Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.

His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses
that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been
the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking
over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had
risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear
her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest
pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though
quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl
must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that
proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her
sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things
were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had
been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be
young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and
know no after-life.

No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one
depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and
orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must
settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is
quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely
with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us.
But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He
rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs
with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.

And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were
going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had
waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when
Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had
gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any
way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited
her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She
had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say
good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the
dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look
that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face,
which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with
interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive
glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts,
and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some
imagination that had given him pleasure.

She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from
him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it
was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The
only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking
walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her
mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though
everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy
terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was
just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress
her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said
courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all
night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become
ringing proclamations of indifference.

Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that,
though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see
one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a
telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had
asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead.
Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet
very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely
action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil
to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an
infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by
which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which
he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her
hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as
if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so
that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would
draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think
so malignantly of one who had been so kind--so much kinder than anybody
else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she
knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that
Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago
she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she
saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex,
her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her
that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of
madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her
cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the
quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way
with derision, of Mr. Philip.

He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"

Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity
he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told
him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is
nobody ready to give me work."

He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"

She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale,
and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that
she should have to live in this world where everyone was either
inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers
that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them
at once."

For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and
at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an
ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate.
A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and
said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude,
but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his
hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands
from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had
need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were
doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could
just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But
it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"

Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway
under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the
strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied
that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you
please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to
speak to you this afternoon?"

"He usually does," replied Ellen.

"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial
an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth
puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held
in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily,
making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about
to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign
of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to
it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt
at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to
be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered
at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have
come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"

She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her
still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the
trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had
dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me?
Whoever's been complaining--and no doubt if your clients once began at
that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock
gun--it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm
practically infallible."

"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing.
"Perhaps we might call it your play."

He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick
whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn
near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making
wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in
darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown
indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his
features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything
about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head
because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with
all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville,
a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have
been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on
Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist
chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving
away. I won't tell you"--he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and
became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before
he speaks of evil--"what the client made of it all." And then he bent
again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in
an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous
sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but
which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and
she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a
satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she
continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this
misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her
crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.

But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had
spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the
serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her
tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her
face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled
surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably
precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that
if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out
of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to
a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was
defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to
destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it
was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble
and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same
persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and
planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his
efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count
that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety
was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me
to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk
the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my
time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as
if she was playing a jig.

He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously,
"The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now,
if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through
her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a
misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which
falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the
recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of
foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was
the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could
effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it
was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being
nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had
talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed
him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently
to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his
shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into
a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of
madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that
in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing.
For of course it could not be so.

Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my
wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as
men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of
craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no
mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned
page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that
it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always
gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she
had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of
Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in
her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,
which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting
any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt
in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the
side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic
lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding
bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a
lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the
client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes
Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it
was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and
another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and
flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,
the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with
waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and
tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy
like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for
his dealings with his wife's money....

But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one
thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.
"Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I
spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a
shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months
to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think
she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping
undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were
just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had
had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out,
though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because
the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a
quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to
her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with
her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her?
They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man
on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she
hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his
lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she
rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was
suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if
there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string
was snapping separately.

"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself
remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the
world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise.
"There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to
sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so
you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just
for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had
been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine,
which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly
unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series
of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the
dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way,
and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the
heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood
arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by
the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up
again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee
men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought
proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the
tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood
such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.
It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically
and mentally.

She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.
But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on,
masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of
that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in
strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with
extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running
red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every
way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than
she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast
for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.

Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate
adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges
and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would
take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women,
hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage,
who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try
to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she
perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.
When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would
have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the
mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house
on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a
furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private
system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a
key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in
one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With
perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the
garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as
monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with
weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick
his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor;
he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands
of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the
white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the
creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken
roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and
dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark
ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience.
Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....

All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or
had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step
was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not
look up from the table.

"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."

She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he
had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been
talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size
that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other
hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought
she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she
said mournfully.

"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put
in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly?
I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let
me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not
know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked
with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage
on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his
cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence.
"Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box
as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian
and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must
be sickening for something."

"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger
stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her
hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with
eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a
woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish
James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity
with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with
pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and
purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point
and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his
chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant
occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and
distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this
creditable pity.

"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."

She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."

"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could
also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into
the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love
may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing
under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets
describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy,
and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it
deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is
just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just
luck....

"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."

Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a
client."

He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away.
All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle
things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on
doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which
did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr.
Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the
long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The
girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of
life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus
assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed,
quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and
at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a
child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could
not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and
tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell
you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes
among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"

"Och, you make fun of me--!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger
stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not
bite it.

"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing
seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish
pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion,
until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and
got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this
delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little
of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that
fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a
wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that
particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has
no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."

Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure
as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say
that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad,
though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking
arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a
great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling.
"The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars
and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled
brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but
wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It
flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat
and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see
what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must
admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are
on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would
not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she
started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish
tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger
stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to
gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger
when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back
for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll
have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the
colour...."

While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers,
the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and
rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over
a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds.
When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of
soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick
to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being,
and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was
completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life
was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now
she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair,
which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the
weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable
women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the
same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her
coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that
people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions
that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to
have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.

To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you
women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with
the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a
fine piece in the _Scotsman_ this morning about one of your Suffragettes
standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would
think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing
slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra
ladylike, I'm sure."

"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith--"

"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he
sits for Fife."

"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady,
who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's _Votes for Women_.
She's a beautiful girl."

"I doubt it, Nelly."

"I'll bring the photo then!"

"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully,
watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married
if she is so beautiful?"

"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen,
admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I
heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder,
yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters
have to be carried out on stretchers."

"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James,
and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her
speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.

"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite
enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while
we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the
Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my
teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't
admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."

"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his
eyes on her face.

"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she
answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her
arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had
begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking
of Yaverland.

She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with
a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with
which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off
her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise,
and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and
began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly
justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it
until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It
is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an
unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is
performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by
dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words
sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance
and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was
not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this
fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his
mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual
in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and
watch his typist dancing.

But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away
her breath.

She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass,
and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful
lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is
always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as
soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the
window-seat and smiled back at the old man.

"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as
the great Dr. Johnson says."

But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make
time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was
just a rude old thing."

"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."

"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked
with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and
indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in
your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion
drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs.
Thrale when the poor body married again."

"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a
substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."

"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way
they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And
hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if
they were blunt wise ones--that's not sense. And if it were, what's the
good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on
your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you
dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it.
One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There
are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get
romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on
the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people--masked
Touaregs--"

"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a
pairfect salad of foreign pairts."

It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both
sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and
etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I
should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal
spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go
there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and
went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de
Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house
where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.
"And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the
big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens,
and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats.
I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?--if I would wear dead
things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be
nice, however rich I was--ways that don't affect me very much, so that
they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I
always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and
jaguars. And--"

"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your
heart to a keeper at the Zoo."

"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you
needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he
steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the
crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was
working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some
other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He
is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come
natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said
nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."

"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling
stones gather no moss, I've heard."

Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of
money. He can beat you even at your own game."

Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking
round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it
contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And
what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."

"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.

He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his
stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not
do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.
"He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."

She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."

Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched.
The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the
day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if
they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned
unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked
sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away
from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the
prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any
appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling
intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a
conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was
morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain,
that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For
Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed
possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion
in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two
establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so
satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to
take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things
he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going
to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their
good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece
of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him
to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity
of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness
which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside
the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives
himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked
back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the
little helpless working-girl.

He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and
offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give
you pleasure when I bought them."

One would always get her that way.

Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove.
"Oh, Mr. James!"

"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've
been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"

"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."

"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am
too free with my tongue."

"Oh, Mr. James!"

"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go
your own way--"

"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at
the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as
sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the
spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you
are very beautiful."

She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"

"Aye," he said, "beautiful."

For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand
on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were
focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity
that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a
little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.

"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.

"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National
Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing?
I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an
actress. Tell me, which am I like?"

"You're like both. That's where you score."

She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"

"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."

She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she
were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if,
indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.

"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.

"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on
straight?"

"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've
never looked at yourself before."

She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up
and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.

"Are you not beautiful?" he said.

"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and
stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done
something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In
evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux
Camélias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan--a big fan of
ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost
gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that
is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I
suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the
plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I
not?"

"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James,
"and her you'd better with your tongue."

"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't
matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like
Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's
merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I
am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure
I'll do?"

"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.

She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual
mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh
dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay.
"What nonsense we're talking! Do--for what? It's all pairfectly
ridiculous--as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so
physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too
quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit,
abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but
abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the
mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit
buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She
stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she
were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than
they had ever been before, because she was holding them with
consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her
frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in
silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with
a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that
there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat
of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and
then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding
herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were
clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.

"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half
from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to
this interesting suffering of hers.

Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on
her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's
very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"

Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're
talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice
sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"

She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief.
"Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell
back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking,
shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head
fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she
pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this
office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had
November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She
pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if
she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"

"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.

She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had
boasted about something that could not come true, that would be
horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only
the young can feel.

Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had
to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating
silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."

At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot
at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy,
and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her
chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her
hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression.
She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a
schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had
married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her
manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was
trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her
mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She
caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this
pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the
window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if
the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a
negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the
bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of
wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what
it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid
on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she
must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark.
Surely it's time I was away home?"

There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past
four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James
cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a
bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so
terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing
his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella
Kingan suffered thus?

"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the
hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and
tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried,
she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things
always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as
she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not
alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.
Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the
blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in
this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac
words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their
brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose,
that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting
strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the
bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.
At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed
with hate. He had brought all this upon her.

And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring
endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as
to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the _tempo
rubato_ and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no
more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the
wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....

She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his
presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent
accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie?
Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."

"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the
doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all
right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was
not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well
be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and
forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!"
she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm
doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"

He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"

"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into
the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door
of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran
down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.


III

More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been
crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she
had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights
in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a
cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture
does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and
called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called
that her mother had that morning said something about spending the
afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again,
"Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out
angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at
the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was
perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to
her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the
caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff
tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking
queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she
had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to
the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the
breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and
carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in
digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her
heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible
derider.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped.
"Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up
the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human
beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get
myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the
Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a
time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk
and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing
at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she
had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the
larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam
her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had
always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being
chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it
liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being
glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an
exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that
flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a
violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was
silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common
and precious too.

She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken
with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the
touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that
she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not
grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully,
putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my
strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what
they've lost...."

The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her
buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she
knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only
because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to
leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures
of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp
brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no
more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and
moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the
plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of
departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was
the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could
imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name
were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.

Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather
than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she
meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare
plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when
they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running
up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River
Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark
glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green
fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss
that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep
river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory
tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat
and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river,
overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel,
weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached
ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff
movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired
merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of
its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows
leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were
somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to
notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one
need! Ah, but it was now.

If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be
impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall
across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers
because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of
the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought
of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so
rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled
with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart.
She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight,
that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world
and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this
moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster
the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put
on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and
greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks.
She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....

Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it
was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived
there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate
opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and
apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed
deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door
and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet;
her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if
there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.

His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was,
and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither
greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down
into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her
eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels
standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver
rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as
they had always looked on any night.

"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand
closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of
the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.

"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love
you."

Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.

"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till,
feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're
getting wet! Darling, let us go in."

When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark,
and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze
he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of
escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But
he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and
drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his
hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat
across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call
me little? I am not little!"

He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his
fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and
yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and
terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not
know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have
countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich
colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going
to be of some high kind of glory.

He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love
me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she
listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he
pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel
of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of
women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to
make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists;
they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills
or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and
pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face
wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was
beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his
passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the
sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me,"
was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She
held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find
that she too was whispering.

"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to
love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle
tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She
loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to
see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she
loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts
the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had
confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep
way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told
you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without
touching you. Please ... please...."

Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on
her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had
ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never
thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when,
between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was
going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her)
as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit
water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on
marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer,
soft as the south wind....

But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard,
interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her
mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever
after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more
subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms
still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the
strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage,
of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things.
Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another
on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would
always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not
quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it
was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was
so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of
his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish
that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a
little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an
ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.

A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become
linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed
under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose
convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and
depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose
unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was
as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung
herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her
happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there
little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had
always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became
more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became
less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of
lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of
his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity:
"Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."

They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The
clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little
room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.

Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.

"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball
of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've
ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself
about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he
was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down
through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you
... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his
fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily
and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood
between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking
the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy café table; men bent forward on
their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men
who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their
graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a
horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the
filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which
it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely
necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk
at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous
heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.

"Ellen--you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that
comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that
doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed
you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And
yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to
say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could
beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to
watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's
all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved,
that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped
dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as
your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I
am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."

He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first
night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart
pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.

"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic.
I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love
God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them
to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has
no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear
prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and
women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like
it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which
he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But
there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love
changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves
up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some
woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary
women. _Vin Ordinaire._ Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female
stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the
spell--you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are
the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for
just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."

He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so
great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that
nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he
feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity,
since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this
richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it
made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for
lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it
had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to
look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of
his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his
inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to
make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against
fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick
sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more
lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so
little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself
nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic
change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his
life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same
revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though
within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no
reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover;
but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of
disloyalty to some fair standard.

He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as
an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been
blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a
severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an
accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped
unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth
and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as
if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to
justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which
showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of
those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful
interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely
things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to
him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a
thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her
again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me!
I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested
love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a
lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the
sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"

She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her
gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you
think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're
not miserable, are you?"

"Sometimes. I have been lately."

"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong--and
victorious! But why?"

"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."

"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of
organisation," she gravely told him.

"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken
particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to
the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there,
and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you
go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do,
although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of
having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what
it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of
one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes
one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come
again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on
to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he
had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were
thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The
sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers.
You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that
in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you
that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a
garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what
you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their
branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they
grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very
edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look
past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you.
Dearest, when can we get married?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a
wife?"

He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep
two."

She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't
divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston
say so."

He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I
could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of
things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"

"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...."
She looked down, weighing grave things.

"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I
will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to
make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let
you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and
whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."

She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her
lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.

"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure
about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got.
Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole
worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls,
stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of
disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect
surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was
not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with
precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with
the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of
organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for
his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman
fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who
had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before
the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her
quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at
last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory
that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were
stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of
her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he
went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money.
Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great
commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one
considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure
science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied
science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got
her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that
sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex
at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."

She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?"
she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why
isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"

"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of
being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money.
I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the
conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's
game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge--the same kind
of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a
person by being with them all the time and loving them very much.
Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the
pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But,
dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to
marry me."

"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am
marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will
know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if
you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."

"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't
you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am!
Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if
he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were
still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of
which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any
case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you,
how little I deserve you."

"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd
been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself
to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his
eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer,
living in a house with you, won't it?"

He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling
her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was
outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had
hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to
him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the
light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so
real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as
terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a
helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again--for he knew she
did not like him to say it!--such a little thing. He remembered, with a
sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had
sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the
human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how
he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated
Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for
the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men
sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the
way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some
special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that
lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.
He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi'
our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to
see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was
evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a
world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest
you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon
day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed
succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.

Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality,
felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met
her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in
the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old
men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white.
"What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow
to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish
James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry.
"Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew
well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll
have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had
thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on
perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland
sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the
narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.

It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its
days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as
some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had
arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid
fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks,
Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house--he rolled his tongue round
the loneliness repellently--had neither sent the cheque on to her nor
asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called
Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of
property"--it was evident that he admired such--saw a prospect of
getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing
well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was,"
and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and
alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an
eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.

"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day,
looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable
unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find
out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was
abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and
geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing
standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what--she
called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!--I kenned there was not her like
under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her
on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been
amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing
aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her
mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court
on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which
she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that
keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like
to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?"
Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her
fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate
about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here,
as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable
air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry
laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a
nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its
troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."

Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad
concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie
alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been
overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man.
Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion
that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He
had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it
stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her
disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could
pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could
step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he
savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the
sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must
be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money?
Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking
of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had
risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike
because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've
been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by
the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching
his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity.
Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his
back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the
world.

Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her
delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought
of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her
live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its
primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more
experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine
white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny
had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to
miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be
played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a
rôle. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very
clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His
heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have
been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of
concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this
before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he
wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of
eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that
his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life
to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out
loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow
wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in
gratitude, and found her looking at him.

"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking
that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking
down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."

The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to
take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh
goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him
from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on
her bosom. "I want--I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be
good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a
religion.

They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee
and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one
foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then
she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands
behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr.
Gladstone!

Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird,
appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen!
And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr.
Yaverland into the parlour!"

"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a
guilty little girl.

Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an
instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never
do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to
marry me."

Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice
at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at
the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on
the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he
noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful
to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her
life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must
live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent
allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.

Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far
as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."

Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet
about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because
now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!

"Let me marry her soon," he said.

She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had
said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."

"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.

She became tragic.

"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house
at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you.
Obviously you can't stand this climate."

She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together
having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well.
I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into
memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always
practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man
than anyone has allowed."

They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its
honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly,
"Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went
out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."

"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland--maircy me, what shall I call
you now?"

"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."

"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one
would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing!
Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I
wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take
Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."

"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly.
It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R--Richard, will you take her
into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not
hear?"

"Ellen dear!"

"Away now!"

"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the
best tablecloth after the mending--and there's nothing but cod-roes, and
you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away,
dear--you'll make Richard feel awkward--"

Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she
knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.


IV

He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to
her three times.

_"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute
of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the
sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red
hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds,
and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the
most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every
moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a
waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now
I do--that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima,
you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you;
we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd
light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your
beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my
lovely red-haired Ellen...."_

And she had written to him twice....

_"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what
you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the
library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping
her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as
hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically
nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Shelley and Byron. But
their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please
come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did
you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling
there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of
life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not
believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there
must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one
another. Do please come soon...."_

Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and illustrated papers for
the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.
Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought
Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three
dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he
saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind
deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out
to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw
extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women
living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the
lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.
Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that
Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and
unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the
door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an
amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant
hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of
the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a
fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons
convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase
creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out
at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her
face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in
lank, curved strands about her shoulders.

She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a
crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.
They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."

"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I
knocked that it was diphtheria she had."

"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with
wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd
again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to
think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in
her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed
her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick
away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the
staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses.
"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."

"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."

"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.
Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."

"That be damned."

"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled
into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered
in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"
Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than
any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her
so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked
so wee!"

"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her
so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his
maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him,
and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of
the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no
sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family
now. You might have let me do that!"

"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you
see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's
no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have
been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was
her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme
poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury
but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the
beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've
told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six
weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all
the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful
tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call
on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her
mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the
slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and
gathered her closely to him.

"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.

"You look very beautiful."

"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."

"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck
with a large horn button anything but decent."

"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm
past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother
her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning
for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for
my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like,
though doubtless it would do me good to know."

"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back
the first thing in the morning."

"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness.
("Ye've got--ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me
feel all--all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me
up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully
before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appetite even when the
Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work
against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just
Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you!
There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that
mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her
terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was
sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years
ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot
think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The
doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry.
She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You
go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the
kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have
heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."

"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of
Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go
off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."

"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come
with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like
a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal
Family."

"But why must you go out?"

"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they
give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and
every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health
Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill,
friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,'
'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be
amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for
worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."

"But, my God, can't you telephone?"

"No, of course not. They can't do that in these institutions. They'd
have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But
it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I
never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the
old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful
thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although
she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!"
She passed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging
down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the
table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with
milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that
was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great
grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing
and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress
in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just
wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she
never got one. Illustrated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing
intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a
great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages,
clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I
expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."

Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in
her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't
I go and look at this board?"

"No. I want to go myself."

"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some
place in Princes Street."

"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying
good-night to Mother."

They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on
to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.
She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and
stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring
noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just
lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently
she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must
go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing
in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird
might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with
gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose
you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you
can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to
turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not
handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped
her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going
to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there,
shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.

"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."

"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's
easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But
mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his
letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets
old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be
able to keep it up?"

She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her
parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh
Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of
deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the
persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious
gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It
was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.

He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things
much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll
be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet
there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for
you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I
have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ...
I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...
something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it
communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.

They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.
He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that
to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she
was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and
trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found
pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind
region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth
in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such
fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.

At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they
made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it
travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of
Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of
coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since
there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their
minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church
like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is
doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than
precious stones.

So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women
are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern
women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of
languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North
was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their
bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such
sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him
for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so
sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme
passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would
provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he
had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen
during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been,
he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising
things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen
would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he
realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and
therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by
telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for
he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which
pain surely could not live.

"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it
you were thinking of saying?"

He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell
you about myself."

She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her
heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will
know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything
disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted
that till you met me you were a bad character."

"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother
and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it,
and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor
little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old
story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with.
We've got our own lives to lead, thank God!"

She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted,
and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something
that you ought to tell me!"

He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm
illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, God,
it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She
probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his
deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence
there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him
want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't
married to each other...."

"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's
silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand
gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the
others twit you with it?"

Oh, God, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when
they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."

"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is
always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."

He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage
meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable
they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman
in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she
herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to
cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to
have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that
everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards
it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If
she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that
solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred
saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which
was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking
of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not
married to my father...."

But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch
of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel
of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of
physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before
hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either
not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had
reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers,
and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a
merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and
undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might
have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so
wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There
appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps
the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which
represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff
and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a
little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She
wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth
and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what
is she like?"

"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she
was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity
as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday
papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that.
Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as
tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea
of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was
saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite
uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might
have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at
once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of
himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the
Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell
her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he
could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned
his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt
himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar
reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to
his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not
marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least,
on her side it was love! On his ... on _his_...."

"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was
trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow
it's making it happen all over again...."

This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was
using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when
he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for
the argument of phantom passions in her room, and she opened her eyes
suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him
grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand,
but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly,
I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the
ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that
stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was
not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found
fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of
course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion
became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel
of his Ellen.

"Forgive me," he murmured.

"Of course I forgive you."

"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"

"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."

"That's a brave undertaking!"

They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've
always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing
I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest
collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used
to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her
tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge.
Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth
when it is nearly all bookshops?"

She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her
breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she
slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they
were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with
drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this
street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed
with windows broken or hung with rags.

"Isn't this the High Street?"

"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a
fine Saturday morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the
Highlanders drilling."

"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"

"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most
likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only
taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He
said I would be just a fule to worry."

He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops
that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm.
"You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this
awful part."

"Is this it?"

"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her
number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon
in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"

After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your
mother's number was?"

"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that
white dog!"

His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"


V

A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the
sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and
they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced
over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her
being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her
mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone
arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness
through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel
drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a
piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the
gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to
Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the
residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good
omens.

When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with
ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told
herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining
their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one,
that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of
an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that
her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had
seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away
from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen
behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud
consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the
same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the
danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for
the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and
of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that
fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the
words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was
that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds
employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a
position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a
nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she
perceived that he was going to do something which he should have
delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and
his office to these two strangers.

As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm
in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that
the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the
little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was
definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits
made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth,
were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that
followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the
pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on
lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they
passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass
and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran
into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind,
private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone;
down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of
different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making
among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.

This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and
some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people
should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and
the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who
carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could
be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:
"You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on
the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'
happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty
without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted
itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more
that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the
speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in
the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her
mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably
well and wearing the moiré blouse that she had given her for her
birthday.

"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door
that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place
of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk,
and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a
prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not
see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and
turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she
still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being
rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the
four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through
the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind
but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their
appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking
at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they
saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout
absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that
displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now
convinced her that mother was dying.

There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose
vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat
and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall
and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and
looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there
was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin
body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door
to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad,
comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and
gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly
come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet
struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from
their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work
if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to
be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh
to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to
that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its
being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and
the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising
doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the
end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one
moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which
dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful
light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour
of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman
parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.
It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where
mother was lying.

She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the
better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She
wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary
movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the
extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.
"Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."

The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in
a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence
and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical
terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary
language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary
dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run
a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go
into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see
her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was
hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large
window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs,
and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a
richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several
sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known
neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather
enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she
would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her
popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable
but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and
minimally furnished as this room.

Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of
stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the
screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron
bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen
but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to
have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of
the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was
for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two
glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever
been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and
about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth,
there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the
slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked
for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end
of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that
sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense
glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some
inmost branch of a large tree.

"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"

From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to
make her lips meet, and speak.

"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be
with you. You needn't speak."

But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so
remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths
commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She
whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."

Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes
towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.
At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his
lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not,
and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and
knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He
said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be
poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and
under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.
Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she
dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no
attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be
together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with
Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon
her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It
struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and
inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come
to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the
stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in
fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose
wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great
glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.

There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though
attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the
exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had
greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy
pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!"
She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about
life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning
the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother
dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they
had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother
dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made
a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that
she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's,
patted it.

All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and
spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint
pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using
it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure
would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want
all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all
yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed
from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and
thither at the call of speculation, told them consoling things. The
mother's flesh, touching the daughter's, remembered a faint pulse felt
long ago and marvelled at this splendid sequel, and lost fear. Since the
past held such a miracle the future mattered nothing. Existence had
justified itself. The watchers were surprised to hear her sigh of
rapture. The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in
the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to
embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first
best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.

There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of
giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup
of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange
because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that
she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to
first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had
played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the
_Student's Song Book_, and they had had several glasses of Stone's
Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly
berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a
wonderful faculty for bursts of gaiety, pure in tone like a blackbird's
song, which brought out whatever gladness might be latent in any person
or occasion. As twelve chimed out they had stood in front of the
chimneypiece mirror and raised their glasses above their heads, singing,
"Auld Lang Syne" in time with the dancers on the other side of the wall,
who were making such a night of it that several times the house had
seemed likely to fall in.

When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses,
Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I
was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at
yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had
held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome
mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his
honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got
another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms
like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered
by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow,
uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy
with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been
greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all
have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember
ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much
admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing
...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly
twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of
an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which,
since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads
if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the
hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are
about work that springs from æsthetic principles different from their
own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of
laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked
at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was
somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had
been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the
night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.

She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's
face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any
gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little
tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin
time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling
every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.
It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth
thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and
on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if
she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone
yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into
a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her
lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow
teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the
tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and
the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to
kiss, even though one loved her so much.

Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very
beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom
Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited
girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women
in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was
sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl
in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French
artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at
Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a
portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New
York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for
though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more
out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing
at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt
I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to
his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing
that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it
down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed
Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the
tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink
roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had
often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and
say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh
at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."

It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those
strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred
Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan
collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working
with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was
intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius,
and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred
Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the
shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a
diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and
her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her
skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and
setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how
more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and
confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile
of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound
strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way
that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick
silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of
allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.

Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring
face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard
again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but
immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long
grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had
had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt
was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some
relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a
professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred
to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to
New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman
jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased,
deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she
had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed
that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed
that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She
remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had
gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror
and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a
woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice
arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs
singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").

Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding
the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done
to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was
unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the
eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be
tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed
that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had
simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that
she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.
This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature
behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had
thought there were three fixed species of people--the young, the
middle-aged, and the old--and she had never before realised that young
people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this
arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this
humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind
passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer
the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly
when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as
if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm
against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping
streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news
that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her
knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.

She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in
and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and
staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen
perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her
mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with
speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach
into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that
was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother,
because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.

Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is
to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way
the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never
have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at
her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the
recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and
had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had
found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom,
with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown
her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she
had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph
Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your
father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure
Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her
head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was
horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the
nurse proof of proper feelings.

She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with
her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her
face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor
and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that
the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not
look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by
diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the
mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she
looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient
performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like,
all through life--a good child. She had always walked as if someone in
authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her
toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had
become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she
had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a
road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been
lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were
innocent.

"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and
there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted
feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared
occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly
at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny
darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little
rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial
bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go anywhere for a
good sunset!"

There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had
watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring
torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that
slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers
that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers'
weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation.
The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in
a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and
above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had
winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled
about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key
of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady
awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had
stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from
their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and
fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of
bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a
sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her
own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"

For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen
remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night,
though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green
glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on
its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not
suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village
that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no
pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal
with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was
untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the
way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of
beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in
Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed
with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their
quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that
be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.

But when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery
ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is
a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people
smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and
when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at
the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of
pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in
pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been
rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and
could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any
bright scrap of that beauty she adored.

Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth
with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her,
and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle
on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a
handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into
the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was
not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops,
trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very
poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had
stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love:
indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have
taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were
harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder
and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she
felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from
companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and
pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to
linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the
free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of
love.

She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the
Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin
projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look
wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By
neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of
negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to
send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before
lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of
little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until
they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last
saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not
quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in
disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this
neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said
to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning
them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.

How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as
anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to
Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had
broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the
picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?
Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical
presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with
concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow
forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow,
repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ...
and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of
telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which
he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the
sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious
charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all
other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation
on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection
of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke,
too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which
he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore
uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with
his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he
looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always
overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner
for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her
hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then
bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly
administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece
of female imbecility.

Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she
guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she
whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you
quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and
showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had
burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands
with a fierce, jubilant pressure.

How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool.
That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she
could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish,
but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast
imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that
was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give
its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she
take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real
wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She
had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than
most professed romantics do.

Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to
Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses
and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house.
He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised
him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at
losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but
I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella."
At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are
such a wee darling!"

And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all
Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things?
It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though
it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than
them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she
undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good--even divinely good. Life
had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that
it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant
demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child,
and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her
hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love
that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than
that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a
little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings
arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often
too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest
possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking
of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a
miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!"
she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother
got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles?
Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her.
It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round
hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman
was being allowed to die without having been happy.

"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the
universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find
that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she
cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until
the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed
the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold
hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and
when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen,
whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just
enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.

Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his
eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.

"Richard, she's going!"

He could find no consolation to give her but a close, unvoluptuous
embrace. They stood silent, looking at the fire. "Is it not strange,"
she whispered, "that people really die?"

Richard did not in the least participate in this feeling. He merely
looked at her with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone
should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer
to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not
tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him,
though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might
see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he
merely bent to kiss her.

"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had
disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."

But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister
of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of
anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he
should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a
spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen
mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it
was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never
scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it?
What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen,
and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was
so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."

The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said
gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."

She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said
wistfully.

"Quite sure."

"May I kiss her?"

"Please don't. It isn't safe."

"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you
ready?"

As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to
that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the
upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all
you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went
to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"

"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying
place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of
death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in
electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a
beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and
dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.

Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across
the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in
sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate
the plot of the universe. This was a catchment area that drained the
whole city of terror; and how small it was! Certainly terror was among
the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking
they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being
children of this age, and conscious of humanity's grievance, they
thought of Him without love. But it was one of the least frequent and
the most impermanent of His moods. All the people one does not know seem
to be quite happy. Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally
closed the story of Mrs. Melville's life, and had to the end shown her
no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future. It might
well be that no other life would ever be so grievous. Therefore it was
with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were
provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out
through the iron gates.

The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation. Before
them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded
tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the
hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs;
and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse
stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white
overalls worked among bare trees. Through this grim landscape they
stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived
without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going
to be so glorious.






BOOK TWO




CHAPTER I


Now that they had taken the tickets at Willesden, Ellen felt doubtful of
the whole enterprise. It was very possible that Richard's mother would
not want her. In fact, she had been sure that Richard's mother did not
want her ever since they left Crewe. There a fat, pasty young man had
got in and taken the seat opposite her, and had sat with his pale grey
eyes dwelling on the flying landscape with a slightly sick, devotional
expression, while his lips moved and his plump hands played with a small
cross inscribed "All for Jesus" which hung from his watch-chain.
Presently he had settled down to rest with his hands folded on his lap,
but had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his
waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the
air. "Mother will laugh when I tell her about that," she said to
herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead
six weeks.

This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the
blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her
stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers
henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender
intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her
inflexibly honest æsthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's
letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever,
because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word
written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white
paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But
their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come
like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not
wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject
of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was
really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who
was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them
merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were
strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old
people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running
Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her
as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise
his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in
favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it
to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to
have been economically independent all the days of her life.

It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical
ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way
they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack
and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that
they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of
Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career
became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which
had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with
illegitimacy. She prefigured her swarthy and obese.

She got out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told
to do. The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through
which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and
tarnished darkness. She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed
and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along
the ground, and who seemed to be seeking so urgently for cabs and
porters because their meagre lives had convinced them that here was
never enough of anything to go round. If she and her mother had ever
come to London on the trip they had always planned, she would have been
swinging off now to look for a taxi, just like a man; and when she came
back her mother would have said, "Why, Ellen, I never would have thought
you could have got one so quickly." Well, that would not happen now.
She would have grieved over it; but a train far down the line pulled out
of the station and disclosed a knot of red and green signal lights that
warmed the eye and thence the heart as jewels do, and at that she was as
happy as if she were turning over private jewels that she could wear on
her body and secrete in her own casket. She was absorbed in the sight
when she heard a checked soft exclamation, and turning about had the
illusion that she looked into Richard's eyes.

"I am Richard's mother. You are Richard's wife?"

Ellen repeated, "I am Richard's wife," feeling distressed that she had
said it, since they were not yet married, but aware that to correct it
would be trivial.

It was strange to look down instead of up at those dark eyes, those
brows which lay straight black bars save for that slight piratical
twist, with no intervening arch between them and the dusky eyelids. It
was strange to hear Richard's voice coming from a figure blurred with
soft, rich, feminine clothes. It was strange to see her passing through
just such a moment of impeded tenderness as Richard often underwent.
Plainly she wanted to kiss Ellen, but was prevented by an intense
physical reserve, and did not want to shake hands, since that was
inadequate, and this conflict gave her for a minute a stiff queerness of
attitude. She compromised by taking Ellen's left hand in her own left
hand, and giving it what was evidently a sincere, but not spontaneous
pressure. Then, turning away, she asked, "What about your luggage?"

"I've just this suitcase. I sent the rest in advance. Do you not think
that's the most sensible way?" said Ellen, in a tone intended to convey
that she was not above taking advice from an older woman.

Mrs. Yaverland made a vague, purring noise, which seemed to imply that
she found material consideration too puzzling for discussion, and
commanded the porter with one of those slow, imperative gestures that
Richard made when he wanted people to do things. Walking down the
platform, Ellen wondered why Richard always called her a little thing.
His mother was far smaller than she was, and broad-shouldered too, which
made her look dumpy. Her resemblance to Richard became marked again
when they got into the taxi, and she dealt with the porter and the
driver with just such quiet murmured commands and dippings into pockets
of loose change as Richard on these occasions, but Ellen did not find it
in the least endearing. She was angry that Richard was like that, not
because he was himself, but because he was this woman's son. When Mrs.
Yaverland asked in that beautiful voice which was annoyingly qualified
by terseness as her letters had been, "And how's Richard?" she replied
consequentially, with the air of a person describing his garden to a
person who has not one. But Mrs. Yaverland was too distracting to allow
her to pursue this line with any satisfaction. For she listened with
murmurs that were surely contented; and, having drawn off her very
thick, very soft leather gloves, she began to polish her nails, which
were already brighter than any Ellen had ever seen, against the palms of
her hands, staring meanwhile out of absent eyes at the sapphire London
night about them, which Ellen was feeling far too upset to enjoy.

There was a tormenting incongruity about this woman: those lacquered
nails shown on hands that were broad and strong like a man's; and the
head that rose from the specifically dark fur was massive and vigilant
and serene, like the head of a great man. Moreover, she was not in the
least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up
the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest
to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry
them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where
one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had
felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever
happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from
the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs
which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running
slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which
makes people perform dramas. And everything about her threatened that
her performances would be too strange.

She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a
brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her
in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not
Edinburgh. The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the
yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into
shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.
They had stopped outside a florist's, in whose dismantled window a girl
in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of
chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls
almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a
Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open
street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding
herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of
being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an
occasion of public rejoicing.

Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind
plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy _brise-bises_ that were as a
ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a
divine shamelessness. It couldn't happen up there. There were simply not
the people to do it. It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged
men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, "Catch me
bringing you here again, Elspeth. It's a nice thing to have your dinner
with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you
take," and because young men would as constantly have turned to young
women with the gasp, "I'm sure I saw father passing," it would have been
a failure. But here it was a success. The sight was like loud, frivolous
music. And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up
to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white
squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy
and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of
gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense
than the North.

She wanted to sit there quietly, savouring the scene. But Mrs. Yaverland
said in her terse voice: "I've taken rooms at the Hapsburg for to-night.
I thought you'd like it. I do myself, because it's near the river. You
know, we're near the river at Roothing." Ellen could not longer turn her
attention to the spectacle for wondering why Mrs. Yaverland should
speak of the Thames as if it were an interesting and important relative.
It could not possibly be that Mrs. Yaverland felt about the river as she
felt about the Pentlands, for elderly people did not feel things like
that. They liked a day's outing, but they always sat against the
breakwater with the newspaper and the sandwich-basket while one went
exploring; at least, mother always did. Trying to insert some sense into
the conversation, she asked politely, "Do you do much boating?" and was
again baffled by the mutter, "No, it's too far away." Well, if it was
too far away it could not be near. She was tired by the long day's
travel.

But the hotel, when they alighted, pleased her. The vast entrance hall,
with its prodigality of tender rosy light, the people belonging to the
very best families who sat about in monstrously large armchairs set at
vast intervals on the lawny carpets, were not in the least embarrassed
by the publicity of their position and shone physically with well-being
and the expectation of pleasure; the grandiose marble corridors, the
splendid version of a lift, and the number of storeys that flashed past
them, all very much the same, but justifying their monotony by their
stateliness, like modern blank verse, made her remember solemnly her
inner conviction that she would some day find herself amid surroundings
of luxury.

The necessity of looking as if she were used to and even wearied by this
sort of thing weighed heavily on her, for she felt that it was almost
dishonour not to express the solemn joy this magnificence was giving
her. So she stood in the fine room to which Mrs. Yaverland took her, and
after having resolved that the minute she was left alone she would touch
the magnificent crimson velvet roses that stood out in high relief all
over the wallpaper, she felt that she could not graciously withhold
praise from this which was to be her own special share of the splendour.
She moved shyly towards Mrs. Yaverland, who had gone to the window and
was looking down in the night, and said shyly, "This is a very fine
room," but, she knew, too softly to reach such markedly inattentive
ears. She stood there awkwardly, feeling herself suspended till this
woman should take notice of her. If her mother had been with her they
would have had a room with two beds, and would have talked before they
went to sleep of the day and its wonderful ending in this grand place.
She sighed. Mrs. Yaverland turned round.

"Come and look at your view," she said, and raised the sash so that they
could lean out.

Beneath there was a deep drop of the windless, scentless darkness that
night brings to modern cities; then a narrow trench of unlit gardens
obscured by the threadbare texture of leafless tree-tops, then a broad
luminous channel of roadway, lined with trees whose natural substance
was so changed by the unnatural light that they looked like toy trees
made of some brittle composition, and traversed by tramcars glowing
orange and twanging white sparks from invisible wires with their
invisible arms; at its further edge a long procession of lights stood
with a certain pomp along a dark margin, beyond which were black flowing
waters. To the left, from behind tall cliffs of masonry pierced with
innumerable windows that were not lit, yet gleamed like the eyes of a
blind dog, there jutted out the last spans of a bridge, set thickly with
large lights whose images bobbed on the current beneath like vast yellow
water-flowers. On another bridge to the right a train was casting down
on the stream a redness that was fire rather than light. On the opposite
bank of the river, at the base of black towers, barges softly dark like
melancholy lay on the different harsher darkness of the water, and
showed, so sparsely that they looked the richer, a few ruby and emerald
lights. Above, stars crackled frostily, close to earth, as stars do in
winter.

"That is the river," said Mrs. Yaverland.

She said it as if she desired to be out of this warmth, standing over
there by the dark parapet marked by the line of lamps close to the
flowing waters; as if she would have liked all the beautiful bright
lights to be extinguished, so that there would be nothing left but the
dark waters.

Ellen went and sat down on the bed. There was a standard lamp beside it,
whose light, curbed to a small rosy cloud by a silken shade like a
fairy's frock, seemed much the best thing for her eyes in the room. She
was sad that in this new life in England, which had seemed so promising,
one still had to turn for comfort from persons to things. She was aware
that wildness such as this, such preferences for walking abroad in the
chill night rather than sitting in warm rooms, for sterile swift water
rather than the solid earth that bears the crops and supports the
cities, are the processes of poetry working in the soul. But it did not
please her in an older woman. She felt that Mrs. Melville, who would
have been trotting about crying out at the magnificence of the room,
would have been behaving not only more conveniently, but more decently,
than this woman who was now crossing the room and not bringing peace
with her. Her open coat slipped backwards on her shoulders so that it
stood out on each side like a cloak worn by a romantic actor striding
across the stage to the play's climax. The ultimate meaning of her
expression could be no other than insolence, for it gave sign of some
preoccupation so strong that the only force which could hold her back
from speaking of it could be contempt for her hearer. Her face was
shadowed with a suggestion of strong feeling, which was as unsuitable on
cheeks so worn as paint would have been.

Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down
on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a
movement towards intimacy, and said, "I hope you're not very tired."
When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the
words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful
to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either
affected or hypocritical. For if that wildness were sincere, and not
some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English
were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she
was doing up Ellen's black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and
condescension.

It was a pity that she was so very like Richard. When they had gone
downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the
plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she
crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way
in her resentful recognition of that likeness. She was not, of course,
so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call "very
striking-looking." Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at
once so appropriate and so common. She did not allow herself to
translate it from commonness and admit that it is a phrase that common
people use when they want to say a woman's face is the point of
departure for a fair journey of the imagination. It was true that a
certain rough imperfection was as definitely a part of her quality as
perfection was of his, and that there ran from her nose to her mouth
certain heavy lines that could never at any age befall his flesh with
its bias towards beauty. But everything that so wonderfully made its
appearance a reference to romance was here also: that dark skin in which
it seemed as if the customary pigment had been blended with mystery;
that extravagance of certain features, the largeness of the eye, the
luxury of lashes; that manner at once languid and alert, which might
have been acquired by residence in some country where molten excess of
fine weather was corrected by gales of adventure. But though so close in
blood and in seeming to the most beloved, this woman could not be loved.
She could not possibly be liked. But this was an irrational emotion, and
Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that
would justify it.

It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were
brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders
that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared
not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift,
automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a
polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. It was evidently a
habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose,
for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it,
although the brows were still sleek. She did it, Ellen told herself with
a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the
afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead
and strums on her knee. It was the only expression the occasion allowed
for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the
inordinate beauty of her clothes. They were, she said to herself, using
a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a
woman of that age. They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental. The
very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to
the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the
effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she
was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that
effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so
conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to
accept her middle age. And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her
colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light
like amber. Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the
various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she
wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever
about clothes. They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase
that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a
pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last
refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their
own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat
seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff
of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and
yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was
sensually heavy with its own richness.

And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows.
Really, it was terrible that Richard's mother should be so deep in crime
as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of
public meetings. She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women
are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power,
content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing
and adorning of it. She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to
produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest,
hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life.
And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and
saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate:

"You won't like anchovies; those things they're helping you to now."

Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion,
and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had
betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and
then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp
bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion
did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes?
When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she
answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please."
She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or
white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip
had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking
almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners
had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear
travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her
lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again
till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door.
Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes
to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."

The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been
substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with
observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was
disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her
eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought
she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things
with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a
dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the
darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant
physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the
palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when
she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images
seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in
bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had
always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her
in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands;
pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being
carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed
deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended
over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered;
bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy
gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks
and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights
with the colour of romance. It would have roused her fatigued
imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand.
She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure,
and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the
expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear,
though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.

She coughed to attract attention, and then sighed. "It's terrible," she
declared, taking good care that her voice should travel across the
table, "to see all these people being happy like this when there are
millions in want."

Marion set down her wine-glass with a movement that, though her hands
were clever, seemed clumsy, so indifferent was she to the thing she
handled and the place she put it in, and looked round the restaurant
with eyes that were very like Richard's, though they shone from
bloodshot whites and were not so bright as his, nor so kind; nor so
capable, Ellen felt sure, of losing all brilliance and becoming
contemplative, passionate darkness. She said in her rapid, inarticulate
murmur, "They don't strike me as being particularly happy."

Ellen was taken aback, and said in the tones of a popular preacher,
"Then what are they doing here--feasting?"

"I suppose they're here because it's on the map and so are they," she
answered almost querulously. "They'd go anywhere else if one told them
it was where they ought to be. Good children, most people. Anxious to do
the right thing. Don't you think?"

Ellen was unprepared for anything but agreement or reactionary argument
from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched
in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her
emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very
horrid. Her young mouth was convulsed. And then she reminded herself
that it could not be horrid, for all grown-up people like it, and that
there had never been any occasion when it was more necessary for her to
be grown-up, so she continued to drink. Even after several mouthfuls she
did not like it, but she was then interrupted by a soft exclamation from
Mrs. Yaverland.

"My dear, this wine is abominable. Don't you find it terribly sour?"

"Well, I was thinking so," said Ellen, "but I didn't like to say."

"It's dreadful. It must be corked."

"Yes, I think it must," said Ellen knowingly.

She called a waiter. "Would you like to try some other wine? I don't
think I will. This has put me off for the night. No? Good. Two lemon
squashes, one very sweet."

That was a good idea of Mrs. Yaverland's. The lemon squash was lovely
when it came, and Ellen had time to drink it while they were eating the
chicken, so that there was no competitive flavour to spoil the ice
pudding. While they were waiting for that Mrs. Yaverland smoothed her
eyebrows once again, and gave her nails one more perfunctory polish, and
opened her mouth to speak, but caught her breath and shut it again; and
said, after a moment's silence, "I hope I've ordered the right sort of
pudding. It's so hard to remember all these irrelevant French names. I
wanted you to have the one with crystallised cherries. Richard used to
be very fond of it." She looked round the restaurant more lovingly. "He
liked this place when he was a boy. We used to come here once or twice
every holiday and go to a theatre afterwards."

But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that: when he opened his
mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly,
"Darling, I do love you." He had done it the very night before, in
Grand-Aunt Jeannie's parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to
tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his
father before he was born. "It was not her fault. My father didn't stand
by her. He was all right about money. But when he heard about the child,
he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the
Colonies. And he didn't come back. So she lost her nerve"; and that he
had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a
success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland. She was dying
to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to
admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had
probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but
because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly,
"Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?"

The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full
of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason
delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered. "How you see through
me, dear!" she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate,
charged with an astringent form of love. "All that I wanted to say was
simply that I am so very glad you have come. Perhaps for reasons that
you'll consider tiresome of me. But Richard has been so much away, and
even when he's at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the
time, that I've often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house,
who'd talk to me occasionally and be a companion. Perhaps you'll think
it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much
older. But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.
You're eighteen, aren't you?"

"Eighteen past," Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain
compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen. But
her birthday had been a fortnight ago.

"And I was nineteen when Richard was born. So you see to me a girl of
eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling
everything. So I hope you won't mind if I treat you as an equal." She
raised her wineglass and looked over its brim at the girl's proud,
solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour,
bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other
woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the
wineglass down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden
tone. "I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it
or not. I knew you'd like it. You see, you get very evasive if you've
ever been in a position like mine. You have to make servants like you so
that they won't give notice when they hear the village gossip, because
you must have a well-run house for your child. You have to make people
like you so that they will let the children play with yours. So one gets
into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without
particularly worrying whether it's sincere. But this I find I really
mean."

As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who
had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to
something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well,
I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant,"
she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as
likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to
say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one
another."

Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as
queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the
girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give
Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty
which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his
unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether
Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And
for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a
courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a
present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their
distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for
her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced
voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."

"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about
herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me
when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was
afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that
I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"

"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint
of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her
son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at:
that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."

"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the
table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think
you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've
been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been
hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on
Richard and you."

The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!"
she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that
when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest
directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my
nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and
stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to
attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving
badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"

"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us
cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're
surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that
he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"

Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to
fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid
women."

Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion
that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her,
and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other
women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.
"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"

There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of
archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves
me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect,
the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women
who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he
can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went
to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who
were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds
with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the
soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that
their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I
will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd
infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was
not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he
takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But
I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much
against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the
world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but
they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there
cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are
hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and
fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like
a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any
character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.
Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she
had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free
speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in
late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none
of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason....
I'll tell you some time...."

The girl was hurt. Marion bit her lip while she watched her crossly pick
up her spoon and eat her ice pudding as if it was a duty. "This is like
old times," she essayed feebly. "I've so often watched Richard eat it.
He went through various stages with this pudding. When he was quite
small he used to leave the crystallised cherries to the very last,
because they were nicest, arranged in a row along the rim of his plate,
openly and shamelessly. When he went to school he began to be afraid
that people would think that babyish if they noticed it, and he used to
leave them among the ice, though somehow they always did get left to
the last. Then later on he began to side with public opinion himself,
and think that perhaps there was something soft and unmanly about caring
so much for anything to eat, so he used to gobble them first of all,
trying not to taste them very much. Then there came an awful holiday
when he wouldn't have any at all. That was just before he insisted on
going to sea. But then he came back--and ever since he's had it every
time we come here, and now he always leaves the cherries to the last."
She was now immersed in the story she told; she was seeing again the
slow magical increase of the small thing she had brought into the world,
and the variations through which it passed in the different seasons of
its youth, changing from brown candid gracefulness to a time of sulky
clumsiness and perpetually abraded knees, and back again to gracefulness
and willingness to share all laughter, yet ever remaining the small
thing she had brought into the world. With eyes cast down, trying to
dissemble her pride, lest the gods should envy, she added harshly, "He
was quite interesting ... but I suppose all boys go through these
phases.... I've had no other experiences...."

Ellen was longing to hear what Richard was like when he was a boy, but
she had been stung by that insolent, smiling murmur, and she could do
nothing with any statement made by this woman but snarl at her. "No
other experience?" she questioned peevishly. "I thought Richard said he
had a half-brother."

There was no longer any pride in Marion's eyes to dissemble. She stared
at Ellen, and said heavily, as one who speaks concerning the violation
of a secret, "Did Richard tell you that?" Before the girl had time to
answer cruelly, "Yes, he tells me everything," she had remembered
certain things which made her stiffen in her chair and keep her chin up
and use her eyes as if there still flashed in them the pride which had
utterly vanished. "Oh, yes," she asserted, in that forced voice, but
very loudly and deliberately. "I have another son. He's a good boy. His
name is Roger Peacey. You must meet him one day. I hope you will like
him." She paused and recollected why they were speaking of this other
son, and continued, "But, you see, I had nothing to do with him when he
was a boy."

This struck Ellen as very strange. She went on eating her ice pudding,
but she cogitated on this matter. Why had this second son been brought
up away from his mother? Surely that hardly ever happened except when
there had been a divorce, and a husband whose wife had run away with
another man was awarded by the courts "the custody of the child." Had
she not talked of this son in the over-bluff tone in which people talk
of those to whom they have done a wrong? She was possessed of the fierce
monogamous passion which accompanies first and unachieved love, that
loathing of all who are not content with the single sacramental draught
which is the blood of God, but go heating the body with unblessed
fermented wines; and she glared sharply under her brows at this woman,
who after losing Richard's father married another man and then, as it
appeared, had loved yet another man, as she might at someone whom she
suspected of being drunk. It was true that Richard adored her, but then
no doubt this kind of woman knew well how to deceive men. Softly she
made to herself the Scottish manifestation of incredulity, "Mhm...." And
Marion, for thirty years vigilant for sounds of scorn, heard and
perfectly understood.

She remained, however, massively and unattractively immobile. There came
to her neither word nor expression to remove the girl's dubiety. Since
she had heard such sounds of scorn over so lengthy a period they no
longer came to her as trumpet calls to action, but rather as imperatives
to silence, for above all things she desired that evil things should
come to an end, and she had learned that an ugly speech ricochetting
from the hard wall of a just answer may fly further and do worse. She
knew it was necessary that she should dispel Ellen's suspicion, because
they must work together to make a serene home for Richard, and she
desired to do so for her son's sake, because she herself was possessed
by the far fiercer monogamous passion of achieved and final love, which
is disillusioned concerning mystical draughts, but knows that to take
the bread of the beloved and cast it to the dogs is sin. She had
acquired that knowledge, which is the only valuable kind of chastity
worth having, that night when she had been forced to commit that
profanation. Shading her eyes while there rushed over her the
recollection of a pallid face looking yellow as it bent over the lamp,
she reflected that even if she conquered this life-long indisposition to
reply, the story was too monstrous to be told. It would not be believed.
This girl would look at her under her brows and make that Scotch noise
again and think her a liar as well as loose. So she sat silent, letting
Ellen dislike her.

She said at length, "Let's go and have coffee in the lounge."

"I'm sure we don't need it," murmured Ellen, as a tribute to the
magnificence of the meal.

Crossing the room was a terrible business. She hoped people were not
staring at her because she was with a woman whom they could perhaps see
had once been bad. No doubt there were signs by which experienced people
could tell. Richard's presence seemed all at once to have set behind the
rim of the earth.

They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked
down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people,
none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their
fray with appetite. They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like
Richard. She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that
there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze
of Richard's eyes, set in Richard's mother's face. Doubt left her. Here
was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance. Here was the
quality of life she loved. She found herself saying eagerly, that she
might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such
strong words as he used: "Yes, Marion?"

"Ellen, when will you marry Richard?"

"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We
think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."

"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being
kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."

Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an
altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I
feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.

The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied,
one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing
at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which
sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale
clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a
lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will
not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon,
so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her
white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had
stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across
the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she
could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like
doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his
towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely,
"No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.
Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves
that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by
the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but
her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to
desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she
exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"

Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would
not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my
life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you
willed with. Let me have mine."

But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy
people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay
hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she
said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced
herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her
that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering
vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to
be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.
I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I
die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of
me--quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I
still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.
You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you
what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to
shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my
throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years
that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But
the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He
lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I
want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will
give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for
him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you
see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the
restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast
mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these
appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips,
to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her
reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and
stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent
and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are
for their sons."

She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that
Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand
across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so
evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl
was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.
"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much
more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I
knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so
very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take
him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew
he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us
both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So
I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's
twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see
to it that now he is here he is happy."

Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared
into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some
practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered
about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does
having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when
Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading,
for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it
always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre
and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the
Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life,
since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever
beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that
she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now
she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now
she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman
who had given her Richard.

Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her
mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under
the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with
sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd
of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving
by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had
relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have
rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of
Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death
she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering
suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by
anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for
the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest
recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had
occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her
sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.
It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving
her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and
gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her
till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with
his long first kiss.

She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and
Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar,
instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look
at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and
give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you
mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at
Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,"
and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was
never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember
that Hendry escaped the family misfortune--mind you, I know it's no a
fault--of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the
dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane
where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of
lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the
pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding
of a theory.

But those were the fair-weather uses of love. It was in the foul weather
she would have missed him most. If this woman had not given her Richard
she would have walked home from the hospital alone and wept by the
unmade bed whose pillow was still dented by mother's head; she would
have had to go to the cemetery with only Mr. Mactavish James and Uncle
John Watson from Glasgow, who would have said "Hush!" when she waved her
hand at the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and cried,
"Good-bye, my wee lamb!" Life was so terrible it would not be
supportable without love. She laid her hand on Marion's where it lay on
the table, and stuttered, "Oh, it was brave of you!"

The intimate contact was faintly disgusting to the other. She answered
impatiently, "Not brave at all; I loved him so much that I would have
done anything rather than lose him."

"You loved him--even then?"

"In a sense they are as much to one then as they ever are."

"Ah...." Ellen continued to pat the other woman's hand and looked up
wonderingly into her eyes, and was dismayed to see there that this
fondling meant nothing to her. She was not ungrateful, but for such
things her austerity had no use. All that she wanted was that assurance
for which she had already asked. Ellen was proud, and she was a little
hurt that the way in which she had proposed to pay the debt of gratitude
was not acceptable, so she held up her hand and said coolly, "I'll marry
your son when you like, Mrs. Yaverland."

The other said nothing more than "Thank you." Realising that she had
said it even more than usually indifferently, she put out her hand
towards Ellen in imitation of the girl's own movement, but did it with
so marked a lack of spontaneity that it must, as she instantly
perceived, give an impression of insincerity. "How I fail!" she thought,
but not too sadly, for at any rate she had got her son what he wanted. A
man came and stood a little way behind her, looking here and there for
someone whom he expected to find in the assembly, and she turned sharply
to see if it were Richard; for always when he was away, if the shadows
fell across her path or there came a knock at the door, she hoped that
it was him.

"I am stupid about him," she admitted, settling down in her chair, "but
if he had come it would have been lovely. What would he think if he came
now and found us two whom he loves most sitting here silent, almost
sulky, because we have fixed the time of his marriage? He would not
understand, of course. When a man is in love marriage loses all
importance. He thinks that he could wait for ever. He never realises, as
women do, that it is not love that matters but what we do with it. Why
do I say as women do? Only women like me who have through making all
possible mistakes found out the truth by the process of elimination.
This girl is as unprovident as Richard is. So unprovident that I am
afraid she is angry with me for insisting that she should put her
capital of passion to good uses." And indeed Ellen was sitting there
very stiffly, turning her hands together and looking down on them as if
she despised them for their cantrips. She wished her marriage had not
been decided quite like this. Of course she wanted to be married,
because, whatever the marriage-laws were like, there was no other way by
which she and Richard could tell everybody what they were to each other.
But she had wanted the ceremony as secret as possible, as little
overlooked by any other human being, and she fancifully desired it to
take place in some high mountain chapel where there was no congregation
but casqued marble men and the faith professed was so mystical that the
priest was as inhuman as a prayer. Thus their vows would, though
recorded, have had the sweet quality of unwritten melodies that are sung
only for the beloved who has inspired them. But now this marriage was to
be performed with the extremest publicity before a crowd of issues, if
not of persons. It was to be a subordinate episode in a pageant the plot
of which she did not know.

Marion, watching her face, saw the faint twitches of resentment playing
about her mouth and felt some remorse. "She would be so happy just being
Richard's sweetheart, if I did not interfere," she thought. "Ah, how the
old tyrannise over the young...." And there came on her a sudden chill
as she remembered of what character that tyranny could be. She
remembered one day, when she was nineteen, waking from sleep to find old
people round her. She had been having such a lovely dream. On her
lover's arm, she had been walking across the fields in innocent sunshiny
weather, and he had been laughing and full of a far greater joy in
impersonal things than she had ever known him. When he saw gorse in life
he would repeat the country catch, "When the gorse is out of bloom then
kissing's out of fashion," but in her dream he laughed to see fire and
water meet where the gorse grew on the sheep-pond's broken lip. He had
liked the white cloths bleaching on the grass, and the song the lark in
the sky twirled like a lad throwing and catching a coin, and the spinney
on the field's slope's heights, where the tide of spring broke in a
green surf of budding undergrowth at the feet of black bare trees.

During all the months her child was moving in her body she was visited
by dreams of spring. This was the best of dreams: it was real. The
lark's song and Harry's happy laughter were loud in her ears; and she
rolled over in her bed and opened her eyes on Grandmother and Aunt
Alphonsine. She looked away from them, but saw only things that reminded
her how ill she was; the tumbler of milk she had not been able to drink,
set in a circle of its own wetness on a plate among fingers of
bread-and-butter left from the morning; they had been told to tempt her
appetite, but they were betraying that they felt she had had more than
enough temptation lately; the bottles of medicine ranged along the
mantelpiece, high-shouldered like the facades of chapels and pasted with
labels that one desired to read as little as chapel notice-boards, and
with contents just as ineffectual at their business of establishing the
right; the jug filled with a bunch of flowers left by some kindly
neighbour who did not know what was the matter with her.

That raised difficult issues. She turned her eyes back to the old
people. They looked terrible: Grandmother sitting among her spreading
skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands
clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was
not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering
her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and
rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and
fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were
an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign.
Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget
that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she
had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons,
the velvet homes of elfs--reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in
sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that
colours have commonly only in twilight.

But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power
over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry
her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared,
and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his
own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow,
"Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And
Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core
of her soul a _dame de compagnie_; and Grandmother had said, with that
use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of
truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come
back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."

That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true
that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his
career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous
compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to
have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still
that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the
linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her
agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and
shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that
such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been
sacred to her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that
it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people
would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.

Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years,
inexplicable. Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of
Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she
had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild
she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed
the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing
prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink
apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider. It is not in the nature
of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and
since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years
with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good
purpose which that tedious companionship had served. The theory of the
sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by
merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and
necessary to the existence of society. But she had so often been
assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life
had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those
doubts. To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been
to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have
been better if she had not been born. "Lord have mercy on us all!"
thought Marion, and forgave her.

It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as
sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead
of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which
the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally. She was the most responsible
for the defeat of Marion's life. And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not
malignant of intent. The worst of illicit relationships is the
provocation they give to the minds that hear of them. When it is said of
a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public
ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the
sober external results of marriage; but when it is said of a man and
woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact
of their love. The thought of her niece night after night shut up with
love in the white belvedere all the long time the moon required to rise
from the open sea, fill all the creeks with silver, and drain them dry
again as she sunk westwards, must have been torment to one whose left
cheek, from the long pale ear to the inhibited mouth, was one scar. That
scar was an epitome of all that was pathetic and mischievous about the
poor faint woman, this being formed to be a nun who had not been blessed
with any religion and so had to dedicate herself to the ridiculous god
of decorum. "Your aunt," Marion's mother had said to her, "burned her
face cleaning a pair of white shoes with benzine for me to wear at my
first Communion. It was a pity she did it. And a pity for me too, since
I have had to obey her ever since in everything, though I wanted
neither the white shoes nor the Communion." In that speech were all the
elements of Alphonsine's tragedy, and therefore most of the causes of
Marion's. The French thrift that had made her clean the shoes at home,
and thereby maim herself into something that desired to assassinate love
whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the possibility that
the family might have to support a fatherless baby. The affection for
her sister Pamela which had made her perform these services had enabled
her to bring up that lovely child through all the dangers of a
poverty-stricken childhood in Paris, in spite of a certain wildness in
her beauty which might, if unchecked, have been a summons to disorder;
and her triumph in that respect had made it the most heartbreaking
disappointment when the temptations she thought she had baulked for ever
in Paris twenty years before returned and claimed so easily Pamela's
child, whom she thought quite safe, since to her French eyes Marion's
dark brows, perpetually knit in preoccupation with the movements of her
nature, were not likely to be attractive to men.

That must have added to her bitterness. It must have seemed very cruel
to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed
perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its
hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all
grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this
black untidy girl. That would account for the passion with which she
forced Marion to do the thing she did not want to; and any suspicion
that she was actuated by a desire to punish the girl for her happiness
she would be able to dismiss by recollecting that certainly she had
served her little sister's welfare by crossing her will. Oh, there was
much to be said for Alphonsine. But all the same, it was a pity that the
old people had interfered. She had loved Richard so much that it would
not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from
the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far
more than other children receive from both parents. They might have been
so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.

"But this is different," she said to herself. "They compelled me to
unhappiness. I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen. It is quite
different."

But she looked anxiously at the girl. They smiled at each other with
their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity. But their lips smiled
guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.




CHAPTER II


The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be
almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a
creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted
with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white
under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched
illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey
houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round
steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did
not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only
as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky,
stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the
marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of
the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue
of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its
humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and
on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.

This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the
Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow
or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the
curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised
clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at
their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had
exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this
plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and
effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be
visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon;
and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling
on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything
happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation
of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed
people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the
present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she
was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred
to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she
smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This
is Kerith Island."

"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat."
And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I
must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's
fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should
everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where
Richard's going to work, though."

"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works
from our windows."

"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I
couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the
works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished
in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the
house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about
him. I suppose I will soon get over it."

"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."

The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now
across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to
the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little
hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse
turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse
gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green
escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose
again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the
purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a
brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform
of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill
grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by
four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the
fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink
corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was
built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a
footing.

Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an
elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with
a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white
like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and
receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken
hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of
the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there
fell an orchard.

"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and
look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could
see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the
sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion
indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the
things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I
can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from
here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of
coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always
where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which
fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller
boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled
island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a
farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.

Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been
driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for
to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of
cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked
bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine
rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a
fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with
their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped
behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened
cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares
set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its
furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky
that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which
dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look
brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be
imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to
lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to
suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie
at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud
galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company
beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen
saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as
Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there
was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed
scepticism concerning the value of all activities.

To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from
delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had
up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday
evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able
to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of,
and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with
pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even
when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they
stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from
her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an
argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly,
as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly.
She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There
had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down
platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back,
facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its
landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high
ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding,
where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath
esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.

It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet
the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of
nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that
was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the
great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged
in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the
light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its
brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own
strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between
deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the
stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to
the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark
line of the Kentish hills.

It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some
large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like
flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now
flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but
bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were
back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it
were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the
wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion
surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed
out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and,
walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud,
followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and
fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the
quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a
solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze
from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make
this a memorable star.

Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been
that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and
breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy
impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she
partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain
and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as
uncompromising as mud.

She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea,
saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I
could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard
could still."

Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the
sky?"

"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings
living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of
extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism,
an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked
appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her
impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill
luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike
for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the
station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on
which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was
saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard
was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of
him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to
conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than
the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than
a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not
offended.

She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which
Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level
crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the
fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the
barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant
posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up
the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken
prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the
direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But
surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in
Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was
written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the
jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too
slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the
housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines,
there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with
white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because
of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want
to recognise its beauty.

When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest
of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that
this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of
white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the
other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's
proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap
in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of
those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far
older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to
Canfleet--that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland--but it's all
gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a
disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between
low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen
a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be
measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike
her.

Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges
gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which
grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively
deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the
air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the
broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places
of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its
windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that
one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by
pressing their faces close against the glass.

"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her.
"I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But
it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the
house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time,
so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways
at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you
know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did
them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of
life, you become most carefully conservative!"

But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch,
and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said
hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this
Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to
please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion
greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning,
Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to
this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things
just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to
replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they
stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark
room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak
settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and
samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this
English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The
Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and
they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any
particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it
was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's
ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look!
It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and
they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide
windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your
room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it.
It's a room I'm fond of...."

They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched
door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on
cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted
green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she
said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when
I was a girl; but all the things are new--I got them down from London;
and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the
chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window
that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a
farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a
story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was
as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle
life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.
He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very
capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him
that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without
losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie
in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see
who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on
you."

She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched
the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little
white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate
grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and
looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had
pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because
to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been
sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out
into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring
cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the
yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its
further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the
billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained,
bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of
purple twigs at each end.

But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when
it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at
all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of
tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the
Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to
have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken
bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the
puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish
affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near
with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?--and them not born at four
o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and
yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the
roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as
usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran
forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among
the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow,
but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the
sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow,
turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that
the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his
long upper lip was twitching from side to side.

She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus!
Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen
and Grandmother was reading the _Prittlebay Gazette_ in the parlour, and
she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing.
Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon
her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs,
and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the
farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing
the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to
him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent
collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not
point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was
immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he
wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with
the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to
point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate
into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his
face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What
could it be that he wanted?

She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it,
pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass.
Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness
as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he
said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when
she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his
eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom
turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It
was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent
head followed by his forgotten dogs.

Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited
by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege
upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that
prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she
liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a
moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and
sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey
flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them
treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then
she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a
bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen
boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs,
the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that
night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come
home.

It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like
this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it
was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid
that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone
had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who
was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite
extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment.
The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power
than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him.
She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the
same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice
everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions
when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white
room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each
with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep,
bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the
long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with
their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in
sherry.

The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she
could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white
cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little
dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their
images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very
cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was
being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that
if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke
disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by
throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation
would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm"
to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement
exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon."
Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice
for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her
dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his
notice.

She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary,
letting our whole lives revolve round a man."

"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint
that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have
her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for
some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who
was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I
don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that
any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"

Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the
Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said
stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."

"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent
things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal
relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And
then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the
world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women
don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we
love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful
with."

Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had
failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by
Richard just as much as she loved him.

"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the
end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up
petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big
sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would
not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak
about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for
a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as
all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.
She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned
the meaning of life as one lived it.

So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked
discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with
drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great
armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but
was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of
that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression
was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial,
though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails
and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was
wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles
of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled
her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the
windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly
happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing
to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch,
and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining
all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all
this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in
the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland,
is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired
with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in
John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can
look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer
and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your
first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the
ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'"
"Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she
objected.

But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found
it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because
she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in
the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately
answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.
Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too
poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.
All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no
cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and
unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge
of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be
enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns
or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She
did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been
able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories
of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies
had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up
people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to
till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed
quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where
feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing
seas.

Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised
that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For
indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat
within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth
spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows
trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were
almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning
below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so
that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their
shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried
to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at
the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine
in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see
him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the
garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too
the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified
green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of
clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate
curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills
beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the
right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the
marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple
statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the
west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if
the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.

She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and
yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite
intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the
immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man
dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with
a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh
became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill
of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one
wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of
the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the
inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the
public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with
concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the
margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of
the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries
made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot
of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more
necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue
her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the
small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it
was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own
ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world
presented by this woman's face.

Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic
point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his
own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what
extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble
atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind
associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she
would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be
trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able
to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to
the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if
they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem
heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight
lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who
had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more
agonising than a common tear.

"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic
tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was
appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish
about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in
an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist
of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say
and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her
repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman
should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that
her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible
in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother
died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire
would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent
and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would
then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical
patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins,
she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as
inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and
would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and
complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of
excessive living.

Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order
characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly
that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the
aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.

"You look tired," said Marion timidly.

"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just
tiredness."

"You'd better go and lie down."

"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."

"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at
the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.

They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily.
Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all
was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains
do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in
the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting
on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like
that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in
front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her
looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her,
and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself
out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back
for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser
of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with
peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror.
The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail
of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing
Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to
the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see
why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of
her own life.




CHAPTER III


They went out of the house by the French window of the dining-room, and
crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in
which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out
to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild
orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an
orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This
is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is
let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was
always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."

"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following
was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not
answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not
spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was
so keen on science?"

But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were
patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need
adventure...."

"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved
half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire
to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard,
and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that
Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be
miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the
leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the
leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel
there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been
any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"

"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.

"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.

"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she
paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She
knew quite well.

It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet
at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea,
which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was
lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened
pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of
the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough
darkness without quality. Yet as they walked down the field-path to the
floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands,
was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a
country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more
intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt
as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than
it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had
come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though
he does no more than tell children tales of storms.

And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the
wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave
cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious
food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when
they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate
to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the
sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and
watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and
time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound
of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the
running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved
culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and
the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.
Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous
disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.

Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over
the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.
Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she
made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable
later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the
marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge,
buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the
lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it
was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.
Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live
there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to
travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.

"Who lives in that little house on the island?" she called out to
Marion.

"The one on the Saltings? No one. It has been empty for forty years. But
when I was a child George Luck still lived there. George Luck, the last
great wizard in England."

"A wizard forty years ago! Well, I suppose parts of England are very
backward. You've got such a miserable system of education. What sort of
magic did he do?"

"Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors' wives used to come
to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look
in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the
men were doing at the time." She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen.
"You see, other women before us have been reactionary."

"Reactionary?" repeated Ellen.

"They have let their lives revolve round men," said Marion teasingly,
and Ellen returned her laughter. They were both in high spirits because
of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing
bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and
air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in
love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current
participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that
makes man the most ridiculous of animals.

They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line,
again in the great green platter of the marshes. The sea-wall, which ran
in wide crimps a field's width away on the other side of the line, might
have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts
showing above it. The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the
sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they
moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which
it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually
that leisurely, wet cry.

"What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing.

"Those are the redshanks. They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he
will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little
streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet
there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks
queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes
here now except the men to see to the cattle. Even though the railway
runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and
shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New
Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the
morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired
to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
During the week the children are all at school or too young to go
further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these
people here, and they never come."

She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between
these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically
night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever
visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should
continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like
lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the
Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you
really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to
be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life
of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had
erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless
for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone
waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery
army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and
white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters
from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in
his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.

But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that
nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as
unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks
would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a
knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in
which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees
lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would
have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as
possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to
hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and
excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys'
doffing of their caps. There was something at once absurd and menacing
about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's
greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to
have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich
expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.

To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that
church up there?"

"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."

"But what's that white thing beside it?"

"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of
Richard's father."

"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined
not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in
the neighbourhood."

"Why?" asked Marion.

"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it
not?"

"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public
subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung
back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard
had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that
white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much
to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who
seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been
able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its
architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement
and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality
should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That
secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from
remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she
had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time
when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for
the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell
on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror
that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than
hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than
to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and
smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not
to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the
hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had
been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and
found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the
situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion
asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the
unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks
it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh."
There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she
tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable
with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a
bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out!
They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or
don't they grow up North?..."

They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the
neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely
inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a
geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and
even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like
orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard.
Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours
which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an
osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange
hair of the young plants.

"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult
to them."

Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a
look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of
letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should
go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah
Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and
made it squalid with tin huts.

"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to
laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and
had things thrown at them.

It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own
Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to
it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the
Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable
people...."

"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."

But to that Marion replied, grumblingly and indistinctly, that style was
the only test of value, and that the fools who put up that notice could
never do any good to anybody, and then her eyes roved to the path that
ran down the green shoulder of the escarpment on the other side of the
valley's neck. "Ah, here's Mrs. Winter. Ellen, you are going to come in
contact with the social life of Roothing. This is the vicar's wife."

"Is she our sort of pairson?" asked Ellen doubtfully.

"For the purpose of social intercourse we pretend that she is," answered
Marion without enthusiasm.

They met her on the plank bridge that crossed the stream by which the
osier beds were nourished, and Ellen liked her before they had come
within hailing distance because she was such a little nosegay of an old
lady. Though her colours were those of age they were bright as flowers.
Her hair was white, but it shone like travellers' joy, and her peering
old eyes were blue as speedwell, and her shrivelled cheeks were pink as
apple-blossom. She bobbed when she walked like a ripe apple on its stem,
and her voice when she called out to them was such a happy fluting as
might come from some bird with a safe nest. "Why, it's Mrs. Yaverland. I
heard that you'd gone up to town."

"I came back this morning. This is Miss Melville, whom I went to meet.
She is going to marry Richard very soon." Marion did not, Ellen noticed
with exasperation, make any adequate response to this generous little
trill of greeting. The best she seemed able to do was to speak slowly,
as if to disclaim any desire to hurry on.

"Oh, how do you do? I am pleased I met you on the very first day." The
old lady smiled into Ellen's eyes and shook her hand as if she meant to
lay at her disposal all this amiability that had been reared by tranquil
years on the leeward side of life. "This will be a surprise for
Roothing. We all thought Mr. Yaverland would never look at any woman but
his mother. Such a son he is!" Ellen was annoyed that Marion smiled only
vaguely in answer to this mention of her astonishing good fortune in
being Richard's mother. "I hope Mr. Winter will have the pleasure of
marrying you."

"I'm afraid not," said Ellen with concern. "I'm Presbyterian, and
Episcopalianism does not attract me."

"Oh dear! Oh dear! That's a pity," said the old lady, with a pretty
flight of hilarity. "Still, I hope you'll ask us to the wedding. I've
known Richard since he was a week old. Haven't I, Mrs. Yaverland? He
was the loveliest baby I've ever seen, and later on I think the
handsomest boy. Nobody ever looked at my Billy or George when Richard
was about. And now--well, I needn't tell you, young lady, what he's like
now. I'm glad I've met you. I've just been up at Mrs. More's."

"Who is Mrs. More?" asked Marion heavily.

"The new people who have the small-holding at Coltsfoot the Brights had
before. I think he used to be a clerk, and came into a little money and
bought the holding, and now they're finding it very difficult to get
along."

"This small-holding business ought to be stopped."

"Why?" asked Ellen peevishly. Marion seemed to reject everything, and
she was sure that she had seen small-holdings recommended in Labour
Party literature. "I thought it was sound."

"Not here. Speculators buy up big farms and cut them into small-holdings
and sell them to townspeople, who starve on them or sell them at a loss.
The land's wasted for good, and all because it can't be farmed again
once it's been cut up. To all intents and purposes it's wiped off the
map. It's a scandal."

"It is a shame," agreed the old lady. "I often say that something ought
to be done. Well, the poor woman's lost her baby."

"Bad business," said Marion.

"Such a pretty little girl. Six months. I've been up seeing them putting
her in the coffin. The mother was so upset. I was with her all day
yesterday."

"I've seen the place," said Marion. "As ugly as one of the Hallelujah
Army shanties. What this bit of country's coming to! And Coltsfoot was a
good farm when I was a girl."

"It isn't very nice now certainly. You see, now that the other people
have failed and gone away, it's difficult for them to get loads taken
down as there isn't a proper road. Before, they did it co-operatively
among themselves. But this winter they say they've been without coal
quite often, and the baby's been ill all the time. I think Mrs. More's
been terribly lonely. Poor little woman, she's got no friends here. All
her people live in the Midlands, she tells me. I don't think they can
afford a holiday, so the next few months will be hard for her, I'm
afraid."

"Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the
garden. Annoying to think that that used to be good wheat-land."

"They've never liked the place. They were terrified of losing the child
because of the damp from the moment it came. She's quite broken by it
all, poor thing."

Marion began to draw on the ground with the point of her stick.

"Ah, well, you'll be wanting to get on," said the old lady. "Now, do
bring your future daughter-in-law to tea with us some day. I've got a
daughter-in-law staying with me now. I should like you to meet Rose. She
plays the violin very nicely. And we have a garden we're rather proud
of, though of course this is the wrong time of the year to see it. Yet
I'm sure things are looking very nice just now. Just look at it! Could
anything," she asked, looking round with happy eyes, "be prettier than
this? Look at the sunlight travelling over that hill!" She cast a shy
glance at Marion, who was continuing to watch the point of her stick,
and bravery came into her soft gay glance. "It's passing over the
earth," she said tremulously but distinctly, "like the kindness of God."

A silence fell. "The wee thing has courage," thought Ellen to herself.
"It's plain to see what's happened. Marion's often sneered at her
religion, and she's just letting her see that she doesn't mind. I like
people who believe in something. Of course it might Le something more
useful than Christianity, but if she believes it...."

Marion lifted her head, stared at the hillside, and said, "Yes. And
look. It is followed by the shadow, like His indifference."

Tears came into the old lady's eyes. "Good-bye. We must settle on an
afternoon for tea. I'll send somebody round with a note. Good-bye." She
pushed past them, a grieved and ruffled little figure, a peony-spot of
shock on each cheek, and then she looked back at Ellen. "We'll all look
forward to seeing you, my dear," she called kindly; but feared, Ellen
saw, to meet the hard eyes of this terrible woman, who was staring
after her with a look of hostility that, directed on this little
affirmation of love and amiability, was as barbarous as some ponderous
snare laid for a small, precious bird.

"Let's get on," said Marion.

They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of
the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice.
To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing. It
should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds,
and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher
level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green
pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a
crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle. But the
quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in
fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick
dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an
angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.

They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran
askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes,
rusted and prohibitive and futile.

"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of
fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of
raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence
to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End
trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go
straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and
lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as
Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the
day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the
enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter,
Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the
thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land
going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings
and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I
wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead
leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the
manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she
pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said
apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the
two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose
bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the
others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had
not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair
exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there
between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I
won't come. I'm tired...."

She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself,
"She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half
because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by
losing my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly
blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking
of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had
parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought,
be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there
could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having
to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in
a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike
any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be
tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A
woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that
work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and
so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened
and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really
dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this
Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it
would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now
this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a
living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman
who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a
baby's coffin.

And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and
undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for
an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy
wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained
timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last
fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long
succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire
system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was
never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the
gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was
always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day
there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything
but weak-eyed, plain people.

The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it
had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which
is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the
tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window
at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls
and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would
not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.
Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are
bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the
end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.
The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had
frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement,
would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of
pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's
lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there
would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"
She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before
she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to
remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she
wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean
living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out,
leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass
bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation,
while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth
grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a
meal.

Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor
souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that
all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by
passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was
feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud
at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an
errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting
strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the
woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming
up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to
speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and
they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded
without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore
having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed
with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She
could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom
she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for
Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to
be happy.

Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.
Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not
be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with
Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had
seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed
in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there had always been
something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a
sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by
sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as
dignified as befitted one who came as an ambassador from life itself,
and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair
outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of
courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarrassment. She
was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck
through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be
his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and
Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.

There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by
the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had
left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees
that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge
that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone
far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had
felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly
and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she
had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to
the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a
queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of
the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said,
"Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an
inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she
followed him down the hillside that nobody since the world began had
ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner,
and she became scarlet with shame.

When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared
nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like
air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen
it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had
pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to
up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to
him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he
answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk
to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could
come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that
seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how
the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I
suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who
does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on
in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now.
Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."

At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in
which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away,
wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about
to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its
cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over
her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked
at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting
along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an
inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a
disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year
later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he
had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He
murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had
looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey
eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It
was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of
passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.

With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a
courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days
with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed
it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of
seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair
dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time
that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action.
She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion
would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had
looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they
would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But
they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good
with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow
the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would
pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all
his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black....
She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all
other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt
about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that
there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him
that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite
well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more
beautifully than she had ever been.

She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if
Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself
to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she
could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.
Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base
passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational
hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It
would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and
besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as
little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now
nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping
broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"

She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the
flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower
towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the
hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl
was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the
tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had
formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations
by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion
had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first
moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the
bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down
on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of
the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among
such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it
was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that
she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird,
and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's
spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind
became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh
and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had
been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary
importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible
presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it
could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself
loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had
fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she
must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act
of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that
made her cry out with joy.

Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was
intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should
intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with
being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The
girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower
as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under
faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about
the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added
to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for
the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course
the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of
Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer
mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She
took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was
sinister.




CHAPTER IV


It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The
white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains
of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at
each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue
which the night assumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the
gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses
in a bowl had the air of brooding and passionate captives. Different
from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of
the wood fire danced again in the glass doors of one of the bookcases:
and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep,
stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at
odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker.
She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that
there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent
schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which
seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author
whose work she studied. In the swinging glass door beside her there was
a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she
herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in
the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by
night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and,
orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard
would find such an interior on his return.

"Have you found a book you like?"

"No. There's lots of lovely ones. But none I just fancy. I'm inclined to
be disagreeable and far too particular this evening. Are these your
books or Richard's?"

"Nearly all mine."

"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could
have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point
if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at
all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a
bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.
I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."

"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you
awake."

"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all
right as soon as Richard comes."

Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till
then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted
intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift
dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching
with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate
matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its
midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.
Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through
the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on
the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of
irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high
polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived
that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation
into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the
most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.
It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the
evening in making Ellen like her.

"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.

"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."

But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She passed into the room of bright
new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction
in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for
I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."

"Let me brush your hair."

As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because
Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she
brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been
gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in
whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to
be understood and conciliated. Her wish that it were so reminded her how
much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl's
shoulder at her reflection in the glass. "It is a face that believes
there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out," she
thought. "Well, that is probably true for her. I, with my foes who are a
part of myself, am unusually cursed. If these young people have ordinary
luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy
standing by and watching them. Oh, I must make friends with her. We have
many things in common. I will talk to her about the Suffragettes. What
shall I say about them? I do honestly think that they are splendid
women. I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out
into the streets knowing they will be stoned...." A memory overcame her.
"Ah!" she cried out, and laid down the brush.

"What's the matter?" exclaimed Ellen, standing up. There was a certain
desperation in her tone, as if she thought the tragic life of a
household ought to have a definite closing-time every night, after which
people could go to bed in peace.

"I forgot--I forgot to take some medicine. I must go and take it now.
And I don't think I'd better come back. I'm sure you'll brush your hair
better yourself. I'm sure I tugged. You're so tired, you ought to go to
bed at once. Good-night. Good-night." By the slow shutting of the door
she tried to correct the queer impression of her sudden flight, but knew
as she did so that it sounded merely furtive.

In her own room she undressed with frantic haste so that she could turn
out the light and retreat into the darkness as into a burrow. But
everywhere in the blackness, even on the inside of the sheet she drew
over her face as she lay in bed, were pictures of the aspects of evil
the world had turned to her that day: thirty years before, when she was
stoned down the High Street of Roothing. She was in the grip of one of
her recurrent madnesses of memory. There was no Richard to sit by her
side and comfort her, not by what he said, for she had kept so much from
him that he could say nothing that was really relevant, but by his
beauty and his dearness, which convinced her that all was well since she
had given birth to him; so her agony must go on until the dawn.

She must get used to that, because when he was married to Ellen she
would no longer be able to sit up in her bed and call "Richard,
Richard!" and strike the bell that rang in his room--that rang, as it
seemed, in his mind, since no other sound but it ever wakened him in the
night. Not again would he stand at the door, his dark hair damp and
rumpled, his eyes blinking at the strong light, while his voice spoke
hoarsely out of undispersed sleep. "Mother, darling mother, are you
having bad dreams?" Not again would she answer moaningly, "Oh, Richard,
yes!" and tremble with delight in the midst of her agony to see how,
when this big man was dazed and half awake, he held his arms upwards to
her as if he were still a little boy and she a tall overshadowing
presence. In the future he must be left undisturbed to sleep in Ellen's
arms. That thought caused her inexplicable desolation. Rather than think
it she gave up the struggle and allowed herself to be possessed by
memory, and to smart again under the humiliation of that afternoon when
life had made a fool of her. For what had hurt her most was that she had
gone out into the world, the afternoon it stoned her, in a mood of the
tenderest love towards it.

She had risen late, she remembered, that day. All night long she had
been ill, and had not slept until the first wrangling of the birds. Then
suddenly she had opened her eyes, and after remembering, as she always
did when she woke, that she was going to have a child, she had looked
out of her wide window into the mature and undoubtful sunshine of a fine
afternoon. She had felt wonderfully well and terribly hungry, and had
hastened at her washing and dressing so that she could run downstairs
and get something to eat. When she went into the kitchen she saw that
dinner was over, for the plates were drying in the rack and Peggy, the
maid, was not there. It was incredible that she had not known why Peggy
had gone out, that she should fatuously have told herself that the girl
was probably working in the dairy; but in those days her mind was often
half asleep with love for the unborn.

She rejoiced that she had missed the family meal, for it was not easy to
sit at the table with Grandmother and Cousin Tom and Aunt Alphonsine,
unspoken comments on her position hanging from each face like
stalactites. In the larder she found the cold roast beef, magnificently
marbled with veins of fat, and the cherry pie, with its globes of
imperial purple and its dark juice streaked on the surface with richness
exuded from the broken vault-of the pastry, and she ate largely, with
the solemn greed of pregnancy. Afterwards she washed the dishes, in that
state of bland, featureless contentment that comes to one whose being
knows that it is perfectly fulfilling its function and that it is
earning its keep in the universe without having to attempt any
performance on that vexing instrument, the mind.

When she had finished, she wandered out of the kitchen aimlessly,
benevolently wishing that her baby was born so that she could spend the
afternoon playing with it.

The parlour door was ajar, and she peeped in and saw Grandmother sitting
asleep in the high-backed chair, a shaft of sunlight blessing her bent
head to silver and stretching a corridor for dancing motes to the bowl
of mignonette. She saw the scene with the eye of an oleographer. In
defiance of experience she considered her grandmother as a dear old
lady, and the hum of a bee circling about the mignonette sounded like
the peace that was in the room becoming articulate and praising God.
Enjoyable tears stood in her eyes. Drying them and looking round the
dear scene, so that she might remember it, she saw that the grandfather
clock marked it as half-past two. Now was the time that she must go for
her walk. The children would be back at school, the men would be at
work, and the women still busy cleaning up after their midday meal. She
was afraid now to walk on the Yaverland lands for fear of finding
Goodtart, the cattleman, standing quite still in some shadowed place
where she would not see him till it was too late to avoid touching him
as she passed, and turning on her those dung-brown eyes in which
thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a canal; and
though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with
Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had
stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the
belvedere. The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go
so far. But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran
from the glebe land opposite Yaverland's End and stretched towards the
village High Street. No one ever went there at this time of day.

Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and
she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though
she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown. Stealing out
very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down
the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She
had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish
cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and
reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The
Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson
Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine
it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married,
and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not
receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to
the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant
oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by
some wise, far-sighted person.

It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had
slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon,
to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will
to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that
it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before
the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his
pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone
would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of
her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come
to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was
twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the
spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a
woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With
aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that
showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had
happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and
seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy
figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.

It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances
these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive
greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being
without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that,
and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in
love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she
knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing
his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that
must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the
exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then
perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to
have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive
eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held
to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day
in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel
in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him
like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their
beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of
acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that,
for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.

At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a
tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down
her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again
and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and
daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly,
swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the
trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch
scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of
the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For
the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the
most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously
for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the
unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their
mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home
litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they
could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds,
and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared
excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts
in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her
and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young
doctor who had been _locum tenens_ here in February, and that they had
seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the
Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in
order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family,
and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill
these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.
She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little
wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as
happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to
venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when
men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.

The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of
an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to
earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked
leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it
dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit
half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up
a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly,
the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of
crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of
Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by
going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into
the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be
Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the
village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and
would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the
unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from
all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their
ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite
close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under
the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.

Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed
at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the
society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of
thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that
his great horny fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was
drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so
disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of
another expulsion. "Oh, ter dash with the thing!" he exclaimed
mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue
sky above and snuffled. Marion's heart dissolved. She could not let this
poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving
only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.
"George!" she called softly, staying among the branches. He gaped about
him. "George!" she called a little louder. "The ball's in the pit, among
the leaves." But he was transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice
and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to
gape. She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after
only half a moment's reluctance she stepped forward. She did not really
mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention
that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby. For there was
now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been
before and her body was like a vase. It was only when they had awful
thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not
have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn. So she went
over to him, pointing to the pit. "I saw it roll down there, George.
Look! There it is."

But he did not pick up the ball. He appeared to be petrified by the
sight of her. "Make haste," she said, "they'll be waiting for you." At
that he dropped his lids, and his lips thickened, and his face grew red.
Then he raised his head again and looked at her with eyes that were not
dull, as she had always seen them before, but hot and bright, and he
began to shift his weight slowly backwards and forwards from one foot to
the other. Her heart grew sick, because all the world was like this, and
she turned again to the path home. But through the tree-trunks in that
direction there came two other boys in search of the ball--Ned Turk, who
to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes;
and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had
done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd
faces. A horror came on her. It was as if they had assumed masks to warn
her that they had some secret and sinister business with her. Then one
pointed his hand at her and made an animal noise, and the other laughed
with his mouth wide open. Neither said anything. Their minds were
evidently engaged in processes beneath those which find expression in
language. She stiffened herself to face them, though she felt frightened
that these two boys, whom she had known all her life, with whom she had
ridden on the hay-wains in summer and caught stickle-backs in the marsh
dykes, should change to these speechless beings with red leering masks
who meant her ill.

For the first time she felt herself too young for her destiny. "I am
only nineteen," she cried silently. Tears might have disgraced her but
that the child moved in her as if it had looked out at the frightening
figures through her eyes, and she suddenly hated Harry for leaving her
and his son unprotected from such brutes as people seemed to be, and was
vivified by the hatred. She made to walk past the boys back towards
Yaverland's End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to
their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately
answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads
whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being
consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that
would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing
for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and
walk down Roothing High Street and go back to Yaverland's End by the
lane. Her mood of forgiving love for the village, which the cricket-ball
had interrupted, had been so real that she felt as if a pact had been
established between it and her, and she was quite sure that she would be
safe from the boys there. If they were tiresome and followed her, no
doubt somebody like Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general stores, would take
her in and let her rest till it was dark, and then see her home. She
turned round and walked out of the wood, and because she could not, in
her heavy-footed state, trample through the undergrowth, she had to
follow the path that led her to within a yard or two of George Postgate.
She could see from the workings of his large face that he was forming
some plan of action. And sure enough, when she passed him, he cried out
"Dirty Marion!" and twitched the sun-bonnet from her head. The sudden
movement made her start violently, for though she had not known what
fear was until she conceived, she now knew a panic-terror at anything
that threatened her body. That made the boys shout with laughter and
call to their friends to hurry up and see the fun.

The sunshine that beat down on the unshaded field was hot on her bare
head. It would be awkward too, going into the village hatless and with
ruffled hair. But she must not be angry with George Postgate, for indeed
the incident had been to him only a means of gaining that popularity
with the fellows that his poor stupid soul so longed for and had so
often been refused, and he could not know that the fright would make her
feel so ill. Since the first agonising months of her pregnancy, when
nausea and faintness had pervaded her days, she had never felt as ill as
this. A sweat had broken out on her face and her hands; she had to
pant for breath and her limbs staggered under her. But she would be all
right if she could sit down for one moment. There was a hawthorn stump a
little way off, and to this she made her way, but as she sunk down on it
a clod of earth struck her in the shoulder. She spun round, and another
broke on her face. Grit filled her mouth, which was open with amazement.
She had been deaf with physical distress, so she had not heard that the
boys had gathered together on the wood's edge and were now marching
after her in a shouting crowd. Something in her attitude when she turned
on them made them fall dumb and stock-still for a moment. But as a gust
of wind ruffled her hair and blew her skirts about her body a roar of
laughter went up from them, and earth and dry dung flew through the air
at her.

As she set her face towards the High Street again, which still seemed
very far away, she sobbed with relief to see that old Mr. Goode, the
carrier, had come down to the end of his garden to see what the noise
meant, and that he had almost at once gone back into his house. Of
course he would come out and save her. In the meantime she pushed on
towards the houses, that because of her sickness and her fear rocked and
wavered towards her flimsily like a breaking wave. A heavy clod struck
her in the back, and she shrieked silently with terror. If they hurt her
she might give birth to her baby and it would not live. She had not had
it quite seven months yet, so it would not live. At that thought anguish
pierced her like a jagged steel and she began to try to run, muttering
little loving names to her adored and threatened child. She looked
towards the road to see if old Mr. Goode was coming, and was surprised
to see that he was standing at the gate of the field with two other men
and a boy. And though they were all looking towards her, they made no
movement to come to her help. Perhaps they did not see what was
happening to her. It did not matter. She would be there in a few
moments. One of the boys had found a tin can and was beating on it, and
the sounds made her head feel bad. She staggered on, looking on the
ground because of the sun's strong glare.

When she found that her feet had reached the patch of rutted ground that
was around the gate, she sobbed with thankfulness. She threw out her
hands to the multitude of people who had suddenly gathered there, and
cried out imploringly, for if someone would only take her to a place
where she could lie down she would be all right and she would keep her
child. But none of them came to her, and her deafened ears caught a
sound of roaring. She could not see who they were and what they were
doing, for all things looked as if she saw them through flowing water.
But she knew the tall figure by the gatepost must be Mr. Goode, so she
stumbled to him and raised her head and tried to find his kind face.
But, like the boys, he wore a mask. Veins that she had never noticed
before stood out red on his forehead and his beard twitched, and the
funny lines that darted about his eyes, which had become small and
winking, made his face a palimpsest in which an affected disgust
overlaid some deep enjoyment. He did not seem to be looking at her;
indeed, he averted his eyes from her, but thoughts about her made him
laugh and send out a jeering cry--wordless like the call of the boys.
She realised that he and these people whom she could not see, but who
must be people who had known her all her life, had come out not to save
but to see her ill-treated and to rejoice. She stood stock-still and
groaned. Her head felt wet, and she put up her hand and found that a
stone had drawn blood behind her ear. The boys pressed close about her
and beat the tin can in her ears, and one stretched out a stick and
touched her, which made Mr. Goode and the unseen enemies laugh. But at
that she shrieked. She shrieked with such terrible anger at those who
insulted the mother of her child, that all their jaws fell and they
shrank back and let her pass.

But when she had gone a few paces up the road someone shouted something
after her, and there was a noise of laughter and then of the shuffling
of many feet behind her, and jeers and cat-calls and the beating of the
tin can. She went on, looking to the right and the left for some old
friend to come out and take her to shelter, but now she knew that there
would be none. These people would drive her on and on. And when she got
home to Yaverland's End, if they would let her go there, and did not
trample her down on the roadside first, she would lose her child. The
core of her body and soul would be torn out from her, and all promise
of pleasure and all occasion of pride. For there was no pleasure in the
world save that to which she had looked forward these seven months, of
seeing that perfect little body that she knew so well and kissing its
smooth skin and waiting for it to open those eyes--those black eyes; and
there could be no greater degradation than to bring forth death, when
for months the sole sustenance against the world's contempt had been
that she was going to give birth to a king of life. There danced before
her eyes all the sons of whom she was to be bereft in the person of this
son. The staggering child, the lean, rough-headed boy of ten with his
bat, the glorious man.

Now her loss was certain. All the people were running out into the
gardens of the little houses on the right and throwing up the windows
over the shuttered shops on the left, and all wore the flushed and
amused masks that meant they were determined that she should lose her
child. Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general store, the kind old woman whom
she had thought would take her in, and Mrs. Welch, the village drunkard,
were leaning over adjacent garden walls, holding back the tall, divine
sunflowers that they might hobnob over this delight, and their faces
were indistinguishable because of those masks. Even Lily Barnes,
standing on the doorstep of the nice new Lily Villa her husband, Job
Barnes the builder, had built for their marriage, with her six months
old baby in her arms, was thus disguised, and seeming, like Mr. Goode,
to look through her old friend at some obscene and delicious fact, sent
up that hooting wordless cry.

Marion was so appalled that a woman carrying her baby should connive at
the death of another's that she stood quite still and stared at her,
until the boys behind her thrust her with sticks. When she passed the
alley between the post-office and the carrier's she saw the cattle-man,
Goodtart, looking out at her from its shadows; he did not move, but his
dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger
stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his
neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with
earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with
nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every
time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.

"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated
it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it
up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished
that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his
child to this.

Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and
the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with
his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back
into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she
had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no
solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself
like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this
thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.
But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her
and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was
approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light
feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face
obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some
invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality
which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried
to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some
remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that
she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.

She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and
pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and
behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt
and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying
standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively,
Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it
said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of
butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her. He was asking
the village people what would happen when the squire came home and
heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire's
tenants. A silence fell on her pursuers. From the rear old Mr. Goode's
kind voice said something about "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey"; Ned
Turk piped, "We don't mean no 'arm," and the crowd dispersed. It
shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated
and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin
cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect
by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of
their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.

She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey. She
realised that she was safe. If she could rest now she would keep her
child. She knew relief but not exultation. It was as if life had been
handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed
with the cup. There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon:
the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she
had been rescued. When Peacey's voice had boomed out above her it had
expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it
had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful
than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and
he begged them to have similar prudence. He had risked nothing of his
reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her. To this loathsome
world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her
divine child. She looked up at Peacey and laughed.

His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness. "You'd best
come into Cliffe's cottage," he said, and went before her. It struck
her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street
it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or
without his knowledge. Well, she must lie down, and this was the only
door that was open to her. She must follow him.

Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and
through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur: "Poor little
girl!" Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in
his heart spoken to itself? Was he really a kind man? She looked at him
searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes,
which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing. In any case
she must take his arm, or she would fall. She even found herself
shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she
was afraid the people inside might not welcome her. She did not know the
Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five
years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make
friends with a young married woman. But its trim garden, where on golden
summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his
clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while
his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own
loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion
wishing that Harry and she were properly married. Because she had
received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for
of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy. But the
shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was
as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into
some vacated house given over to decay. There was dust everywhere, and
the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the vase on the
table had died yesterday; and the woman who stood in the middle of the
room, looking down at her hands and turning her wedding ring on her
finger, was not pretty or joyous. Her face was a smudge of sullenness
under hair that was elaborately dressed yet was dull for lack of
brushing, and her body drooped within the stiff tower of her
thickly-boned Sunday-best dress. She looked at Marion without curiosity
from an immense distance of preoccupation. There came from a room at the
back of the house the strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee," played on
the harmonium, and at that she made a weak, abstracted gesture of
irritation.

"Go and get a basin of water and a bit o' rag. The girl's head's
bleeding," said Peacey, and she went out of the room obediently. He
collected all the cushions in the room and piled them on the horsehair
sofa, and helped her to lie comfortably down on them. Then he walked to
the window, and stood there looking out until Mrs. Cliffe came back into
the room. He took the basin without thanks, and set it down on a chair
and began to bathe Marion's head, while Mrs. Cliffe stood by watching
incuriously.

"Now then, Trixy," he said, not unpleasantly, "you'd best go into the
back parlour and listen to your beloved husband playing hymns so
trustfully."

She went away, still without speaking, and Marion, no longer feeling
defensive before a stranger, closed her eyes. Really his fat hands were
very gentle, very clever and quick. After a few moments he had finished,
and she was able to turn her face to the wall and talk to her baby that
had been saved to her, and to exult that after all she would see those
eyes. She shivered to think how nearly she had lost him, and was
transfixed by her hatred of Harry. She turned hastily and faced the
room.

Peacey was watching her with his quiet eyes. He said in a silken voice,
"This sort of thing wouldn't happen to you if you were married to me."

She lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. She knew that what he said
was true.

"You've looked at me as if I were a pickpocket, you have," he went on,
"just because I want to marry you. I don't hold it against you. You're
young. That young, that it's a shame this has happened to you. But after
to-day perhaps you'll judge me a bit fairer. You see, I'm older than
you, and I've seen a bit of the world, and I know how things are. And I
knew you'd have a nasty jar like you had to-day before you were through
with it. And I don't doubt you'll have a few more before you're done. It
ain't too good for the little one, if you'll excuse me mentioning it.
You can't expect a man of any feelings to look on without trying to do
what he can."

She looked up to scan his face for some sign of sincerity, and found
herself for the first time wishing that she might find it and have
reason to distrust her own dislike of him. But he was sitting sideways,
with his head turned away from her, and she could see nothing of him but
his hot black clothes and his fat hand slowly stroking the thigh of his
crossed leg in its tight trouser. A sigh shook the dark bulk of his
back.

"Me of all men," he said softly, "who had such a mother."

There was a long pause. She grew curious.

"Is she dead?" she asked.

"Died when I was ten. Not a soul's ever cared for me since then. I'm not
sorry. It's made me remember her all the better. And she was one of
God's saints."

His voice was husky. She muttered, "I am sorry," and was annoyed to find
that she really was.

"Why need you be?" he asked. "There's those that haven't that much to
look back on. All I want from you, Miss Marion, is to let me help you.
Or at least not to think ill of me for wanting to help you."

He sat still for a moment and continued to stroke his thigh.

"Marion," he began abruptly, and then paused as if to brace himself.
"Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you
to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never wouldn't bother you for
that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise
with some chance of keeping it. And besides, there's more than that to
it. How," he asked, lifting his head and speaking mincingly, "should I
presume to go where Sir Harry's been? I would never ask you to be a wife
to me. Just to accept the protection of my name, that's all I ask of
you."

They sat for a while in the embrowned sunshine of the dusty room.

He rose and stood over her, drooping his sleek head benevolently. "Ah,
well," he said, "I'd best leave you alone. God knows I never meant to
intrude on you. Perhaps you would take a little doze now, and after tea
I'll take you home." He looked on her moistly, tenderly. "Think kindly
of me if you dream." Some emotion coagulated his voice to a thick, slow
flow. "You'll be the only woman who ever has thought of me in her dreams
if you do. I've never had anything to do with women all my life. You
see, I know I've got an ugly mug. I wouldn't dare to make love to any
woman in case I saw--what I've seen in your face--what I saw in your
face that night I came out on you from the belvedere. Oh, I don't blame
you, Miss Marion. You're young--you're beautiful. You've had a real
gentleman for your sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you.
Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands
together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her
matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate
that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her.
"Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled
about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body
neckless and sloping like a seal's, and said softly, "And don't think it
was me who put Lady Teresa up to coming down to Yaverland's End
to-morrow morning. It is her ladyship's own idea. I said to her, 'Leave
the poor girl alone.' I have always said to her, 'Leave the poor girl
alone.'" His voice faded. He moved vaporously out of the room.

One is too harsh to one's dead self. One regards it as the executor and
residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate
regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty
years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the
closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her
life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was
conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present
should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting
up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The
tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost
as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black
fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all
the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he
has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the
end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my
Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely
Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him
unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There
are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She
groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like
cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot
thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this
dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it
was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had
remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear
it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage
to live.

Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about
what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should
sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or
Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on
that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to
abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her
consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was
within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn
baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she
had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of
her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves
had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had
been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly
nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo
knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical
adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment
dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to
live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and
have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill
and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the
shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it
and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next
day it would forsake her.

She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer
from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose
at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was
necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look
up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the
expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been,
it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she
dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that
Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the
church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl
who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope
that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy
head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of
paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of
Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not
really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and
tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.

Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking
personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm
black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of
Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a
profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that
Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its
bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or
of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no
reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at
Torque House. By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry. The child
would doubt again.... Since these things would have happened she could
not do other than she did. Her surrender was the price she had to pay
for Richard's life.

How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to
pay any real price! She looked back through the past at Peacey's conduct
of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at
some perfect and obscene work of art. He had laid his hand so
wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so
that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the
renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he
turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to
one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme
mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante
love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and,
knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as
their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship,
she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his
melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had
failed utterly.

Mrs. Cliffe had come in with a cup of tea and some cake on a tray.
"You'll feel better for this," she said, and while Marion had ate and
drunk she had stood by the window and looked at her. It seemed to Marion
that she had greatly changed of late. Before, she had belonged very
definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from
the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even
after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any
cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw
and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative
of a change from her pristine gentility.

"Funny I never heard of you being like this," she said at last.

"It is. I thought everyone was talking about it."

"They may be. But there's times when one doesn't listen to what people
are saying." For a time she was silent. "Ah, well," she meditated
bitterly, "it doesn't pay to do wrong, does it?"

"I haven't done wrong," said Marion.

"So you say now," Mrs. Cliffe told her, "but there'll come a day when
you see you have." She drew in her breath with a little gasp as Peacey
put his head in at the door.

He looked sharply from one to the other, and then advanced to Marion's
couch, rubbing his hands genially. "Now then, Trixy," he said teasingly,
"you don't want me to talk too long to your beloved husband, do you? I
might go telling him things about you, mightn't I? You run along and
look after him." Mrs. Cliffe retired quite taciturnly, nothing in her
face responding to this rallying, and he bent quickly over Marion. "I
hope she hasn't been worrying you?" he asked. Concern for her?--it
sounded just like concern for her--made his voice tremble. "That's why I
hurried back. Women are so narrow-minded to their poor sisters who
haven't been so fortunate. I thought she might have been making you feel
a bit uncomfortable."

"Oh no," said Marion.

The mask of his poor ugly face, which had been grotesque with pitying
lines, became smooth. He sighed with relief, and sat down by her side,
very humbly.

"But she was beginning to talk rather strangely," the poor fool Marion
had continued. "I think she's altered very much lately."

"Do you know, I was thinking so myself," Peacey had answered
reflectively. "I wonder if she's got anything on her mind. I wish I
could find out. One doesn't like a 'ome of friends not to share its
worries with you, without giving you a fair chance to 'elp. I must see
whether I can get it out of 'er."

Oh, he was a kind man. He was certainly very kind. She put down her cup
and braced her body and her soul, and said, "Mr. Peacey...."

The world had deceived her utterly that day; and yet there was one in
that cottage who had suffered more than she, for by her suffering she
had bought no Richard. Poor Mrs. Cliffe! She was a woman of sixty now,
white-haired, and fine-featured with the anxious fineness of one who has
for long lived out of favour with herself and has laboured hard for
re-establishment; but the fear still dwelt in her. Most times that
Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting
knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here
and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly. But
every now and then, perhaps once a year, she would put down her knitting
so soon as Marion came in sight and come into the road to meet her and
would give her nervous, absent-minded greetings. Then she would draw her
into the furthest edge of the pavement, because the blind have such
sharp hearing, and she would whisper:

"Have you heard from _him_ lately?"

"No."

"He's still at Dawlish?"

"They say so."

"Do you think he will ever come back?"

"No. He will never come back."

"Ah." She would stand looking past Marion with her face cat's-pawed by
memory and her fingers teasing the fringe of her shawl, till from the
garden the blind old man would cry lovingly and querulously, "Trixy,
where are you?" and she would answer, "Coming, dearie." As she turned
away she would murmur: "I shouldn't like him to come back...."

Poor Trixy Cliffe! She should have known only the sorrow of pure
femalehood, such sorrow as makes the eyes of heifers soft. Women like
her should be harvested like corn in their time of ripening, stored in
good homes as in sound barns, and ground in the mill of wifehood and
motherhood into the flour that makes the bread by which the people live.
But there must have been some beauty working in her soul, for Peacey
went only where he saw some opportunity to cancel some movement towards
the divine, being a missionary spirit. So she had been delivered over to
that terror which survived for ever. Even in the exorcised blue
territory of a good old woman's eyes. "Oh, poor Trixy, poor Trixy!"
moaned Marion, weeping. But it struck her that she was enjoying herself,
and she sat up rigidly and searched her soul for the smuggled
insincerity. "I must be lying," she said aloud with loathing. "I really
cannot be pitying Trixy Cliffe because in my heart of hearts I care for
no one but Richard. I would knead the flesh of anyone on earth and bake
it in the oven if that were the only food I could give him. What am I
doing this for? Ah, I see. I am hanging about this fictitious emotion
simply because I do not wish to go on and remember Roger." She held out
her hands into the blackness and cried out, "Oh, Roger, forgive me for
shutting you out of my memory as I have shut you out of everything else.
I will remember everything, I will!" She lay down and let all pictures
reappear before her eyes, but her mouth was drawn down at the corners.




CHAPTER V


It was no use wondering now whether or not Peacey had really murmured
"Good day, ma'am," as they parted at the door of the church after their
furtive marriage. She had certainly thought she had heard this ironic
respectfulness, and she had stared after him with a sudden dread that
under the cream of benignity there might after all be a ferment of
malign intention. But that gait, which was so light and brisk for such a
heavy man, had already taken him some distance from her, and he was now
entering the yew alley that was the private way from Torque Hall to the
churchyard. The sunlight falling through the interstices of the dark
mossy trees cast liver-coloured patches on his black coat. She had
turned and looked down, as she always did when human complexities made
her seek reassurance as to the worth of this world, on the shiny
mud-flats, blue-veined with the running tides, and green marshes where
the redshanks choired. Her misgiving had weakened at that beauty, for
with the logic of the young she thought that if the universe was
infinitely good it could not also be infinitely evil, and it had been
utterly dispelled by his considerate conduct during the following weeks.

He did not try to see her at all until a day or two before the birth of
her child was expected. Then he came at twilight. He would not let
Grandmother put a match to the lamp in the parlour, and Marion knew from
his quiet urgency that he was doing this so that she might continue to
wear the dusk as a cloak. He sat down by the window, his shoulders black
against the sunset, and his fat hands, with their appealing air of shame
at their own fatness, laid on the little table beside him an old; carved
coral rattle and a baby's dress precious with embroideries. These he had
bought, he said, up in London, where he had had to go for a day to do
business with the wine merchants. He had not seemed to listen to her
thanks. But his hunched shape against the primrose light and the
gleaming of his thick white fingers playing nervously with the fragile
gifts spoke of a passionate concern for her. No doubt that concern was
sincere. They told her after her confinement that during the day and
night through which her child was slowly torn from her he had not left
the house, and at her cries a sweat had run down his face. That was not
unnatural. An incomplete villainy would vex its designer as any
unfinished work of art vexes the artist. But she interpreted it in the
sense that he, knowing what delusions youth has regarding the human
capacity for love, had foreseen that she would.

She let him see her before anyone else, and he had made the most of that
ideal occasion when her being was so sensitive that it responded to
everything, and so well pleased at having safely borne her son that she
saw everything as evidence of creation's virtue. He had added stroke to
stroke with the modest confused smile with which he entered the room, as
if he felt his vast bulk ridiculous in this room of small rosebud
patterns; the uneasy laughter with which he disguised his embarrassment
when they could find no chair big enough for him; the shy wonder with
which he put out his hand and hooded the tiny black head with it, and
uncurled the little hand with his obese forefinger; the reticence with
which he checked his remark that he had always wanted to have a child of
his own. And he perfected the picture that he desired her to see by the
assurance he gave murmurously from the darkness of the open door. "Get
well soon.... You needn't be afraid of me. We made a bargain. I mean to
stick to it." He had caught the very tune that dogged sincerity plays on
the voice's chords. She lay happy after he had gone because she and her
child had so true a friend.

It was, of course, from no malice against her that he set out to deceive
her, but from the natural desire to protect his being from alterations
hostile to its quality. Long after, sitting with Richard in a café in
Rio de Janeiro, she had looked at the men who were taking the lovely
painted women to themselves, and she detected behind the gross mask that
the prospect of physical enjoyment set on the faces an expression of
harsh spiritual defensiveness; and thenceforward she had understood why
Peacey had practised this fraud on her. He had known, as all men know,
that there is a beneficent magic in the relationship between men and
women; the evil man, at war with all but himself, cannot but admit that
for his supremest pleasure he depends on one other than himself, and by
his gratitude to her is tainted with altruism and is no longer
single-minded in his war on others. Such men uphold prostitution because
it exorcises sex of that magic. It is not a device to save sensuality,
for love with a stranger is like gulping new spirit, and love with a
friend is drinking old wine. Its purpose is indeed this very
imperfection of the embraces that it offers, for they leave the soul as
it was.

Peacey, she understood in the light of this discovery, had desired her
with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and
a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would
have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to
create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her
and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.
She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler's
pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as
old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of
craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as
unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked
down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top
shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver: thinking his
solution out to its perfect issue.

It had been quite perfect. By that visit, and by his abstention from any
later visit, he had induced in her just that mood of serenity and
confidence which would be most shocked by the irruption of his passion.
The evening when it all happened she had been so utterly given up to
happiness. She had taken the most preposterously long time to put
Richard to bed. He had had a restless day, and had been so drowsy when
she went to feed him in the evening that she had put him back in his
cradle in his day clothes, but about half-past eight he had awakened and
called her, and she found him very lively and roguish. She had stripped
him and then could not bear to put his night-clothes on, he looked so
lovely lying naked in her lap. He was not one of those babies who are
pieces of flesh that slowly acquire animation by feeding and sleeping;
from his birth he had seemed to be charged with the whole vitality of a
man. He was minute as a baby of three months is, he was helpless, he had
not yet made the amazing discovery that his hand belonged to him, but
she knew that when she held him she held a strong man. This babyhood was
the playful disguise in which he came into the world in order that they
might get on easy terms with one another and be perfect companions.
Never would he be able to feel tyrannous because of his greater
strength, for he would remember the time when she had lifted him in her
weak arms, and that same memory would prevent her from ever being
depressed into a sense of inferiority, so that they would ever move in
the happy climate of a sense of equality. And every moment of this
journey towards that perfect relationship was going to be a delight.

She bent over him, enravished by the brilliant bloom of his creamy skin
and the black blaze of his eyes, which had been black from birth, as
hardly any children's are; turned him over and kissed the delicate crook
of his knees and the straight column of his spine and the little square
wings of his shoulder-blades, and then she turned him back again and
jeered at him because he wore the phlegmatic, pasha-like smile of an
adored baby. She became vexed with love for him, and longed to clasp
him, to crush him as she knew she must not. She put on his
night-clothes, kissing him extravagantly and unsatedly, and when she
finished he wailed and nuzzled to her breast. "Oh, no, you greedy little
thing," she cried, for it was a quarter of an hour before he should have
been fed again, but a wave of love passed through her and she took him
to her. They were fused, they were utterly content with one another. He
finished, smacking his lips like an old epicure. "Oh, my darling love!"
she cried, and put him back into the cot and ran downstairs. If she
stayed longer she would keep him awake with her kisses and play. She was
brightened and full of silent laughter, like a girl who escapes from her
sweetheart.

Grandmother sat very quietly at her sewing and soon went upstairs.
Grandmother was getting very old. When she said "Good-night" she seemed
to be speaking out of the cavern of some preoccupation, and when she
went upstairs her shawl fell from her shoulders and trailed its corner
on the ground. Marion hoped that the old lady had not worn herself out
by worrying about her, and she pulled out the sewing that had been shut
up in the work-basket and meditated finishing it, but she was too tired.
Nowadays she knew a fatigue which she could yield to frankly, as it was
honourable to her organism, and meant that her strength was going into
her milk and not into her blood. She folded her arms on the table and
laid her head on them and thought of Richard. It was his monthly
birthday to-day. He was three months old. She grieved to think that she
could feed him for only six months more. How could she endure to be
quite separate from him? Sometimes even now she regretted that the time
had gone when he was within her, so that each of her heartbeats was a
caress to him, to which his little heart replied, and she would feel
utterly desolate and hungry when she could no longer join him to her
bosom. But she would always be able to kiss him. She imagined herself a
few years ahead, calling him back when he was running off to play,
holding his resistant sturdiness in her arms while he gave her hasty,
smudged kisses and hugged his ball for more loving. But she reflected
that, while the character of those kisses would amuse her, they would
not satisfy her craving for contact so close that it was unity with his
warm young body, and she must set herself to be the most alluring mother
that ever lived, so that he would not struggle in her arms but would
give her back kiss for kiss. She flung her head back, sighing
triumphantly because she knew she could do it, but as her eyes met her
image in the mirror over the mantelpiece she was horrified to see how
little like a mother she was looking. Lips pursed with these long
imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child's mouth; she had lost
utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a
child may sleep: on a child's path her emanations were beginning to cast
not light but lightning.

She called out to herself: "You fool! If you really love Richard you
will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow
strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him
an orange and not a kiss!" But it seemed to her that this would be a
sacrifice until, staring into the glass, she noticed that she was now
more beautiful than she had ever been, and then she saw the way by which
she could be satisfied. Harry must come back; she knew he was coming
back, for they had intercepted his letter to her, and they would not
have done that if it had been unloving. After she had weaned Richard she
must conceive again and let another child lift from him the excessive
burden of her love: then her mind and soul could go on in his company
without vexing him with these demands that only the unborn or the
nursling could satisfy. Then this second child would become separate
from her, and she must conceive again and again until this intense life
of the body failed in her and her flesh ceased to be a powerful artist
exulting in the creation of masterpieces. It must be so. For Richard's
sake it must be so. Her love would be too heavy a cloak for one child,
for it was meant to be a tent under which many should dwell. Again as in
the wood she laid her hand on her body and felt it as an inexhaustible
treasure. Again she was instantly mocked.

There had come, then, a knock at the door. She had felt a little
frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt
fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is
endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not
be bitten by a frothing mouth. But it was not late, and it was as likely
as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian
calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.

Peacey stood there. He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his
body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll. There
was an appearance of ceremony about him. His skin shone with the white
lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly
in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which
she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like
varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.

He did not speak. He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he
should enter. She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that
clung about him been so definitely that of soap. From the garden behind
him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds
disturbed. His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids,
with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or
twice. When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish
and he stepped within. He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to
strip off his gloves. His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction,
terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out: "Why have
you come?"

But he answered nothing. Speech is human, and words might have fomented
some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should
know each other only as animals and enemies. He continued to take off
his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him
hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the
lamp. She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and
moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood. Then in the blackness his
weight threshed down on her. Even his form was a deceit, for his vast
bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength. All consciousness soon left
her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.
Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her. She saw it as a lovely
naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side,
where it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body,
sitting by with its haunches in a spring. She cried out to herself: "You
can rise above this! This is only a physical thing," but her own answer
came: "Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing. Yet it was a
sacrament and gave you life. There is white magic and black magic. This
is a black sacrament, and it will give you death." Her soul fainted into
utter nothingness.

She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself
up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.
But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and
made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over
her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish
early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow
of the lamp the night before. It was evident that Peacey had set it in
order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing
she had left crumpled on the table. At this manifestation of his
peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son's
room. But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was
ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first
to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty
had through all previous agonies reassured her. But the eastern sky was
inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before,
and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the
barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch
wounds. Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had
happened to her one of earth's ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking
on could make good. But turning to her child to still his crying, she
saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on
the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty
and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and
she ran to him. She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the
criminal face of the morning.

From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest
isolation. She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing
what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but
she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now
why Grandmother had been so preoccupied that she let the tail of her
shawl trail on the ground as she went upstairs that night, and why
Cousin Tom Stallybrass had not come in to tell how the calf had gone at
Prittlebay market. When one afternoon she came to the head of the stairs
and saw Aunt Alphonsine gesticulating in her tight _dame de compagnie_
black in the parlour below, stretching out her long lean neck like the
spout of a coffee-pot to Grandmothers' ear, she stood quite still,
staring at the two women and hating them till they saw her and fell
silent. She did not take her gaze from them until Aunt Alphonsine put up
her hand to cover her scar. Then she knew that this wretched woman was
at last afraid of her and would let her alone, and she turned
contentedly to the room where Richard was.

But later on a misgiving seized her lest her aunt might have come as
envoy from Peacey, and since she perceived that, her rage against the
world was so visibly written on her that she inspired fear; she thought
it best to give her boy into the charge of Peggy and to go over to
Torque Hall herself. She waited in the courtyard outside the servants'
quarters while they fetched him, and stood with her head high, so that
the faces peering at her from the windows should see nothing of her
torment, at the corner of the gardens that was visible through the
gracious Tudor archway. There was nothing showing save a few pale mauve
clots of Michaelmas daisies standing flank-high in the slanting dusty
shafts of evening sunshine, and the marble Triton, glowing gold in
answer to the sunset, with gold autumn leaves scattered on his pedestal.
But she knew very well how fair it all must be beyond, where she could
not see--the broad grass walk stretching between the wide, formal
flowerbeds, well tended but disordered with the lateness of the year, to
the sundial and the chestnut grove. How could Harry, who had loved her,
possess all this and not want to share it with her? She could have
sobbed like a child whose playmate is not kind, had not Peacey stood at
her elbow. "I want to give you warning that if ever you come near me
again I will kill you," she said. He looked sharply at her and she saw
that he was convinced and discomfited. But suddenly he smiled. She went
home, wondering uneasily why he should have smiled, but came to the
conclusion that this was simply one of his mystifications and that he
had simply been trying to cover his defeat. It was an extraordinary fact
that there never once occurred to her that possibility, the thought of
which, she afterwards realised, had made Peacey smile. The truth was
that she never thought directly of that night's horror, but, perhaps
because of that fantasy about the wounded youth which had vexed her
delirium, she always disguised it in her mind as an encounter with a
wild beast, and the expectation of human issue no more troubled her than
it would a woman who had been gored by a boar.

It was partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous
peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some
months that she was going to have Peacey's child. It was indeed a rainy
December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was
little Jack Harken, because he was whistling "Good King Wenceslas," as
he always did, and would not go to answer him, although she knew
Grandmother and Peggy were both in the dairy, because she was distraught
with her own degradation. Her encounter with Peacey had been like being
shown some picture from a foul book and being obliged to stare at it
till it was branded on her mind, so that whenever she looked at it she
saw it also, stamped on the real image like the superscription on a
palimpsest. But now she felt as if she herself had become a picture in a
foul book. And she was quite insane with a sense of guilt towards
Richard. This discovery had, of necessity, meant that she must wean him,
and her obsession interpreted their conflict between them that had
naturally followed as a wrangle between them as to her responsibility
for this evil. Now he was lying in his cot screaming with rage, his
clean frock and the sheets running with the rivulets of milk that he had
spat out and struck from the teat of the bottle she was forcing on him,
and she was sobbing, for this sort of thing had been going on for days,
"I can't help it, darling, I can't help it."

Then Jackie began to thump rhythmically on the door below, and she ran
down, maddened with so much noise, and snatched the letter he held out
to her. At the writing on the envelope her heart stood still. She
recanted all she had lately thought of Harry. Hatred and resentment fell
from her. The promise of her lover's near presence came on her like a
south wind blowing over flowers. At his message that he was waiting for
her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is--a
shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its
mate's hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that
changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable
gold. In her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her
shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly
so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the
thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell,
because her lover's arms would so soon be round her.

She was amazed, for she had not yet had leisure or the heart to look out
of the window, that beneath her the marshes crackled white with sunlit
snow, and a blue sea stretched to the rosy horizon that girdles bright
frosty days. Even as this beauty had lain unseen under her windows, so
had her happiness waited unsuspected. She did not see him till she was
close upon him, for he was striding up and down between the last two
trees of the elm hedge. Her heart ached when she saw him standing,
brilliantly lovely as the glistening snow-laden branches above him, for
it was plain from the confident set of his shoulders and the loose grip
of his hand on his stick that he was unaware that any situation existed
which was not easily negotiable. They had evidently told him nothing at
Torque Hall to destroy the impression she must have created by her last
letter to him in which she had described her acceptance of Peacey's
offer of a formal marriage. They had not dared, for they knew how
terrible he would be when he moved to avenge her. But he lifted his eyes
and ran to her and took her in his arms, and did not cease to kiss her
till she sobbed out what they had done to her. Then it was as if a wind
had blown and the snow had fallen from the branches, leaving them but
dark, gnarled wood.

"But why did you marry him?"

"The people stoned me in the street and I could get no peace at home."

"Couldn't you have tried to stand it?"

"I was afraid for the boy."

"Then why couldn't you have gone away?"

"How could I when I was so ill? Why did not you come back?"

"How could I leave the prince and princess?"

She was aghast to find them quarrelling, and while he drew a shuddering
breath between his teeth, she interrupted: "Oh, Richard is so lovely!
You must see him soon. Oh, such a boy!"

But he had paid no heed and shakingly poured out words since it was so
like the harmless spite of a child that beats young to old, her blood
from that of a loved girl to a hating woman. He found the situation, she
had thought at the time, and still thought after thirty years, far less
negotiable than a high love would have done. It did not occur to him
that he might take her away. He took it for granted that thereafter
they must be lost to each other. But save for his desire to blame her
for these mischances, which did not offend her, since it was so like the
harmless spite of a child that beats his racquet because it has sent his
ball into the next garden, he seemed not to be thinking of her part in
that loss at all. It was his extreme sense of his own loss that was
making him choke with tears. It appeared that love was not always a
shelter, a wing, a witty clemency, a tender alchemy. She stood half
asleep with shock until a sentence, said passionately in his delightful
voice which made one see green water running swiftly, and at first
refused admission to her mind by her incredulous love, confirmed itself
by reiteration. "Damn it all," he was saying, "you were unique!" At that
she cried out, "Oh, you are Peacey too! I will go back to Richard," and
turned and stumbled up the wet hillside.

It is true that Harry's desertion nearly killed her--that there was a
moment, as she breasted the hill-top and found herself facing the
malevolent red house where they had always told her that he did not
really love her, when she thought she was about to fall dead from excess
of experience and would have chosen to die so, if Richard had not waited
for her. Yet it was also true that for long she hardly ever thought of
Harry. Such fierce and unimagined passions and perplexities now filled
her, that the simple and normal emotions she felt for him became
imperceptible, like tapers in strong sunlight.

The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry
frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in
the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had
left Torque Hall that morning. She had shaken her head and given a
dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had
had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because
the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she
was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to
speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her
or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey. Nor, when a few weeks later
it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had
been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next
twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must
be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved. She thought of it,
indeed, but negligently. She could imagine well how he had walked with
his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a
tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very
virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped
and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest
in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the
shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, "I must get out of
this." No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to
the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies. It was not like her
agony. Nothing was simple there. Destiny had struck her being a blow
that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was
confusion, and the best things were bad.

Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
to judge her and bring this matter to an end.

It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
that day of which she had told nobody.

But she had cheered herself in all those nights that she would make up
for her body's defection by loving the child very much when it was born.
She knew she would have no passion for it as she had for Richard, but
she foresaw herself being consciously and slantingly tender over it,
like a primitive Madonna over the Holy Child. There was, of course, no
such solution of the problem. It became plain that there was not going
to be in that hour when she knew the unnatural horror of a painless
parturition. She had not been at all shocked by the violence she had
endured at Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with
the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a
persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating
herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like
looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that
here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which
have no meaning and realising that here is madness.

She was going through a process that should have produced life: but
because of the lack of some essence which works through pain, but
nevertheless is to the breeding womb what sight is to the eye or sanity
to the brain, it was producing something that was as much at variance
with life as death. The old women at her bedside chuckled and rubbed
their hands because she was having such an easy time, but that was
because they were old and had forgotten. If a young woman had been
there she would have stood at the other side of the room between the
windows, as far away from the bed as she could, and her lips would have
pursed, as if she felt the presence of uncleanness. So were her own,
when they showed her the pale child. She had indeed done an unclean and
unnatural thing when she had brought forth a child that lived yet was
unloved; who was born of a mother that survived and looked at it, and
who yet had no mother, since she felt no motion towards it, but a deep
shiver of her blood away from it; who aroused no interest in the whole
universe save her own abhorrence; who was, as was inevitable in one so
begotten and so born, intrinsically disgusting in substance.

"Well, I have Richard to help me bear this," she said to herself, but
her heart reminded her that though she had Richard, this child had no
one. Pitifully she put out her arms and drew it to her breast, but
detected for herself the fundamentally insincere kindness that a
stranger will show to a child, confident that before long it will be
claimed by its own kin.

She always remembered how good the little thing had been as it lay in
her arms, and how distasteful. Those were always to remain its silent
characteristics. It was so good. "As good," the nurses used to say, "as
if he were a little girl." It hardly ever cried, and when it did it
curiously showed its difference from Richard. He hated being a baby and
subject to other people's wills, and would lie in a cot and roar with
resentment; but this child, when it felt a need that was not satisfied,
did not rebel, but turned its face to the pillow and whined softly. That
was a strange and disquieting thing to watch. She would stand in the
shadow looking at the back of its little head, so repellently covered
with hair that was like fluff off the floor, and listening to the cry
that trailed from its lips like a dirty piece of string; and she would
wonder why it did this, partly because she really wanted to know, and
partly because it fended off the moment when she had to take it in her
arms. Perhaps, she reflected, it muted its rage because it knew that it
was unlovable and must curry favour by not troubling people. Indeed, it
was as unlovable as a child could be. It was not pleasant naked, for its
bones looked at once fragile and coarse, and its flesh was lax, and in
its clothes it was squalid, for it was always being sick or dribbling.
Then her heart reproached her, and she admitted that it cried softly
because it had a gentle spirit, and she would move forward quickly and
do what it desired, using, by an effort of will, those loving words that
fluttered to her lips when she was tending Richard. Time went on, but
her attitude to it never developed beyond this alternate recognition of
its hatefulness and its goodness.

She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to
bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed
infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant
in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out
of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when
her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly
to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for
knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty
knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food
round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a
railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would
speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered
him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does
when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But
Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk
perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that
passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got
tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked
playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with
trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of
foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine
and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a
pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over
again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and
Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!"
When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both
his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so
that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly
noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would
take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not
share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the
best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to
a servant. He was of the substance of his mother, and he knew all that
she knew, and he knew that this child was an intruder.

They clenched themselves against him. They were kind to him, but they
would silently scheme to be alone together. If they were all three in
the garden, she sitting with her needlework, Richard playing with his
engine and Roger making daisy-chains, there would come a time when she
would arise and go into the house. She would not look at Richard before
she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When
she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious
operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale,
or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to
look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him,
knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door and stand for a
moment, twiddling the handle round and round, as if he had not really
been so very keen to come to her, and she would go on indifferently with
her occupation. But presently she would feel that she must steal a
glance at the face that she knew would be looking so adorable now,
peering obliquely round the edge of the door, the lips bright with
vitality as with wet paint and the eyes roguish as if he felt she were
teasing life by enjoying it so, and the dear square head, browny-gold
like the top of a bun, and the little bronze body standing so fresh and
straight in the linen suit. So her glance would slide and slide, and
their eyes would meet and he would run to her. If he had anything on his
conscience he would choose this moment for confession. "Mother, I told a
lie yesterday. But it wasn't about anything really important, so we
won't talk about it, will we?"

Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk,
until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so
boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love
for him as in long meadow-grass. Even as she imagined that night before
Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss.
They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other
child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle,
surveying them with wild eyes. There would be a moment of dislocation.
Then she would cry, "Come along, Roger!" and Richard would slip from her
knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms
round her neck and kiss her. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as
if it needed reassurance.

But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very
difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of
him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never
felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving
nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in
order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage
which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was
eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel
either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in
different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the
immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the
other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when
she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great
distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she
marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for
love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would
never mature.

The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another
eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque
Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed
between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she
was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but
she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so
after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past
each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift
her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she
would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful,
and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was
as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a
band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were
contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be
pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's
breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the
other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it
would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its
features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any
expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the
mud. They would pass on--their hearts sunk deeper into dingy
acquiescence in their separation.

Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as
externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.
Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house
into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers
to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though
his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of
naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when
Roger ailed--which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a
weak digestion--she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse
him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary
intensity on the minutiæ of his treatment and diet as if she were
attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on
presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter
evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often
to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start
one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent,
concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal
existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the
park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames
mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave
any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him
as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing
did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.

As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare
that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman
living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the
other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes
at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers
rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into
it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and
she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger,
but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there had
arrived--as there did every six months--parcels of toys, addressed to
him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of
paper scrawled "With love from father."

She would be troubled by such moments when they came, for she was
growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this
pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and
struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had
smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love
itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and
breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent
that it did not detect that nobody had really given it anything, and
went on rejoicing, thus redeeming her from guilt. He would come and
stand at the door of any room in which she was sitting, and she would
pretend not to know he was there, so that she need caress him or say the
forced loving word; but when at length, irritated by his repeated
sniffs, she turned towards him, she would find the grey marbles of his
eyes bright with happiness, and he would cry out in his dreadful
whistling voice, "Ah, you didn't know I was watching you!" and run
across undoubtingly to her arms. There would be real gratitude in the
embrace she gave him. His trust in her had so changed the moment that
she need not feel remorse for it.

It had seemed quite possible that they could go on like this for ever,
until the very instant that all was betrayed. She had had a terrible
time with Richard, who was now seven years old. After their midday meal
he had asked permission to go and spend the afternoon playing with some
other boys on the marshes, and she had given it to him with a kiss,
under which she had thought he seemed a little sullen. When Roger and
she had nearly finished their tea he had appeared at the door, had stood
there for a minute, and then, throwing up his head, had said doggedly:
"I've had a lovely time at the circus." She had left the bread-knife
sticking in midloaf and sat looking at him in silence. This was real
drama, for she had refused to take them to the circus and forbidden him
to go by himself because there was a measles epidemic in the
neighbourhood. It flashed across her that by asking for permission to
play with the boys on the marshes when he meant to go to the circus he
had told her a lie. The foolish primitive maternal part of her was
convulsed with horror at his fault. Because he was more important than
anybody else, it seemed the most tremendous fault that anybody had ever
committed, and because he was her son it seemed quite unlike any other
fault and far more excusable. Her detached wisdom warned her that she
must check all such tendencies in him, since what would in other
children be judged a shortcoming natural to their age, would in him be
ascribed to the evil blood of his lawless begetting, and he would start
life under the powerful suggestion of a bad reputation. She resolved to
punish him. The core of her that was nothing but love for Richard, that
would have loved him utterly if they had not been mother and son, but
man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, cried out with
anguish that she should have to hurt him to guard against the destiny
which she herself had thrust upon him.

She said in a strained voice: "How dare you tell a lie to me and pretend
that you were going to the marshes?" He answered, his eyebrows meeting
and lying in straight, sullen bars: "I had to do that so's you wouldn't
worry about me not coming home. And I paid for myself with the sixpence
that was over from the five shillings Cousin Tom gave me at Christmas.
And you know it doesn't really matter about the measles, because I'm
strong and don't always go catching things like Roger does."

He made as if he were going to sit down at the table, but she said: "No,
you mustn't have any tea. Go to your room and undress. You've lied and
you've disobeyed. I'll have to whip you." Her heart was thumping so that
she thought she was going to faint. He lifted his chin a little higher
and said: "Very well, the circus was very good. It was quite worf this."
He marched out of the room and left her sick and quivering at her duty.
After she had heard him bang his door, she realised that Roger was
asking her again and again if he might have some more cherry jam, and
she answered, sighing deeply, "No, dear, it's too rich. If you have any
more you'll be ill," and she rose from the table and took the jar into
the larder. She decided to clear away tea first, but that only meant
carrying the tray backwards and forwards twice, and after a few moments
she found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, shaking with
terror, while the other child whined about her skirts and stretched up
its abhorrent little arms. She pushed it aside, qualifying the harsh
movement with some insincere endearment, and went to Richard's room and
walked in blindly, saying: "I must whip you--you've broken the law, and
if you do that you must be punished." Out of the darkness before her
came the voice of the tiny desperado: "Very well. It was quite worf
this. Mother, I'm ready. Come on and whip me." She pulled down the
blinds and set herself to the horrid task, and kept at it hardly,
unsparingly, until she felt she had really hurt him. Then she said, with
what seemed to be the last breath in her heart-shattered body: "There,
you see, whenever you break the law people will hurt you like this. So
take notice." She moved about the room, leaving it as it should be left
for the night, opening the windows and folding up the counterpane, while
he lay face downwards on his pillow. Just as she was closing the door he
called softly:

"Mummie!"

She continued to close it, and he cried:

"Mummie!"

But she remained quite quiet so that he thought she had gone. After a
minute she heard him throw himself over in the bed and kick the clothes
and sob fiercely, "Gah! Why can't she come when I call her?"

She was back by his bedside in a second, and his arms were round her
neck and he was sobbing:

"Mummie, mummie, I know I've been naughty!" And as he felt the wetness
of her face he cried out, "Oh, mummie, have I made you cry? I will be
good! I will be good! I'll never make you cry again! I know I was a
beast to go 'cos you really were frightened of us getting measles, but
oh, mummie, I did so want to see a tiger!"

They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that
were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost
melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.

"You were quite right to whip me," he told her. "I wouldn't have
believed you were really cross if you hadn't hurt me." Presently, when
he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he
sighed, "Oh, darling, the circus was lovely! There were such clever
people. There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the
ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful
lady in pink satin. Mummie, you'd look lovely in pink satin!--and she'd
bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.
That was lovely, but I liked the animals best. Oh, darling, the lions!"

She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that
ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he
protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
suddenly as children do.

She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
rose and left him.

Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily
through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart
wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew
that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had
been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going
to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that
she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve
this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the
open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by
some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all
poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate
for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.

She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and
humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of
nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the
woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way
touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her
eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went
round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop
on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was
pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark doors and
windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their
thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they
were consciously preserving their occupants from the night's magic. As
she walked to the garden's edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass
and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks. The
round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were
hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and
changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within
the house was Richard. All was beauty.

Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother? She stood
there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew
cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went
back to the house.

She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door
was open and giving out a faint ray of light. She pulled it open and saw
the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the
jar into his mouth. A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it,
threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull.
It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that
gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair,
the floor. She lifted the child down and struck it. It gave her the most
extraordinary pleasure to strike it. She struck it three times, and each
time it was as good as drinking wine. Then she fell forward on her knees
and covered her face with her hands. The child ceased to howl and put
its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only
reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it. Still, she submitted
to its embrace, and muttered in abasement: "Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn't
have done that!"

The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam,
and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that
anybody had behaved badly to it. There was nothing to do but to give it
a kiss and take it off to bed. When she saw its horrid little body
stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered
again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether
very much force would be needed to kill it. All the time it knelt at her
knee saying its prayers she was wondering whether, when he was a little
older, he would not get caught by the tide out on the flats. "You vile
woman!" she exclaimed in amazement. "You murderess!" But that was merely
conversation which did not alter the established fact that her
profounder self still hated the child it had brought forth, as it had
done before he was born, and now, as then, was plotting to kill it, and
that some check which her consciousness had always exerted on that
hatred had for some reason been damaged, and that he was in active
danger from her.

All night she lay awake, and in the morning she went up to the bailiff's
office at Torque Hall and asked them to send for Harry. She waited in an
inner room, her heart quite calm with misery, and when Harry appeared in
the doorway she did not care one way or another that he was white and
shaken. Without delaying to greet him, she told him that she loathed
Peacey's child so much that it must be taken away from her, at least for
some time, and that she had wondered if she ought to give him a chance
of finding affection with his father, who had, after all, never stopped
sending him presents.

There was a silence, and she turned her eyes on him and found him
looking disapproving. Plainly he thought it very unnatural of her to
dislike her own child, and was daring to doubt if his own son was safe
with her. He--he of all men--who by his disloyalty had brought on her
this monstrous birth that had deformed her fate! She clenched her fists
and drew in a sharp breath and her eyes blazed. He moved forward
suddenly in his chair, and she saw that this display of her quality had
drawn him to her, as always the moon of her being had drawn the fluid
tides of his, and that he wanted to touch her. Nearly he desired her.
That also was insolence. Her acute hating glance recorded that whereas
desire had used to make his face hard and splendid like a diamond, like
a flashing sword, it now made it lax, and she realised with agony,
though, of course, without surprise, that he had been unfaithful to
their love times without number. But she looked into his eyes and found
them bereaved as her heart was. She turned aside and sobbed once, drily.
After that, they spoke softly, as if one they had both loved lay dead
somewhere close at hand. He told her that Peacey had set up for himself
in an inn, and that a widowed sister of his, named Susan Rodney, who
also had been in the Torques' service, was keeping house for him. She
was a really good sort, he declared, although she was Peacey's sister,
and very motherly; indeed, she had been terribly upset by the loss of
her only child, a little boy of nine, so she would doubtless welcome the
charge of Roger. At any rate, there would be no harm in letting the
child go to her for a three months' visit.

"I'll settle the whole thing," he said. "You'd better not write; he may
want to meet you."

With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything
useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she
abruptly rose to go. But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity
that had vexed her for years.

"Tell me," she asked. "How did you get rid of Peacey? Was it money?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Not altogether. You see, I found out
something about him...."

She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had
perpetuated.

So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation.
She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her
brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper
lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow
floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And
because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was
sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at
Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance
at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she
found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been
in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which
was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as
to how he was getting on at Dawlish.

"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would
begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer,
and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious
man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that
which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated
her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.

Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by
explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had
suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she
could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to
win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and
be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly
in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely
she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had
gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the
other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been
subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read
book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to
this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not
bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood
had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows
brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her
bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the
Ten Commandments.

Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the
eyeballs were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose
and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much,
and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms
round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly
difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her,
and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her.
But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that
because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more
impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the
child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in
this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her
heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she
had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being
slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was
necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment
Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his
poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other
love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them
off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly,
and with an air of refusing to participate in the spoils of vice,
declined to let Marion buy her a firstclass ticket, so the parting had
to take place in a crowded thirdclass compartment. Roger shrieked and
kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion
said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now
she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the
eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And
there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."

All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this
plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who
stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters
wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he
never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream
out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been
sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother
hates him!"

She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with
grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus
about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child
might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She
watched the diminishing train with a criminally light heart. Richard
began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely--just us two!"

It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran
into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep,
into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did
not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the
head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he
went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the
garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a
foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not
been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he
returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter,
for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick
suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him
out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have
stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not
struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed
her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a
picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put
them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted
candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her
pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which
these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and
Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and
sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost
nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better
than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he
would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her
about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would
settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would
tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.

On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together,
and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found
the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine.
They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried
horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see
Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it
were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there
met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings,
and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the
sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels
thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled
and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its
flames.

Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness
and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and
lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it
was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his
body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and
unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings
as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride
ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his
behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable
conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his
spirit were poured out into his passion for her. She had always known
these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the
knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For
now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man
to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she
was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud
by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother
of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according
to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be
enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses
in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so
much less splendid than his son.

She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour
on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with
the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew
that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to
keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite
safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to
speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to
say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard
would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she
would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to
speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she
tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might
try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be
nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger
will always be nice to me--you needn't worry about that."

As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural
slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village
school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact,
disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered
judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of
his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which
his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure,
whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute
illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically
than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or
need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so
were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly,
or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or
workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely
than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together
men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to
rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged
to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure,
their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be
adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.

Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest
after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind
like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and
even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would
disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose
begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him
take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her
the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that
stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith
Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought
beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any
man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to
everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long
would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she
cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard
looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The
surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical
kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very
well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute,
with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to
burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest
of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity,
and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way,
"You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll
be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.
If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger,
she would succeed.




CHAPTER VI


Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking
and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay
in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone
from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by
nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and
love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning
for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later
years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the
afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever
rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as
one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own
thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that
the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle
of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it
specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two,
and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last
Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds
about the dark edges of the room.

"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.
She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began
to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning
their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.
"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys
say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because
always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down
and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to
infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.
But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile,
as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly,
"Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his
brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as
children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some
important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant
resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow,
acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has
to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.
But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an
off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the
best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"
She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had
been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about;
it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups
were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....

As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and
rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment
so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the
benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that
her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no
longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she
wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week
before Christmas.

       *       *       *       *       *

Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on
the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it
threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the
pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.
There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to
remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her
brainpan.

       *       *       *       *       *

When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he
would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.
It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so
many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she
took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six
months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by
reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to
be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was
declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that
love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy
than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not
have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the
house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then
penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant
presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat
with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she
could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor
little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that
Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in
subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his
cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they
would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished
she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and
not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from
looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey
and he knew it.

Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to
heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She
picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and
struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients
would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was
being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter
to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not
know, and then, because the grandfather clock twanged out three and she
knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the
windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High
Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found
Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped.
The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously,
and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all
the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation
of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at
once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days
after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey,
the village people would go through her story all over again to try to
find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a
tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which
the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer
distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming,
_please_, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the
favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much
imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.

"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say
afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the
extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy
with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed.
For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was
nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the
game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote
her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back
within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an
infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back,
pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be
taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger,
she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped
them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame
died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and
cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"

What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels
with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than
a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can
hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.
She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the
blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air
with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him
suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and
abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her
no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every
hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in
some way that would hurt her.

One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when
she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up
and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had
forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able
to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to
write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not
coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She
took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown
getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard
and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away
she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and
wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of
blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or
of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper;
and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said
wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into
February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and
the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.

That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn
she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men
looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her
hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.
Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.
Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In
the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to
herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God
I may never spend another like it."

But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul
walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously,
struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was
no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not
long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture
so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in
an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get
something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a
bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few
hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now
undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They
were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that
there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put
into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and
at games.

Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance
which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead
from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a
school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a
player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure
was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know
as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail
of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were
both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his
superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader
might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.
When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this
suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth
limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he
pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it
was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this
sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.
She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that
she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to
her.

But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down
Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown sunshine of the
dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his
dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of
the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the
other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep,
for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of
memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given
her with its first prick, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that
those things would go on and on, until in the end a little figure in a
nightshirt beat the dark with its fists.

For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating
her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her
that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart
which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little
more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she
coveted more than any pleasure. But that process, if it ever had begun,
was stopped when Richard was fifteen.

It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays,
that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that
she had started up, crying out, "Harry! Harry!" She heard the latch of
the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.
Half asleep, she mumbled, "Harry, it can't be you?..." A voice answered
haltingly, "No," and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and
lit the candle by her bedside. She could not see him, for the light was
too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her
dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, "Go to
bed, I'm all right, all right." But he sat down on her bed and took her
hand in his, and said sullenly, "You've been calling out for my father.
Why are you doing that?" She whimpered, "Nothing. I was only dreaming."
But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep. "I know all
about it, mother. The other boys told me about it. And Goodtart said
something once." His hand tightened on hers. "You used to meet him up at
that temple." For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and
then persisted, "What is it? Why do you cry almost every night? I've
heard you ever so often. You've got to tell me what's the matter."

She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid
for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that
the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but
because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin
cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she
desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her
long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the
shore by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him
so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips
dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the
boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"

"What boy did that?"

"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."

"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."

She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually
became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair
across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she
wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had
happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight
of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself,
"Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"

But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face
against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and
sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at
him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking,
"Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I
love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for
one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears,
slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with
kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with
relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back
to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He
did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped
softly into dreamless sleep.

Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced
by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of
guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes
against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it
is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by
calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest
dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and
she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was
binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his
childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from
a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand
what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these
nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her
destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she
could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly
concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a
profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She
did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory
quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little
figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt
nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As
much as ever Roger was an orphan.

But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this
matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed
it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How
proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to
sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to
that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from
boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen
so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when
he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids
and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent
clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her
until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She
had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul
when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship,
he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"
She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather
roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting,
did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned
away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had
distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would
imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for
going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was
not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that
travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his
magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had
found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and
the farm-men, for she had grown very sly about her fellow-men, and knew
that it was best to hide happiness lest someone jealous should put out
their hand to destroy it. So she had gone down to the orchard and sat in
the crook of a tree, looking out at an opal estuary where a frail
rainstorm spun like a top in the sunshine before the variable April
gusts. She wondered how his dear brown face would look now he had
outfaced danger and had been burned by strange suns. She had heard
suddenly the sound of steps coming down the path, and she had turned in
ecstasy; but there was nobody there but a pale young man who looked like
one of the East-End trippers who all through the summer months
persistently trespassed on the farm lands. As he saw her he stopped, and
she was about to order him to leave the orchard by the nearest gate when
he flapped his very large hands and cried out, "Mummie! Mummie!" There
was a whistling quality in the cry that instantly convinced her. She
drew herself taut and prepared to deal with him as a spirited woman
deals with a blackmailer, but as he ran towards her, piping exultantly,
"Now I'm sixteen I can say who I want to live with--the vicar says so,"
she remembered that he was her son, and suffered herself to be folded in
his arms, which embraced her closely but without suggestion of strength.

That day, at least, she had played her part according to her duty: she
had corrected so far as possible the sin of her inner being. It had not
been so very difficult, for Roger had shown himself just as
goldenhearted as he had been as a child. He would not speak of the years
of ill-treatment from which he had emerged, save to say tediously, over
and over again, with a revolting, grateful whine in his voice, how hard
Aunt Susan had worked to keep the peace when father had one of his bad
turns. It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice
in a draper's shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and
overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained
of was that the "talk was bad." Tears came into his light eyes when he
said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save
sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for
her. There would never be any end to that. All through the midday meal
he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and
would say whistlingly: "Ooh, mummie, d'you know, I used to think it must
be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think
I've ever seen such another head of hair."

But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they
walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of
which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when
I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said
that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you
didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."

Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a
kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try
his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and
that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you
knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past
eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she
had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they
ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into
the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly
excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here,
Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who
defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not
like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But
Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened
with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It
evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a
third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself
felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other
people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have
come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see
it's Roger!"

Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for
him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure,
she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome
having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But
her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it
was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of
a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his
coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he
had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one
chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell
the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer
and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and
immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of
waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are
you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her
chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when
suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's
shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to
run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to
carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not
look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice,
"Hello, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not
bear to look at his warty hands any longer, and then asked: "Roger,
dear, is there anything the matter?" She spoke to him always without any
character in her phrases, like a mother in books. He mumbled, "Nothing,
mummie," but would not lift his head; and after a gulping minute
whimpered: "I want to go back to the shop." "Back to the shop, dear? But
I thought you hated it. Darling, what is the matter?" He remained
silent, so she took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
Perhaps that had not been a very wise thing to do.

Marion had dropped her hands and gone back to Richard, and said with
simulated fierceness: "You haven't done anything to Roger that would
make him think that we don't like having him here?" He glanced sharply
at her and recognised that their destiny was turning ugly in their
hands, and he answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to a chap
who's been through such a rotten time." She thought, with shame, that if
his face had become cruel at her question, and he had answered that he
thought it was time the other went, she would have bowed to his
decision, because he was her king, and she realised that it was no
wonder that Roger had found out. That moment of which she was so proud
because she had said heartily, "Richard, don't you see it's Roger?"
without showing by any wild yearning of the eye that she would have
given anything to be alone with him, had been instantly followed by a
betrayal. For when he had lifted his lips from her cheek and had turned
to greet Roger with courtesy that was at once kind and insincere, he had
left one hand resting on her shoulder as it had been when they embraced,
and his thumb stretched out to press on the pulse that beat at the base
of her throat. If she had been completely loyal she would have moved;
but she had stood quite still, letting him mark how she was not calm and
rejoicing at all, but shaken as by a storm with her disgust at this
loathsome presence. His hand had relaxed and he had passed it
caressingly up her neck. She had let herself sigh deeply; she might as
well have said, "I am so glad you understand I hate him." That was the
first of a thousand such betrayals. The words said between souls are not
heard by the eavesdropping ear, but the soul also can eavesdrop, and
tells in its time. That morning there must have come a moment to the
poor pale boy, as he worked at his silly present in the little shed,
when it was plain to him that the mother and the brother whom he had
thought so kind were vulpine with love of each other, vulpine with hate
of him.

There was no disputing his discovery, since it was true. The only thing
to do was to try to arrange some way of life for him in which he would
have a chance to become an independent person who could form new and
unspoiled relationships. It was, of course, out of the question to send
him back to the shop, but the problem of disposing of him was one that
raised innumerable difficulties which Marion was the less able to face
because her bad dreams had begun again. He had so little schooling that
it was impossible to send him in for any profession. He, himself, who
was touchingly grateful because they were not sending him back to the
shop, chose to be trained as a veterinary surgeon, and he was
apprenticed to old Mr. Taylor at Canewdon. But it turned out that though
he had a passionate love for animals he had no power over them. After he
had been chased round a field three times and severely bitten by a
stallion with whom he had sat up for two nights, Mr. Taylor pronounced
that it was hopeless and sent him home. They tried him as a chemist's
assistant next, and he did well for ten months, until there was that
awful trouble about the prescription. There had been nothing to do after
that save to put him to work as a clerk and give him an allowance that
with his wages would enable him to live in comfort and try to seem glad
when he came home for his holidays.

For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not
love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made
him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and
half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not
take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for
his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at
his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were
so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank
Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get
there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep
things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less
misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window
than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was
concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end
of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes
following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her
heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was
responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to
ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as
everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which
confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving
from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city,
because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.

From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she
was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he
would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say
bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And
she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as
you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be
sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling
and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the
inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it
would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.
And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there
flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing
would happen. But what thing? She would put her hand to her head, but
she was never able to remember.

And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen;
though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing. She herself had
never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it,
but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had
always done its duty by Roger. It told, of course, the most moving story
of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he
should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been
walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a
flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller's in Watford
and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his
allowance, he could not possibly pay.

The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at
first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger. It had been
unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had
been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation
of the note of love. It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in
the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense
rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur,
"Oh, but he was speaking the truth. I'm quite comfortably off. I've come
to pay the jeweller," and watch the look of amazement on the hot,
high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated
into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man,
and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no
longer. Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger. Marion
felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to
feel.

She liked, too, going into the jeweller's shop and sitting there under
the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely
voice that she had learned from her lover: "Yes, but I don't want you to
take them back. I want to pay for them. There seems to have been some
misunderstanding. There is no difficulty about the money at all. My son
only wanted you to wait till his quarter's allowance came. I have the
money here in notes. If you would count it...." She was playing a
mother's part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller's eyes were
examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she
had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because
it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from
within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly
because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served
Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried
back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him
as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have
done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious
woman...."

But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up
suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with
pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took
it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into
a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the
oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.
She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay
two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other
hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her
train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you,
mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of
his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll
of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For
since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not
love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space,
there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had
always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....

But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had
written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his
allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must
try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a
situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they
heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his
holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an
increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at
first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then
in Rio de Janeiro. There she was happy. She was one of those Northerners
to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its
natives. For over those the sun has had power since their birth,
consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became
pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the
Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth. But
with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of
the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons. She could walk
across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the
heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent
pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the
thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she
was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had
always impotently desired to do.

And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched
his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had
established it over her being from the moment of his conception. There
was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in
hesitancy, but in simultaneous snatchings at life by both of the warring
forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation. He loved
riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he
did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him
in his pleasure. But he gave the core of his passion to his work and
disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he
was always cool and remote like a priest. It gave him pleasure to be
insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of
fineness and humility. He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality
of his work that he rejected half the world's offers to him. And always
he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if
they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country
that had banished them and were earning great honours. She wished this
life could go on for ever.

But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the
flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap. She did not
open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.
His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an
Indian's in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and
satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.
That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think
of Richard's actions as being good or bad, but only as being different
in colour and lustre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are
pearls, and there are emeralds. But it made her feel lonely, and she
turned soberly to opening her letter. It was from Roger. He was in
trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were
gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help. At
first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising
that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly:
"Richard, how can I cable money to Roger? He wants it quickly. And,
Richard, I think I should go home and look after him." Richard had set
his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment's quivering
silence, had broken into curses. "Oh, don't speak of poor Roger like
that!" she had cried out, and he had answered terribly: "I'm not
speaking of him; I'm speaking of my father, who let you in for all
this." She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his
face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace
with his father before he died. Not even for Harry's sake would she
imperil the love between her and her son.

She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been
useless. Roger would never come back to live with her. All she could do
was to sit at Yaverland's End, ready to receive him when he turned up,
as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was
going to do in the future. Usually on these occasions he brought her a
present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the
humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a glass jar of
preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking
magnificent when he saw it in the grocer's shop. She would kiss him
gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the
grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in
cities.

A regular routine followed these visits. First he wrote happy letters
home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was
silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job
and owed money to the landlady. Then she would seek him out, wherever he
was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards
Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the
house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an
irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home
with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.
At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.
For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become
so if he went back and lived with her. As things were, he could
interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.
Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible
quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so
sorry for his landladies. To admit that he could not earn a bare living
when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would
have broken his spirit.

Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her,
but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend
together on these occasions. There fell increasingly moments of silence
when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good
little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his
unpleasantness. For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.
As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning
to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was
something else about his appearance, something tarnished and
disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at
Leicester said to her: "I do think it's such a pity that a nice young
man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don't take more care of himself like he
ought to." Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world,
because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her
son a murderer than a drunkard. She had wondered if the truth need ever
reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind's eye a newspaper
paragraph: "Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings
for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course
of their duty...." She had asked quickly, "What is he like? Does he get
violent?" The woman had answered: "Oh no, mum; just silly-like," and had
laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.

Oh God, oh God! When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to
something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear,
but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had
always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was
conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was
somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention
to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for
daring to be Richard--an intention that was vindictive against beauty
and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not
strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit
for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's
drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would
side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.
They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness
would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped
out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that
lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness
that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.
Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and
excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she
cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been
so different...."

If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great
house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there
slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry
would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of
her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born
child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have
gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a
boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of
immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his
face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she
longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have
turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men
and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them
threatened, not one of them doomed....

Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.
The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming
tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her
house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would
not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.
Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it
had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her
eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...."

There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric
bell.

She looked at the clock by her bedside. It was three o'clock. She said
to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange
things have happened assume when they fear that yet another is
approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation,
"It's late for anyone to call."

But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.

She cried out, "Ah, yes!" She knew who it was. It was Roger, come in
rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and
squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself. She hurried over to her
wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into
slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, "Roger, Roger,
Roger! ... Why, it's you, Roger!... Come in. Come in, my boy.... What is
it, my poor lad?..."

She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle
of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and
smoothed from it certain lines of loathing. Bowing her head, she
murmured a remonstrance to some power.

But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.




CHAPTER VII


He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the
door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare,
lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,"
so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared
to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more
hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard
line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the
threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and
hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor
darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight
coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it
seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the
white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous
stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but
their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.

She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed
nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor
she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had
looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked
like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern
countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where
she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles
away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat
outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their
relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without
warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.

She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the
shed?" she asked indifferently.

"No. It's outside the gate."

"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."

He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of
dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.

She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the
illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the
phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange
night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were
co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears
she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge
electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous
son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he
passed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It
was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores
lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit
to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and
kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.

She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search
of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of
light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been
anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have
gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from
him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her,
that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.

When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."

Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance
of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had
not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his
cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The
queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet
somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity
for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....

He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and
murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her
that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in
an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely
name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way
it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly
as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.
It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his
favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to
school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow
of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the
flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."

She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but
she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm
plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption.
These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that
the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's
hot!" she said, holding out the plate.

He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.

"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.

"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in
Scotland."

"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"

"As well as well can be."

"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."

"No, I've had none, none at all."

"That means not too many. Does it?"

They kissed, and he said tenderly yet harshly: "Roger hasn't been
bothering you?"

"Ah, the poor thing, don't speak of him like that," she said. "No, but
I've not heard from him for six weeks. Not even at Christmas. I'm a
little anxious. But it may be all right. You remember last Christmas
there was a time when he didn't write. I expect it'll be all right." But
with her eyes she abandoned herself to fear, so that he should soothe
her and stroke her hands with his, which were trembling in spite of
their strength because he was so glad to see her.

"Mother, darling, I have hated leaving you alone. But it was necessary.
I've done good work this winter." He made with one hand a stiff and
sweeping movement that expressed his peculiar kind of arrogance, which
stated that his was the victory, now and for ever, and yet took
therefrom no pride for himself. "I've pulled it off," he said jeeringly,
and smiled at her derisively but with tight lips, as if they must take
this thing lightly or some danger would spring. "Where I get my brains
from I don't know," he muttered teasingly, and put out his hand and
traced the interweaving strands in one of her plaits. "What hair you've
got!" he said. "I've never seen a woman with ..." He started violently
and was silent.

She cried out, "What is it?" But he answered, speaking clippedly, "Oh,
nothing, nothing...."

So evidently was he overcoming a moment of utter confusion that she
turned away and busied herself with the coffee.

Behind her his voice spoke falsely, uplifted in a feint of the surprised
recollection which at its first coming had struck him dumb the previous
moment. "And Ellen! I'm a nice sort of lover to be five minutes in the
house without asking for my Ellen! How is she? How have you been getting
on together?"

"Oh, your dear Ellen!" she cried fervently. But her heart went cold
within her. He was right. It was against nature that he should have
forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was
sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman
he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of
destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make
time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he
had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head,
thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable
look of a man who is truly in love. Well, if that were so, why could it
not be pure and easy joy for them both, as it was for other sons and
mothers when there were happy marriage afoot? Why must their life, even
in such parts of it as escaped the shadow of Peacey or Roger, be so
queer in climate? This time it was Richard's fault. She had been
willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people. Her
spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, "Go and eat your
eggs before they're cold." As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and
trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of
his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and,
cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.

"Why didn't you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?" she
demanded.

He answered mildly, "Didn't I?"

"No, you didn't," she told him curtly. "You said you thought her pretty.
Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch
little face!..."

She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the
uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the
smile on his lips. Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air
as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to
follow their diverse musics? But she could not quarrel with him for
long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was
given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame
her heart like the advance of an army. His flesh and hair seemed to
reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with
water. Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into
some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his
mouth vigilant. Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver.
Utterly melted, she cried out, "I am so glad you have come home."

He started, and came smiling out of his dream. "I am so glad to be
here," he said. They laughed across the table; the strong light showed
them the dear lines they knew on one another's faces. "That's why," he
cried brilliantly, "I've come at this ungodly hour. I had to be here. I
got into London at nine o'clock and I went and had some dinner at the
Station Hotel. But I felt wretched. Mother, I'm getting," he announced
with a naïve triumph, "awfully domestic. I got the hump the minute Ellen
left Edinburgh. I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and
got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here
by midnight if I hadn't had a smash at Upminster. No, I wasn't hurt. Not
a scrap. It was at the beginning of that garden suburb. God, it must be
beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe. I'm
glad we live in this old place. Well, a chap who'd bought some timber at
an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a
log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half
a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a
garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up.
The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown
and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down
because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his
business, I ask you?' he kept on saying. Mustn't it be queer to have
womenfolk with whom one doesn't feel identical?" They exchanged a
boastful look of happiness, the intensity of which, however, seemed the
last effort he found possible. For his lids drooped, and he supported
his head on his hand and took a deep drink, and said drowsily, "I'm glad
to be here."

She went and stood beside him and stroked his hair. "I should have come
to you at Aberfay," she grieved. "But I knew I couldn't stand the
winter, and I would only have been a nuisance to you if I had been ill
all the time. Did the woman feed you properly, dear?"

He said, without looking up, "I wouldn't have let you come. It was a
God-forsaken hole. I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for"--he
gave it out with an odd hesitancy, almost as if he were boyishly
shy--"Ellen. And I had to stand it, so that I could pull this thing
off."

She asked, "What thing, my dear?" though she was not so very greatly
interested. By daylight her ambition for him was fanatic and without
limit. But in this stolen hour, when no one knew that they were
together, she let herself feel something like levity about his doings.
It seemed enough, considering how glorious he was, that he should merely
be.

He began to eat again and told the story tersely between mouthfuls. "You
know the reason that I stayed up in Edinburgh after I'd sent off Ellen
was that I thought I had to show the directors what I'd been doing at
Aberfay next Thursday. They were to come on to me after they'd paid
their visit to the Clyde works. Well, they came yesterday instead. Sir
Vincent has to go to America sooner than he expected, so he wanted to
get it over. When they saw what I'd been trying for during the last six
months they got excited. As a matter of fact it is pretty good. I wish I
could tell you about it, but you know I can't. Also I had told McDermott
that Dynevors, the Birmingham people, had heard my contract was up in
March, and wanted to buy me. So they got frightened, and offered me a
new contract that they thought would keep me." He had finished his meal,
and he pushed away his plate and stretched himself, looking up at her
and smiling sleepily.

"Have you taken it?"

"Rather. It couldn't have been better."

"What is it?"

"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."

"How?"

He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm
too woolly-headed to tell you now."

"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a
rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are
you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared
nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest
he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.

He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to
reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm
glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been
working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my
footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest
director. I've got"--again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of
arrogance that was not vanity--"the best brain of them all. In ten years
I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly
everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the
next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being
fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind,
who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any
class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I
meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific
man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."

"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.

"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where
it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you.
You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the
example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself.
Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady
enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be
done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to
impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes--there's a
kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work,
when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what
one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have
kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have
pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.

"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into
British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking
so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one
go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's
important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world.
It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only
look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study
matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that
when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's
not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool
that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself
with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will
die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything
on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself,
such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.

"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification
for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose
that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was
to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as
little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it,
considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were
beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so
easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just
kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women
that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here
and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the
reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is
that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your
life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me,
and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember
licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself
teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married
woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by
your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of
her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been
magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such
thing as justice in heaven or earth--I tell you, mother, it's kept me
going to think of the sacrifice you made for me--"

"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with
you."

"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case
against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of
him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being
cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband--for some man to
adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all
been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist
more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything
about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this
while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done
for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful
you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"

Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with
grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I
never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I
mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance
music...."

"Oh, you poor darling!--and you would have danced so beautifully!" he
cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself
free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she
might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were
only moods. I never really wanted anything except to be with you!" But
her bliss in him had been too tightly strung by his sudden coming and by
his open speech of that concerning which they spoke as seldom as the
passionately religious speak of God, so for a little time she had to
weep. But presently she stretched out her hand and pressed back his
seeking mouth.

"Hush!" she said with a grave wildness. "We must not talk like this."

He lifted his face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found
her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly
he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on
his hand and staring at a blank wall.

She saw that she had hurt him. She drew close to him again, and murmured
lovingly, though still with defensive majesty: "Why should we talk of
it, my boy? It's all over now, and you're a made man. This contract
really does mean that, doesn't it?"

He answered, patting her hand to show that he submitted to her in
everything, "Oh, in the end it means illimitable power."

To give him pleasure she exchanged with him a brilliant and triumphant
glance, though at this moment she felt that her love for him concerned
itself less with ambition than she had ever supposed. Incredulously she
whispered to her harsh, sceptical mind that it almost seemed as if its
sphere were not among temporal things. But it gave her a real rapture to
perceive in his eyes the elder brother of the expression that had always
dwelt there in his childish days when he announced to her his
cricket-scores and his prizes; even so, she had thought then, the
adjutant of a banished leader might hand him down arrows to shoot on the
city that had exiled him. And indeed the success of their conspiracy had
been marvellous. In old times they had looked out of this house under
lowered and defiant brows, knowing there was none without who knew of
them who did not despise them. But now they could smile tenderly and
derisively out into this hushed moonlight that received the uncountable
and fatuously peaceful breaths of the sleepers who had been their
enemies and were to be their slaves. It was strange that at this of all
instants she should for the space of a heartbeat lose her sense of the
uniqueness of her fate and be confounded by amazement at the common lot
in which they two and the vanquished sleepers alike partook. Was it
possible that this could be? That this plethora of beings that coated
the careless turning earth like grains of dust on a sleeping top were
born--mysterious act!--and mated--act so much more mysterious than it
seemed!--and died--act which was the essence of mystery! She was dizzied
with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught
hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to
her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less
broad body. She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking
about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as
unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest. Penitently she dropped a kiss
on his forehead and muttered, "Richard, you're a good son. You've made
up for everything I've been through many times over...."

"Then stay up with me a little," he said. "Don't let's go to bed yet."
He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the
hearth till it faced the grate. "Sit down, dear, and I'll make you a
fire. Dear, do sit down. This is the last night we shall have
together." She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew
to be in him a mask of intense desire. He busied himself with the fire
and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he
had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her
lap and seemed to sleep.

But he did not. Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep
of his eyelashes. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered; and discovered
happily, "Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen." She waited serenely,
while the clock ticked.

Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being
here...."

She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough
that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.

But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to
my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm
mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case--because they've got the works
on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I
shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a
place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll
be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to
our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising
his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him,
though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before.
"It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what
it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar
thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go,
hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I
were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place
where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that,
mother?"

She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened
here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a
reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling.
"Yes, I love it."

They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He
grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if
he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like
the house?"

She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.

"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.

For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward
and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked
unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"

He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six
hours with her without seeing that I must? She--she's a lamp with a
double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little
soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the
same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from
hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned
again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty
faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at
him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he
repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making
for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live."
And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his
lips would not--that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen,
there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made
him leaden and uneager.

"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured,
and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than
your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying
to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to
find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune
in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."

He made no response. The words were strangled in her throat, and she
fell to tapping her foot rhythmically against the fender. Her eyes were
moist; this was so different from the talk she had expected.

Presently his shoulders twitched. "Don't do that, mother dear," he said
impatiently.

"I'm sorry, darling," she answered wearily. She threw herself back in
her chair and clenched her fists. Desperation fevered her, and she began
to speak vindictively. "Of course it was a great relief to me when I saw
the kind of girl Ellen is, considering how up till now you've sidled
past women of any sort of character as if you'd heard that men got sent
to prison for loving any but fools."

He laughed uneasily.

"Yes," she went on; "you always seemed to be looking carefully for
anything you could find that was as insipid as a water-melon. You can't,
you know, possibly count your love-affairs as amongst your successes."
She jerked her head back, her lips retracted in a kind of grin.
"Mariquita de Rojas!" she jeered.

He started, though not much. "I never knew you knew about that," he said
mildly.

"Of course I did." She quivered with exaggerated humiliation. "To see my
son spending himself on something so nearly nothing. And then the way
you moped and raged at her when she threw you over. Seeing the poor
woman was a fool, how else could you expect her to behave but like a
fool? It was undignified of you to put the burden of being the woman you
loved on a poor thing like her--like overworking a servant girl." She
perceived that she was hot and shaking, and that she was within an ace
of betraying the secret that there sometimes rose in her heart a thirst
to beat and hurt every woman that he had ever loved. Words would pour
out that would expose her disgusting desire to strike and scratch if she
did not substitute others. So she found herself crying in a voice that
was thinner than hers: "And a married woman! To see you doing wrong!"

The moment she said it she was ashamed and drew an expunging hand across
her lips. And as she had feared, he threw over his shoulder a glance
that humorously recognised the truths which she had insincerely
suppressed: that while she desired to hurt the woman whom he had loved,
she would gladly have murdered any woman who had refused to love him,
whether married or single; and that she had never cared what he had done
so long as he did not lose his physical and moral fastidiousness, and
did not lust after flesh that, having rotted its nerves with delight
unsanctioned by the spirit, knew corruption before death, and so long as
he had not pretended to any woman that he wanted her soul when he wanted
her body.

Seeing the tears in her eyes, he said kindly: "Well, I never thought
Mariquita's marriage counted for much. Do you remember how you took her
in one night when old de Rojas hid in a cloisonne vase on the verandah
for cover and potted at the stars with his gun?" But in his voice she
read wonder that for the first time in his life he should have found his
honest mother forging a moral attitude.

It was dreadful that, on this of all nights, and so soon after a special
illumination of their relationship, she should have set him making
allowances for her to cover up her insincerity. She stammered miserably:
"Well, Ellen's a dear, dear girl," and twisted her fingers in her lap,
and cried out in a fresh access of fever: "It's strange: this is a cold
night, and yet I feel hot and heavy and sticky as I did in Italy when
the sirocco blew."

He slid his hand into hers again and altered his position so that he
could smile up into her face. "Yes, she's a dear girl," he agreed
comfortingly.

"Then marry her soon!" she begged. "You're thirty. It's time you had a
life of your own. You must make the ties that will last when I am dead.
Marry her soon."

"Yes," he said. "I will marry her soon."

"At once!" she urged. "You can be married in three weeks, you know, if
you set things going immediately. You'll see about it to-morrow, won't
you?"

He said nothing, but stroked her hand.

"You will do that?" she almost shrieked.

He moistened his dry lips. "I hadn't thought ... quite so soon...."

"Why not? Why not?"

"She is so very young," he mumbled, and turned away his face.

"Why, Richard, Richard!" she exclaimed softly. "God knows I'm not in
love with old-fashioned ideas. I've only to put up my hand behind my ear
to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down
Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas
are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this
idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What
you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old
enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you
miscall--that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed
in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her
inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of
the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to
each other, like other mothers and sons?

He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right,
mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false
brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in
town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything
really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got
lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with
her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult
to get."

"Ah, jewellery," she said.

"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented,
unconscious of her irony.

Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen,
that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and
would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you,
they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to
give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for
certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The
heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are
no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well
with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was
not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her
son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise
ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the
house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling
under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be
lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still
suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's
misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but
lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who
sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So
it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft
as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself. It had seemed to
Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the
moon's faith in them. Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights
were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion
had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to
hunger for something hardly to be attained by man. Perhaps his son, if
he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had
forgotten. She said eagerly: "Richard, before you go to bed, let us go
out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island."

"No," he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap. She began to
rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation.
There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that
there was no hope, things never went well on this earth. Then he
exclaimed suddenly, "Marion."

"Yes?"

She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of
Ellen's magic which he loved and desired to share with her. But he
muttered, "That box on the dresser. Up there on the top shelf."

She followed his eyes in amazement. "The scarlet one in the corner? That
belongs to cook. I think it's her workbox. What about it?"

He stared at it with a drowsy smile. "You had a cloak that colour when I
was a child," he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.

"Why, so I had," she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, "How
he loves me! He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good
ale that he could drink. He speaks like a sweetheart...." And then
caught her breath. "But that," she wept on, "is how he ought to speak of
Ellen, not of me." A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into
her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong,
competent hands, and said to herself uneasily: "I wish life could be
settled by doing things and not by thinking...." But the conviction had,
by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind. She cried out to
herself in anguish: "Of course! Of course! He cannot love Ellen because
he loves me too much! He has nothing left to love her with!" A tide of
exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement
within her of the pride that leads to death. For if Richard went on
loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never
thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do. The girl
would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its
heart hurt as dear little Ellen. And there would be no future. She would
have no grandchildren. When she died he would be so lonely.... And it
was her own fault. All her life long she had let him see how she wanted
love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry's failure; and so he
had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his
own needs. "What can I do to put this right?" she asked herself. "What
can I do?"

She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap. "Mother,
what's the matter?"

"The matter?"

"You were looking at me like a judge who's passing sentence."

"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who
sentences the children for the sins of the father."

His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father.
"Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."

It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could
free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any
more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit
groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.
It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she
were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.

She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was
strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at
each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a
hammer on her own delicate reluctances.

"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I
ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before
he died."

He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.

"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent
because of the beating of her heart.

Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."

"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the
afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of
course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house,
which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father
standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was
happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't
got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which
he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia
and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their
names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled
from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them,
so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.

Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went
on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in,
if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite
close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped
himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got
to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come
and see you.'"

Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The
snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left
you to for years."

"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I
took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me
all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a
dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly
frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him
saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world,
will it be as jolly as this?'"

"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"

"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said
that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise
what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had
been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."

"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a
woman, what would you have said?"

"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for
one's husband. One expects much more."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his
eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a
house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we
talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to
him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been
worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But
men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a
mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a
son's a happier thing than a daughter--there's something a little sad
about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do
with this business of having children--and men like that do so love
happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the
lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the
couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke
up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four,
and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you
and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked
if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you
would."

"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"

"Yes. It was Punch."

She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had
loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that
he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up
old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.

She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know
that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."

"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque
Hall."

The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had,
so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went
on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.
And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead."
For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she
raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that
there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling
it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't
you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long
before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a
part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each
other--and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't
matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making
something--something--" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for
some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot,
and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is
so!" she cried defiantly.

The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and
envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.

He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to
bed," he said.

"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.
Uneasily he stood and watched her.

"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.

"The Registrar?"

"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one
does."

"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in
the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there
only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"

"Yes," he said. "Good-night."

When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the
table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought
grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to
her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door. She
flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there
would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything.
She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the
passage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the
memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive
and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken
of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve,
and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad
complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and
crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were
there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered
her.

Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite
with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it
seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on
her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had
read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said
that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant
cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was
somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause
of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was
no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked
with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits
that were all that was to be seen of the girl.

"Ellen," she said.

The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved
her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should
have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.

"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."

Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled
like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.

"I know. We've got the vote."

"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."

The girl sat up. "When did he come?"

"Last night."

"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"

"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."

Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've
nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said
shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she
noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet
high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too
modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my
dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets
lose their value when they are disclosed...."

She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a
glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.
Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity,
for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she
felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but
to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end
of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a
silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the
floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining
green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored
the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees
and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like
the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the
chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred
smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls,
in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured
itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She
nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.

Ellen ran across the lawn to her, beetle-black in her mourning, but
capering as foals do.

"I'll not have my breakfast till he does," she announced. "Is there
anything I can do for him?"

"Nothing, my dear, I'm afraid. But look at the view. Isn't it lovely?"

The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, it's bonny. And it's neat. It's redded
itself up for Richard's coming."

"'Redded itself up'? What does that mean?"

"Don't you use the word here? English seems to be a terribly poor
language. Redding up means making everything tidy and neat, so that
you're ready for anything."

That was what one must do: red oneself up. It was true that it was no
use doing that for Richard any more, and that there was no one else in
the world for whom she wished to be ready. But she must be schooled by
the spectacle of the earth, for here it was shining fair, and yet it had
nothing to expect; it was but the icing of a cake destined for some
sun's swallowing.

"Is Richard a good riser?" asked Ellen, adopting a severe,
servant-engaging tone to disguise the truth that she was trembling with
desire to see her lover.

"Usually, but he may be late to-day since he went to bed such a short
time ago. He evidently isn't up yet, for his blind's still down. That's
his room on the left."

But as they gazed the blind went up, and they saw him turning away from
the window.

"Oh, why didn't he look at us!" cried Ellen. "Why didn't he look at us?"

"Because he is thinking of nothing but how soon he can get down to
breakfast and meet you," said Marion; but being aware of the quality of
her blood, which was his, she knew that he had not seen his women and
the glittering world because he had risen blind with sullenness.

"Will he be long, do you think?" she pondered. "Not that I'd want him to
miss his bath." She broke into a kind of Highland fling, looking down on
the blue and silver estuary and chanting, "Lovely, lovely," but desisted
suddenly and asked: "Mrs. Yaverland, do you think there's a future
life?"

Marion said lazily, "I shouldn't have thought you need to think out that
problem yet awhile."

"Oh, I'm not worrying for myself. But on a fine day like this I just
hate to think my mother's not getting the benefit of it somewhere. And
seeing your age, I thought you might have begun to give the matter
consideration."

Marion resolved to treasure that remark for repetition to Richard; and
was dashed to remember that it was probable in future they would not
share their jokes. "Well, I don't think there's any evidence for it at
all," she said aloud; "but I don't think that proves that there isn't
one. I don't think we would be allowed to know if there was one, for I'm
sure that if most people knew for certain there was going to be another
world they wouldn't make the best of this." But she saw, from the way
that Ellen continued to stare down at her toes, that that abstract
comfort had not been of any service, so she parted with yet another
secret. "But I do know that when Richard's father died all the trees
round the house seemed to know where he had gone."

Ellen raised wet but happier eyes. "Why, I felt like that when they
brought mother's coffin out of the Fever Hospital. Only then it was the
hills in the distance that knew--the Pentland Hills. But do you really
think that was true?"

"I knew it was then," said Marion. "If I am less certain now it is only
because I have forgotten."

They nodded wisely. "After all, there must be something."

"Yes, there must be something...."

Ellen began to dance again. Marion turned aside and tried to lose the
profound malaise that the reticent feel when they have given up a secret
in thinking how well worth while it had been, since Ellen was such a
dear, young, loving thing. She found consolation in this frost-polished
morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her
abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance
over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of
rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine
jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world
had neglected nothing in its redding up.

At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go
in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"

"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. From now onwards he's
yours, not mine."

Ellen ran in and Richard came to the window to meet her. As he drew her
over the threshold by both hands he called down the garden, "Good
morning, mother." But Marion had perceived that from the moment of
seeing her his face had worn the dark colour of estrangement. She turned
and walked blindly away, not noticing that Mabel had come out to bring
her the morning post, and was following at her heels, till the girl
coughed.

There were four letters. She opened them with avidity, for they were
certificates that there were other things in life as well as Richard
with which she could occupy herself. Two were bills, the first from her
dressmakers and the other from the dealer who had sold her some coloured
glass a few weeks before; and there was a dividend warrant for her to
sign and send to her bankers. Sweeping about the lawn as on a stage, she
resolved to buy clothes that would make her look like other untormented
women, and more hangings and pictures and vases to make her house look
gay. Then she observed that the fourth envelope was addressed in the
handwriting of the son whom she could not love.

She looked towards the house and saw the son whom she loved, but he did
not see her. Ellen's red head was close to his shoulder.

It was horrible handwriting outside and inside the envelope: a weak
running of ink that sagged downwards in the second half of every line
and added feeble flourishes to every capital that gave the whole an air
of insincerity. It had the disgusting appearance of a begging letter,
and indeed that was what it was. It begged for love, for condonation of
the writer's loathsomeness. She held it far off as she read:

"DEAR MOTHER,

"You will be wondering why I had not written to you. You will know soon
that something you would not have expected has happened to me. I am not
sure how you will take it. But I will be with you in two days, and then
you will see for yourself. I hope you will not harden your heart against
me, dear mother.

"Your loving son,

"ROGER."

There was no address, but the postmark was Chelmsford. No doubt he had
written in the cells. For the letter could have no other meaning but
that the disgrace she had foreseen had at last arrived.

She could not bear to be out there alone on that wide lawn, in the
bright light, in the intense cold. She ran to the window, and not daring
to look in lest they should be very close together, she called,
"Richard, Roger is coming."

There was a noise of a chair being pushed back, and Richard stood over
her, asking: "When? Has he written?"

She held out the letter.

There was the rustling of paper crushed in the hand, and she looked up
into his burning and compassionate eyes. Her head dropped back on her
throat; she grew weak with happiness. He was her own once more, if she
would but disclose in what great fear and misery she stood. But in the
room behind there sounded the chink of china. Little Ellen was bending
over the table, putting the tea-cosy over Richard's egg.

Marion said levelly: "Well, I shall be glad of Roger's company while
you're occupied with Ellen." She added reprovingly, as if she were
speaking to a child: "You mustn't be jealous of the poor thing. I saw
last night that you can be jealous...."

His eyes blazed at the indecency. He stepped back from the window.




CHAPTER VIII


Ellen was very glad that Marion was going out for the whole of the
afternoon, for then she would be alone with Richard; and though they had
been out together all the morning, there had been that in the atmosphere
which made a third. The whole time it had been apparent that the coming
of this Roger, who must be an awful man, was upsetting him terribly.
When he had taken her out into the garden after breakfast he had looked
up into the vault of the morning and had put his hand to his head,
making a sound of envy, as if he felt a contrast between its crystal
quality and his own state of mind. He had liked standing with her at the
edge of the garden and setting names to the facets of the landscape,
which he plainly loved as he had never told her that he did. He really
cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be
afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned
out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not
lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way
among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the
golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts
and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black
gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped.
Something in the orchard below had waylaid his attention. Ellen looked
down the steep bank to see what it was, and saw Marion sitting in the
low crook of an apple-tree. She snatched at contemptuous notice of the
way that the tail of the woman's gown, which anyway was far too good for
any sensible person to wear just going about the house and garden in the
morning, was lying in a patch of undispersed frost; but fear re-entered
her heart. Marion was sitting quite still with her back to them, yet the
distant view of her held the same terrifying quality of excess as her
near presence.

There could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the
earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat,
stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.

Richard said: "No, she isn't crying. She isn't moving. I should feel a
fool if I went down and she didn't want me." And because his voice was
thin and husky like a nervous child's, and because he was answering a
question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid. This woman was
throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....

       *       *       *       *       *

But these were only the things that one thought about life. As soon as
one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be. The world was not
really tragic. When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where
they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure,
and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even
now, since the water looked so smooth. He answered that winter boating
was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation
that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but
which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had
had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white
oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed
the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin
snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only
warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the
primrose moon on the right. She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to
take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take
her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in
the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.

Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he
turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious
abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world
that he refused to hurry, "Go and put on your hat and we'll start at
once." So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the
harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she
forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.
There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically
unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat
dwellings that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and
boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs
of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being
designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know
of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and
there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the
place which struck the same note of innocence.

The town council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the
esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a
bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with
cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen
thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too,
when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed
the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The
houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep
green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which no one sat,
and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its
base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take
the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air
had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish,
spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were
brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but
breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the
pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the
simple people who lived in the other part of the town.

She was amused by it all, and was sorry when they came to the
Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked
very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was
polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant
port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to
land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains,
spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled
beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the
boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before
had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men
who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on the
tradition of brave life, and it made her want to cry to see how
crowsfeet of pleasure came at the corners of their eyes when they looked
at Richard, and how they liked to slap his strong back with their rough
hands, which age was making delicate with filigree of veins and
wrinkles. And she could see, too, that they liked her. They looked at
her as if they thought she was pretty, and teased her about the
Votes-for-Women button she was wearing, but quite nicely.

When they were standing under the dark eaves of the boathouse, looking
up at the gleaming tawny sides of the motor-launch, one of the old men
pointed at the golden letters that spelt "Gwendolen" at the prow, and
said, "Well, Yaverland, I suppose you'll have forgotten who she is these
days." Another added: "He'd better, if he's going to marry a
Suffragette." And all broke into clear, frosty laughter. She cried out
in protest, and told them that Suffragettes were not really fierce at
all, and that the newspapers just told a lot of lies about them, and
that anyway it was only old-fashioned women who were jealous, and they
listened with smiling, benevolent deference, which she enjoyed until her
eyes lighted on Richard, and she saw that he was more absorbed in her
effect on his friends than in herself.

For a moment she felt as lonely as she had been before she knew him, and
she looked towards the boat and stared at the reflection of the group in
the polished side and wished that one of the dim, featureless shapes she
saw there had been her mother, or anyone who had had a part in her old
life in Edinburgh. She turned back to the men and brought the
conversation to an end with a little laughing shake of the head, giving
them the present of an aspect of her beauty to induce them to let her
mind go free. Again she felt something that her commonsense forbade to
be quite fear when he did not notice for a minute that she was wistfully
asking him to take her away. It was all right, of, course.

When they had said good-bye to the happy old men and were walking along
the promenade, he asked: "What was the matter, darling? Didn't you like
them? They're really very good old sorts"; and understood perfectly when
she answered: "I know they are, but I don't want anybody but you." There
was indeed vehemence in his reply: "Yes, dear, we don't want anybody but
ourselves, do we?" Undoubtedly there was a change in the nature of the
attention he was giving her. Instead of concentrating in that steady
delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated
between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete
abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his
stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of
the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She
hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend,
whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished
home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and
disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and
soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life
explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the
luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where
Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness,
overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the
hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the
squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything
else in the glittering, brittle world around her.

Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under
Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within
herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were
always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their
absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white,
view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the
hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she
turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have
you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of
her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more
desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen
had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house
with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the
midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast
mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And
Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had
noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is
he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very
poor person, ma'am. His boots is right through, and his coat's half off
his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.
Shall I tell him to go away?"

But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.
She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a
minute."

Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each
other queerly.

She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook
haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably
haven't seen him since he was a boy."

"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at
the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and
unsuspicious."

Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face
suffused with the bloom of kind, sad passion, and lifted towards her
son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the
rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if
she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful,
closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some
hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated
her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard
of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had
stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the
kitchen.

"Richard!" breathed Ellen.

He went on eating.

"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does
she want it to be Roger?"

"God knows, God knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are
lots of things about her that I don't understand."

Some moments passed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she
said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."

"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He
stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly,
coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out
suddenly. "Who is it?"

"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a
ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's
Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman
but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away
because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and
now he's on the road. I must give him something, poor creature. Such a
nice wife he had--he says she's in Chelmsford workhouse. I'll send him
on to old Dawkins at Dane End; I'll get him to give the poor wretch a
few days' work."

Ellen disliked her as she left the room. She looked thick and ordinary,
and was apparently absorbed in the mildly gross satisfaction of a
well-to-do woman at being bountiful. Moreover, she had in some way hurt
Richard, for his face was dark when he came back to the table.

But an amazement struck Ellen as she thought over the scene. "Richard,"
she exclaimed excitedly, "is it not just wonderful that this man should
come to your mother for help after she'd put him to the door? I'm sure
she'd make a body feel just dirt if she was putting them to the door. It
would be a quiet affair, but awful uncomfortable. But she's such a good
woman that, even seeing her like that, he knew she was the one to come
to when he was really in trouble. Do you not think it's like that?"

"Oh yes," he almost groaned. "Even when she's at her worst you know that
she's still better than anyone else on this earth."

When Marion came back she sat down at the table without noticing what
seemed to Ellen his obvious dejection, and began to talk about this man
Milford, telling of the power he had over his beasts and how a prize
heifer that they then had, by the name of Susan Caraway, had fretted for
three weeks after he had left. She said that he gained this power over
animals not by any real love for them, for he was indifferent to them
except when he was actually touching them, and would always scamp his
work without regard for their comfort, but simply by some physical
magnetism, and pointed out that there it resembled the power some men
have over women. It surprised Ellen that she laughed as she said that,
and seemed to find pleasure in the thought of such a power. When the
meal was over she sat for a moment, gathering together the breadcrumbs
by her plate, and said pensively: "Yes, it might quite easily have been
Roger." Ellen wondered how it was that Richard had always spoken of his
mother as if she needed his protection, when her voice was so nearly
coarse with the sense of being able to outface all encounterable events,
and she felt a flash of contempt for his judgment. She wished, too, that
when Marion rose from, the table he had not followed her so closely
upstairs and hovered round her as she took up her stand on the
hearthrug, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her foot in the fender,
and kept his eyes on her face as she settled down in an armchair. It was
just making himself cheap, dangling after a woman who was perched up on
herself like a weathercock.

When she said, "I'm going to walk over to Friar's End. Old Butterworth
wants me to do some repairs which I don't feel inclined to do, so I want
to have a look at the place for myself," the announcement was so little
tinged by any sense of the persons she was addressing that she might as
well have held up a printed placard. Ellen thought he was a little
abject to answer, "So far as I can remember, Butterworth's rather a
rough specimen. Wouldn't you like us to come with you?" and almost
deserved that she did not hear. Such deafness argued complete
abstraction; and indeed, as she turned towards them and stood looking
out towards the river, her face again wore that incomprehensible
expression of secret and even furtive satisfaction. The sight of it
fell like a whip on Richard. He lowered his head and sat staring at the
floor. Ellen cried out to herself, "She's an aggravating woman if ever
there was one. It's every bit as bad as not saying what you feel, this
not saying what you look," and tried to pierce with her eyes the dreamy
surface of this gloating. But she could make nothing of it, and looked
back at Richard; and shuddered and drew her hands across her eyes when
she saw that he had lifted his head and was turning towards her a face
that had become the mirror of his mother's expression. He, too, was
wrapped in some exquisite and contraband contentment. She raised her
brows in enquiry, and mockingly he whispered back words which he knew
she could not hear.

"I think I'll go now," said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.
Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly: "Why
are you looking at me like that?" But he would not answer, and began to
laugh quietly. "Tell me!" she begged, but still he kept silence, and
seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but
would not disclose. It struck her as another example of Marion's
dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room
after she had left it and that it should blot out the son's habitual
splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly: "Oh, very well, be a
Cheshire cat if you feel called to it," and went and pretended to look
for a volume in the bookcase. It was annoying that he did not come after
her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat
until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front
door.

She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above
the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was
at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but
because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling,
she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the
smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored
world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to
ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again
in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little
bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God
could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right
too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our
time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the
living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put
about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the
outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.
She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly reassured.
For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it
borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved
in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts
commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the
broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only
frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve
and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to
find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed
them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her
wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body
close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was
astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and
felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to
him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her
on to his knee and began to kiss her.

But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain
expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process
which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had
a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of
course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over
and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told
herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind
of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of
love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest
kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were
impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she
found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare,
bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of
tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had
their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it
was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that
he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like
trees.

Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it
was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first
there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when
one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a
tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk,
and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces
where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the
birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the
grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches
that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were
their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together;
the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when
they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making
anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves
his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he
sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad
when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.

"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade
necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good
against your white, white skin."

"That's verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by," she told
him wisely, "for I couldn't go wearing a green necklace when I'm in
mourning."

"But you won't be in mourning much longer."

"Six months in full mourning, six months half. That's as it should be
for a mother."

"But what nonsense!" he exclaimed irascibly. "When you're a young little
thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes. It doesn't do your mother
any good, your going about in black."

"I know well it doesn't, but, remember, mother was old-fashioned Scotch,
and she was most particular about having things just so. Specially on
melancholy occasions. I remember she was most pernickety about her
blacks after my father's death. And though she's entered into eternal
life, we've no guarantee that that makes a body sensible all at once."
She saw on his face an expression which reminded her that he had been
careful never to acquiesce when she spoke of the possibility of a future
life, and she cried out: "You needn't look so clever. I'm sure she's
going on somewhere, and why you should grudge it to the poor woman I
don't know. And your mother thinks there's something after death, too.
She told me this morning in the garden that she was quite certain of it
when your father died. She said that all the trees round the house
seemed to know where he had gone."

"Oh, she said that, did she?" His arms released her. He stared into her
face. "She said that, did she?" he repeated in an absent, faintly
malevolent murmur; and clasped her in his arms again and kissed her so
cruelly that her lips began to bleed.

"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. "You're not loving me, you're just
taking exercise on me!"

He let her go, but not, she knew from the smile on his face, from any
kindness, but rather that he might better observe her distress and gloat
over it. She moved away from the heat of the fire and from that other
heat which had so strangely been engendered by these contacts which
always before engendered light, and went to the window and laid her
forehead against the cold glass. The day had changed and lost its smile,
for the sky was hidden by a dirty quilt of rain-charged clouds and the
frost had seeped into the marshes and left them dark, acid winter green,
yet she longed to walk out there in that unsunned and water-logged
country, opening her coat to the cold wind brought by the grey, invading
tides, making little cold pools where she dug her heels into the sodden
ground, getting rid of her sense of inflammation, and being quite alone.
That she should want not to be with Richard, and that she should not be
perfectly pleased with what pleased him, seemed to her monstrous
disloyalty, and she turned and smiled at him. But there was really
something wrong with this room and this hour, for as she looked at him
she felt frightened and ashamed, as if he were drunk, though she knew
that he was sober; and indeed his face was flushed and his eyes wet and
winking, as if smoke had blown in them. For some reason that she could
not understand he reminded her of Mr. Philip.

She cried out imploringly. "Take me down to the marshes, Richard!"

He shook his head and laughed at some private joke. She felt desolate,
like a child at school whom other children shut out from their secrets,
and drooped her head; and heard him say presently: "We are going out
this afternoon, but not on the marshes."

"Where?"

He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would
not answer. She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a
game of it to cover her near approach to tears. Then he told her, not
because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed
to put him in a good humour. "We're going to the registrar, my dear, to
fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks' time."

The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing
at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.
He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more
suitable to a smaller man. Oh, he was terribly different to-day! His
eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were
narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full. She screamed "Oh, no!
Oh, no!" without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was
crying out.

He laughed and pulled her down on his knees. He was laughing more than
she had ever known him laugh before. "Why, don't you want to, you little
thing?"

Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some
reason. But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet,
unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.
She said feebly, as one who asks for water: "Please, please take me down
to the sea-wall."

His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness. "But why don't you
want to come and see about our marriage? Are you frightened, dear?"

Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as
he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and
said: "Nellie, ma wee lassie, dis onything ail ye?" and yet left her
with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of
curiosity and not because he really cared for her. She was dizzied.
Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard. She muttered: "Yes, a
little."

He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with
a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine. "Frightened of me, my darling?"

She pulled herself off his knee. "I don't know, I don't know."

"Why? Why?"

She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the
flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to
Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The
immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and
twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly
because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr.
Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had
hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects
was not so great as she would have hoped. She could bear it no longer,
and screamed out: "Oh! Oh! That's how Mr. Philip looked!"

It took him a minute to remember who she meant. Then his face shadowed.
"Don't remind me of him, for God's sake!" he said through his teeth. "Go
and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar."

She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her
trembling. He was very like Mr. Philip. Softly she said: "You sounded
awful, as if you were telling me."

"I was."

She began to want to cry. "I'll not do anything that I'm told."

He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat. It struck her as a
mark of debasement that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their
minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made
some wordless sound. He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard
him before: "Go and put on your things."

"Away yourself to the registrar," she cried more loudly still, "and tell
him he'll never marry you to me."

The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled
something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.
She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was;
and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards
a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden
feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peacock it in heaven, had
come to show his wings to earth. On the other side, turned to the colour
of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that
Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were
remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many
concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman. The
woman was not young and wore a man's cloth cap and a full, long, filthy
skirt. They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard
apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures
across the gap. At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces
close together, and vomited coarse cries at one another; and she had
looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at
the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than
terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some
boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners. Then she
had been sixteen. Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting
across a space. Could it be that vileness was not a state which one
could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human,
one must pass? If that were so, life was too horrible. She cried out
through his vehemence: "No, I'm not going to marry you."

"Don't be stupid. You're being exactly like all other women, silly and
capricious. Go and put your things on."

"I will not. I'm going away."

"Don't talk nonsense! Where are you going?"

"Back to Edinburgh." She made a hard line of her trembling mouth. "My
mind's made up."

He made a sound that expressed pure exasperation untouched with
tenderness, and his eyes darted about her face in avaricious
appraisement of this property that was trying to detach itself from him
with a display of free will that might not be tolerated in property. She
could see him resolving to take it lightly, and thought to herself:
"Maybe it's just as well that it's to be broken off, for I doubt I'm too
clever for marriage. I would read him like a book and, considering
what's in him"--a convulsion of rage shook her--"he'd be annoyed at
that."

He had been saying with deliberate flippancy: "Oh, you silly little
Ellen," but at that convulsion a change came over him. Delight
transfigured him. He jerked his head back as she had done, as if he
would like to continue the violent rhythm of her movement through his
own body, and blood and laughter rushed back to his face. Taking a step
towards her, he called softly: "Oh, my Ellen, don't let us quarrel! Come
here."

But she remembered then how that scene at the base of the golden stone
had ended. The pair had swung apart and had staggered their several
ways, shrieking over their shoulders; and had suddenly pivoted round and
stood looking at each other in silence. Then they had run together and
joined in a rocking embrace, a rubbing of their bodies, and had put
their mouths to each other's faces so munchingly that it had looked as
if they must turn aside some time and spit out the cores of their
kisses. She would have no such reconciliation. "I won't! I tell you I
hate you!" she cried, and escaped his arm.

Rage came into his face without displacing his intention to make love to
her. That was against nature, unless nature was utterly perverse! She
could not bear it. She struck him across the mouth and ran out of the
room.

There was a moment of confusion on the landing when she could not tell
which of the white doors on the right and left led into her bedroom. The
first one she opened showed her a table piled with heavy books; a vast
wardrobe with glass doors showing a line of dresses coloured like autumn
and of fabrics so exquisite that they might be imagined sentient; under
a shelf beneath it a long straight line, regular as the border plants in
a parterre, of glossy wooden shoe-trees rising out of rather large shoes
made from many kinds of leather and velvets and satins; and in the
carpets and the hangings a profound and vibrant blue. Accusingly she
exclaimed into the emptiness, "Marion!" and darted into her own room
just as Richard burst out into the passage. She flung herself on the bed
and lay quite still while he knocked on the door. Twice he called her
name. Nothing in her desired to answer. That was both relief and the
loss of all. Three times again he knocked, and there penetrated through
the panels one of those wordless noises that had been disgusting her all
the afternoon. After a moment's silence she heard him go downstairs. She
leaped up and dragged her trunk from a corner into the middle of the
room, but instead of beginning to pack she fell on her knees and wept on
to the comfortingly cool and smooth black surface.

"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I
thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll
just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and
looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them
terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my
face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into
her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and
found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely
guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be
dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be
dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a
necessary and noble journey towards economic and spiritual independence
it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh,
which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her
mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight.
What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real
way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be
crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer
pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it
and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried
about the town.

Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed
and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained
and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her
life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man
whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to
disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in
the glass which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate
the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It
struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from
her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was
overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened
to her in it.

She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping,
but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that
her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a
vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have
foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the
galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many
fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who
died God's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one
of them.

She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that
it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of glass
which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a
dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the
victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of
this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and
wept and wept, until she fell asleep.

It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she
remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past
few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a
light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that
it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want
to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet
terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those
superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and
waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps
that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more--they
were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was
the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep
and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing
heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he
was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he
was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you
poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"

But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt
down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face
from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent
of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words
and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.

"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute--oh, such a
brute. Do, do forgive me."

"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."

"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.

"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly,
and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and
the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my
love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"

He broke into anguished laughter. "No, you wee little thing!" He
strained her to him and faltered vehemently: "You generous dear! When
I've insulted and bullied you and shouted at you, you ask me if you've
hurt me! I wish you had. It would have given me some of the punishment I
deserve. Oh, keep me, you wonderful, strong, forgiving dear! Keep me
from being a hound, keep me from forgetting--whatever it is we've found
out. You've seen what I'm like when I've forgotten it. Oh, love me! Love
me!"

"I will, I will!"

They clung together and spent themselves in reconciling kisses.

"It was my fault, too," she whispered. "I was awful hard on you. And
maybe I took you up too quick."

"No, it was all my fault," he answered softly. "I was worried and I lost
my head."

"Worried? What are you worried about, my darling? You never told me
that."

"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. It's not a definite worry. It's to
do"--his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of
the room--"with my mother."

If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft. "Your
mother?" she repeated.

"Yes," he said petulantly. It struck her that there was something
infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might
feel against its nurse. "She's been the centre of my whole life. And now
... I don't know whether she cares for me at all. I don't believe she
ever cared for anybody but my father. It's puzzling."

His eyes were fixed on the shadows. He had quite forgotten her. She
leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling
of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.

He dropped a kiss on it and went on: "So, you see, I fell back on you
for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me. It's
funny the change it makes in everything. I became--so conventional. When
you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn't follow you because
I was conscious that I oughtn't to come into your room. Afterwards,
when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by
you, I didn't care a damn for any rule." Their lips met again. She had
to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about
anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a
woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more
fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for
you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...
that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The
corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like
my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot
her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came
back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.
"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know
why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.
Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that
time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you
might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in
the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your
living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially
happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those
lustful old swine."

She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she
had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and
what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she
had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she
was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as
if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them lustful?"

In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could
see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them
proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you
if he'd been young."

Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it
meant, but accepted it.

A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and
began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that
means?"

She shook her head.

"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."

In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured: "Sometimes. A little."

He was trembling. "You poor thing. You poor little thing. Yet I can't
tell you."

She clapped her hands over her ears. "Ah, no. I couldn't bear to listen
if you did." They sank into a trembling silence. Her black eyes, fixed
on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white
evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying
under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which
seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other
sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in
them proofs that the core of life was darkness. There came on her
suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when
she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard. She
remembered it with a singular lack of dismay. There ran through her on
the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new
experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid
annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had
fallen down about her shoulders. They stood easily together in the light
of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head,
he looking down on the disordered glory.

"But what's that for?" he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the
middle of the floor.

Her eyes filled with tears. "I was packing to go back to Edinburgh."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said solemnly. "I came near to imperilling a
perfect thing." He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss
her, but she started away from him.

"Oh, maircy! What cold hands!" she exclaimed.

"I've been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle. It was
freezing. And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and
shaking with rage."

"You poor silly thing!" she cried lovingly. "Give me yon bits of ice!"
She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.

For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great
for him to bear, and he whispered: "This is all it is! This is all it
is!"

"What do you mean?" she murmured.

"What you fear ... is just like this. You will comfort my whole body as
you are comforting my hands...."

She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her
face, and she answered loudly, plangently: "Then I shall not be afraid!"
They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy: "I will marry
you any day you like." When he answered, "No, no, I will wait," she
jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I
want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they
travelled far into a new sphere of love.

It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from
her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express
train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her
that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.
But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder
out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and
pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear.
She swung round to see what it was.

A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.
Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that
the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what
was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with
her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that
these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet
interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut
unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass
buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the
woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored
skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were
ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."

The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting
clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the
shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they
should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured
the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect
harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in
disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.
She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into
their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection
and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover
what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.
There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united
several qualities that one would not have thought could be found
together. She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet
worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at
the shoulders as if she were fragile. But the man was odd enough. He was
pale and had a very long neck, and wore an expression of extreme
foolishness. From the frown with which he was accompanying his gaping
stare it was evident that his mind was so vague and wandering that he
found it difficult to concentrate it; she was reminded of an inexpert
person she had once seen trying to put a white rabbit into a bag. She
looked again at the girl, with that contempt she felt, now that she had
Richard, for all women who let themselves mate with unworthy men, and
found that her dark eyes were fixed sullenly, almost hungrily, on
Richard. She laid her hand on Richard's arm and cried: "If it's not
impudence, it's the next thing to it, staring like that into a pairson's
room! They're collecting, I suppose. Away and give them a penny."

"No," said Richard. "They are not collecting. That is Roger."




CHAPTER IX


Ellen could not understand why Richard whispered explosively as they
turned away from the window: "Pin up your hair! Quickly! We must go down
at once!" or why he hurried her downstairs without giving her time to
use her brush and comb. When they got down into the old parlour Richard
went to the side door that opened into the farmyard and flung it open,
beginning a sentence of greeting, but there was nothing to be seen but
the grey sheds, the wood-pile, and the puddle-pocked ground. He uttered
an exasperated exclamation, and drew it to, saying to Ellen: "Open the
front door! Please, dear." She did so, but saw nothing save the dark and
narrow garden and the black trees against the white north sky. "What in
Christ's name are they doing?" Richard burst out, and flung open the
side door again. Both put their heads out over the threshold to see if
the two visitors were standing about anywhere, and a gust of wind that
was making the trees beat their arms darted down on the house and turned
the draught between the two open doors into a hurricane. Ellen squealed
as her door banged and struck her shoulder before she had time to steer
clear of it. "Oh, my poor darling!" said Richard, and he was coming
towards her, when they heard the glug-glug-glug of water dripping from
the table to the floor, and saw that the draught had overturned a vase
filled with silver boughs of honesty. He picked it up and uttered
another bark of exasperation, for it had cracked across and he had cut
his hand on the sharp edge of the china.

"Oh, damn! oh, damn! oh, damn!" he cried, in a voice that rage made
high-pitched and childish, sucking his finger in between the words.
"What a filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two
halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of
distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered
uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a
desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the
maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards
the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved
it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round
till I've found that fool and that woman! This is some new
folly--probably I'll have to get him away before mother comes! Come on!
Perhaps they're hanging about the garden, though God knows why!" After
making a savage movement towards the broken vase, as if he could not
bear to leave the disorder as it was, and checking it abruptly,
jarringly, he rushed into the dining-room, and Ellen followed him.

The two were there, their faces pressed against the window-panes. Behind
them the grey waste of stormy shallow waters, and the salt-dimmed
pastures, and the black range of the Kentish hills, hung with
grape-purple rainclouds, made it apparent how much greater dignity
belongs to the earth and sea than to those who people them. As Richard
and Ellen halted at the door the faces receded from the glass. The woman
stepped backwards and, looking as if she were being moved on by a
policeman, passed suddenly out of sight beyond the window's edge.
Richard crossed the room and opened the French window, but by the time
he had unlocked it the man in uniform, who had been beckoning to his
companion with long bony hands, had gone in search of her. As Richard
put his head round the door to bid them enter, the wind, which was now
rushing round the house, made itself felt as a chill commotion, an icy
anger of the air, in which both he and Ellen shivered. Presently the
pair in uniform appeared again, but at some distance across the lawn,
and too intensely absorbed in argument to pay any attention to him.

"Oh, damn! oh, damn!" sobbed Richard. The wind was blowing earth-daubed
leaves off the flowerbeds through the open door into the prim room. He
stepped into the gale and shouted: "Roger! Roger! Come in!"

Roger waved his arms, which were too long for the sleeves of his coat,
and from his mouthings it was evident that he was shouting back, but the
wind took it all. In anger Richard stepped back into the room and made
as if to close the doors, and at that the two on the lawn ran towards
the house, with that look which common people have when they run for a
train, as if their feet were buckling up under them. Richard held the
door wide again, but when the couple reached the path in front of the
house they were once more seized with a doubt about entering and came to
a standstill.

"Come in," said Richard; "come in."

The man took off his cap and ran his hands through his pale, long hair.
"Is mother in?" he demanded in a thin, whistling voice.

"Come in," said Richard; "come in."

The man began: "Well, if mother's not in, I don't know--"

Richard fixed his eyes on the woman's face. "Come in," he said softly,
brutally, loathingly. Ellen shivered to hear him speak thus to a woman
and to see a woman take it thus, for at once the stranger moved forward
to the window and stepped into the room. As she brushed by him she
cringingly bowed her shoulders a little, and looked up at him as he
stood a head and shoulders higher than herself. He looked back steadily
and made no sign of seeing her save by a slight compression of the lips,
until she passed on with dragging feet and stood listlessly in the
middle of the room. It was evident that they completely understood one
another, and yet their understanding sprung from no recollection of any
previous encounter, for into the eyes of neither did there come any
flash of recognition. There could be no doubt that Richard was feeling
nothing but contempt for this woman, and her peaked yet rich-coloured
face expressed only sick sullenness; yet Ellen felt a rage like
jealousy.

Richard turned again to the garden, and said: "Come in."

"Now don't be high-handed, old man," expostulated the stranger. But then
he seemed to remember something, and stretched out both his arms, held
them rigid, and opened his mouth wide as if to speak very loudly. But no
sound came, and his arms dropped, and his long bony hands pawed the air.
Then suddenly his arms shot out again, and he exclaimed very quickly in
a high, strained voice: "Pride has always been your besetting sin,
Richard. You aren't a bad chap in any way that I know of. But you're
proud. And it doesn't become any of us to be proud"--his spirit was
shaking the words out of his faltering flesh--"for we're all miserable
sinners. You needn't order me"--he spoke more glibly now, the flesh and
the spirit seemed in complete agreement--"to come out of the garden like
that. I wish Poppy hadn't gone in." He caught his breath with something
like a sob; but the woman in uniform made no movement, and turned her
eyes to Richard's face as if it were he that must give the order. "I've
got a reason for staying out here. I know mother's not got Jesus. If
she's ashamed of me now that I'm one of Jesus' soldiers, I won't come
in. I'll go and wrestle on my knees for her soul, but I won't hurt her
by coming in. So here I stay till she tells me to come in."

"But she's out," said Richard.

The man in uniform was discomfited. The light went out of his face and
his mouth remained open. He shifted his weight from one foot to the
other and muttered: "Ooh-er, is she?"

"Yes," said Richard pleasantly. "She's gone over to Friar's End, but
she'll be back any time now. I wish you'd come in. I haven't seen you
for years, and I'd like to swap yarns with you about what we've been
doing all the time."

"You'd have the most to tell," answered the other wistfully. "You've
been here, there, and everywhere in foreign parts. And I haven't been
doing nothing at all. Except--" he added, brightening up, "being saved."

"That's your own fault," Richard told him. "I've often wondered why you
didn't try your luck abroad. You'd have been sure to hold your own.
Well, anyway, come in and have some tea. I don't know what mother would
say to me if she came in and found I'd let you stay out in the cold.
She'd be awfully upset."

"Do you think she would?" the man in uniform asked, and seemed to
ponder. He looked up at the grey sky and shivered. "'Tis getting
coldish. And the cloth this uniform is made from isn't the sort that
keeps out cold weather. God knows I don't want to grumble at the uniform
I wear for Jesus' sake, but me having been in the drapery, I can't help
noticing when a thing is cheap." He stared down at his toes for a time,
lifting alternately his heels and pressing them down into the wet
gravel; then raised his head and said nonchalantly: "Well, old man, I
think I will come in after all." But he halted yet again when he got one
foot over the threshold. "Mind you, I'm not coming in just because it's
cold," he began, but Richard, exclaimed, "Yes, yes! Of course I know
you're not!" and gripped him by the arm and pulled him into the room. He
did not seem to resent the rough treatment at all, and went over at once
to the woman in uniform, and, looking happily about him, cried: "Isn't
this a lovely home? I always say there's nobody got such a nice home as
my mother."

His voice whistled; and Ellen in her mind's eye saw a vision of some
clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy
and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and
breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise.
She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard,
meaning to tell him by a smile that she would help him to be kind to
Roger. But Richard was still occupying himself with the window,
examining with an air of irascibility a stain of blood which his cut
finger had left on the white paint near the lock. His eyes travelled
from it to the muddy footprints of the two who had come in from the
garden and to the spatter of earth-daubed leaves on the polished floor,
and his mouth drew down at the corners in a grimace of passion that made
Ellen long to run to him and kiss him and bid him not give way to the
madness of order so prevalent in this house. But he did not even look at
her, so she could do nothing for him.

He went forward to Roger, determinedly sweetening his face, and shook
his hand heartily. "It's good that you should have turned up just at
this moment, for I'm going to be married before long to Miss Melville,
whom I met in Scotland when I was working at Aberfay. Ellen, this is my
brother, Roger."

Roger took Ellen's hand and then seemed to remember something. After
exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked
steadfastly into her face and said sombrely: "I hope all's well with
you, sister! I hope all's well with you!"

"Pairfectly," answered Ellen; and after a pause added, shyly: "And I'm
pleased to meet you. I hope anyone that's dear to Richard will be
friends with me."

He flung his head backwards and cried, in that whistling voice: "Yes,
I'll be that! And I'm a friend worth having now I've got Jesus! And He's
given me Poppy too! Aha, old man!" With a little difficulty he put both
his thumbs inside the corked edge of his armholes and began to stride up
and down, taking steps unnaturally long for thin legs. "You aren't the
only man who's thought of getting married! Great minds think alike, they
say!" With a flourish he stretched out his hand, and it was plain that
he thought he would touch the woman in uniform, though he was some feet
away. Richard's and Ellen's eyes met; it was repulsive to see a man
dizzied by so small a draught of excitement. "Richard, Miss Melville,
this is Lieutenant Poppy, who's going to be my wife."

It was difficult to know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although
she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which
conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was
glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted
darkness of her eyes.

"We're going to be married as soon as I've served my year of probation.
That's a long time ahead, for I've only been at it a fortnight. I expect
you'll be getting married much sooner. Things always went easier with
you than me," he complained. "But it'll be a happy day when it comes,
and I get the two blessings at the same time, becoming a full soldier of
Jesus and marrying Poppy. She's nearly a full soldier already. She
joined the Army seven months ago."

"Do you preach in the streets?" asked Richard.

Roger's eyes filled with water. Ellen reflected that he must be
curiously sensitive for one so dull-witted, for the rage and disgust
behind the question had hardly shown their heads. "Yes, I do!" he said
pettishly. "And if Jesus doesn't object, I don't see why you should."

"I don't object at all," Richard assured him amiably. "I only wondered
what sort of work you did. I suppose you haven't come to work at the
Hallelujah Colony here, have you?"

"That's just what I've done!" answered Roger joyfully. "I joined up at
Margate and I've laboured there for three weeks. I didn't do so bad. Did
I, Poppy? Not for a start? No one could exactly shine at street
preaching at first, you know. They will laugh so. But I didn't do worse
than other people when they begin, did I, Poppy? However, they've
transferred me over here to the Colony, to do clerk work." He added with
a touch of defiance: "And, of course, they'll want me to take services
too, sometimes. In fact I'm going to take a service this evening."

"How long are you to be here?"

"Maybe always. They may feel I do the best work for Jesus here." He drew
a deep, shuddering breath, and took his cap off and threw it on the
table with a convulsive gesture. "If mother doesn't turn me away because
I've given myself to Jesus," he said with that whistling note, "I'll be
able to see her every day."

"She won't turn you away."

There was folly, there was innocence in Roger's failure to notice that
Richard was speaking not in reassurance but in grimness, as one might
speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place
where he stood. "You ought to know, old chap," he murmured hopefully.
"She's always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me.... I
don't know.... Oh, I've prayed...."

"Well, you'll know for yourself in a minute," said Richard. "I heard the
front door open and close a second ago."

Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the
sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached
him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother's being. She
longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all
the other things, but again he wouldn't pay attention to her. Indeed, he
could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up
to pain and apprehension. Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the
case against Roger. He was sickening like something that has been fried
in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral
flaw made it all the more sinister. If there was not vileness in his
will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded
into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor,
and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair. She looked at him
accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum
version of the emotion of embarrassment was sucking and gnawing one of
her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true
love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used
despitefully. Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.

The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger. But when
Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else,
because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held
in her hand.

There was stillness till Richard whispered: "Mother."

She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, "Oh,
Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the
parlour."

He answered softly: "No one broke it. The wind blew it down when I
opened the door to Roger."

Her eyes did not move from his. Her mouth was a round hole. He put out
his hand to take the piece of china from her. They both gazed down on
it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance. She gave it to
him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger. When she found him
she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the brass buttons, and
the brass studs on his high collar. Then she became aware of the woman,
and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her
uniform. His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it
up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters
on the magenta ribbon.

"So you've joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?" she said, in that
muffled, indifferent tone.

"Yes," he murmured.

"Do you preach in the streets?" Her voice shook.

"Yes," he whispered.

She gave the cap another turn on her hand. "Are you happy?" she asked,
again indifferently.

"Yes," he whispered.

She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him.
"Oh, my boy!" she cried. "Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at
last!" Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room,
and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger
crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all
soft, mothering curves to him.

Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor. Roger's sobbing made a
queer noise. Ahé ... ahé ... ahé.... It had an unmechanical sound, like
the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard's
motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a
mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an
unmechanical situation. It must break down soon. She looked across at
Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but
not so dejected as she might have feared. It struck her that he was
finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the
situation which was making her grieve--which must, she realised with a
stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with
that wrongness. He would rather have things as they were, and see his
mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been
natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing
her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their
children do. Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the
far view of the river and the marshes.

"Oh, mother!" spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion.
"I'm a rich man now! I've got Jesus, and you, and Poppy! Mother, this is
Poppy, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can."

The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as
if she would have liked to jump through it. One could imagine her
alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some
small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short
hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and
abjectly: "I didn't want to come."

Marion answered smoothly: "But now that you are here, how glad I am
that you have," and took her two hands and patted them. Looking round
benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed: "I'm
a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week." She was
behaving like an old mother in an advertisement, like the silver-haired
old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh's
toffee or who reads the _Weekly Telegraph_ in plaques at
railway-stations. The rapidity with which she had changed from the
brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching
hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been
resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the
perfection with which she had assumed this bland and glossy personality
at a moment's notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration. She liked
the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate. She was
glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel
proud on joining a pirate crew. She went over and stood beside Richard
and slipped her arm through his. Uneasily she was aware that now she,
too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it
was. She drooped her head against Richard's shoulder, and hoped all
might be well with all of them.

"You see, mother, since I saw you I've had trouble--I've had trouble--"
Roger was stammering.

Marion turned from him to Richard. "Ring for tea," she said, "and turn
on the lights. All the lights. Even the lights we don't generally use."

Roger clung to her. "I don't want to hide anything from you, mother," he
began, but she cut him short. "Oh, what cold hands! Oh, what cold
hands!" she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him. As the lights went
up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in
the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as
long and yellowish and covered with warts. The parlourmaid came in and,
over her shoulder, Marion said easily: "Tea now, Mabel. There're five of
us. And we'll have it down here at the table."

She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an
armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a
look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it
became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that
Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant
was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when
she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies
the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short
and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been
talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in
watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation,
which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched
Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in
their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors,
were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor
her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly
to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned
and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body,
taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of
attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was
no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.

"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a
second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been
very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm
cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on
the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward.
And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard
and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about
it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that
she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs
had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was
this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate
Broadway--"

The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they
all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she
nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways
they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at _Margate_."

"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got,
Poppy!"

Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided
shoulders as she passed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and
take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be
very comfortable when one's tired."

Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red
fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at
once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed
thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular
curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round
Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls
horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember
also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses
dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the
bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of
sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand
among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for
the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave
her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones
marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared
that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her
bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to
destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was,
perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there
had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned
effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the
pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind
the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking
just like this; but it was gone immediately.

"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going
along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band
playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to
pass it by--think of it, mother, I was going to pass it by!--when the
band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy.
Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful
voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a
pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw
her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was
plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked
straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that
is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother
for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were
really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but
when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you
know, mother, Poppy _is_ Spanish--half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her
mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good
family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died
when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by
a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married
again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other
side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very
godless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man
who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted
to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so
cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she
never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as
she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."

After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the
appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."

The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.

"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung
about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got
Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden
pale, febrile passion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to
their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"

"Yes, Roger," she answered him. "You'll be very happy--a husband that
any woman would be proud of."

"Oh, I'm not nearly good enough for Poppy," he said deprecatingly. He
seemed used to Poppy's silence, and, indeed, whenever her silent absence
from speech was most marked, he bent towards her in a tender attitude
which showed a resolution to regard it as maidenly bashfulness. "Well,
to get back to my story. I stood there peering through the crowd for
another look at her, and an officer began preaching. Captain Harris it
was. I didn't take any particular notice of him." He jerked his whitish
face about contemptuously. "He's a poor preacher, isn't he, Poppy? He
never gets a grip on the crowd, does he? And they can't hear him beyond
the first few rows. I don't think I heard more than a few sentences that
first evening. If I'd had been in the Army as many years as he has, and
I couldn't preach any better than that, I'd find some other way of
serving Jesus. I would really.

"But after that"--he stopped, looked at some vision in the air before
him which filled his eyes with tears and fire, and sighed
deeply--"Captain Sampson preached the gospel. It's Captain Sampson I've
been working under since I joined the Army. Oh, mother, mother, I wish
you could hear him preach. He would give you Jesus. That first evening I
heard him I saw Jesus as plain as I see you. I saw Him then looking
fierce like He was when He scourged the moneychangers out of the temple.
But when I'm alone, I see the other Jesus, the way he was most times."
He put his head back and bleated: "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' The
One that loves us when we're weak and when we fall, and loves us all the
better for it. Even you"--he looked at Richard with a faint, malign
joyfulness--"must feel the want of Him sometimes. Life can't be a path
of roses for any of us, however strong and clever we are. So I say it's
not good preaching to go on always about fighting for Jesus and being a
good soldier, and making it seem as if religion was just another trouble
we had to face." His voice broke with petulance. "It's a shame not to
show people Gentle Jesus."

He checked himself. Remorse ran red under his pale skin. "What am I
saying?" he cried out. "Captain Sampson is a holy man! If he's harsh to
those that work under him it's right he should be. God chasteneth whom
He loveth, and it's the same way with Captain Sampson I expect. It's
really a way of showing that he cares about you and is anxious about
you. And anyway, he did give me Jesus that evening. Oh, mother, it was
so wonderful!" The words rushed out of him. "He made you feel all
tingling like you do when the fire engine goes past. Oh, it's an evening
to remember! And it gave me Jesus! Oh, mother, you don't know what it's
like to find Jesus! To know"--his voice whistled exultantly over the
stricken tea-table--"that there's Somebody who really loves you!"

For one second Marion covered her face with her hands.

Unseeingly he piped on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into
thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night,
instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that
happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been
born as I wasn't any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel
lovely and warm. And I've got earthly happiness as well. I've got Poppy.
Oh, I'm a lucky man, lucky man! And I've got a lifework instead of being
an odd-come-short. I'll always have something to do now. They've had
experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into
soldiers for Jesus. Surely they'll be able to find some work for me,
even if they don't want me to preach. Look at what I'm going to do now.
Even if I don't do anything but clerk work, it's helping the Labour
Colony along--helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living
under Bible influence when, if they weren't, there they'd be, roaming
about the streets hungry and in sin. I'll be doing my bit, won't I,
mother?"

She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.

Ellen felt contemptuous. She had read about those Hallelujah Army
Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour
meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the
pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing
with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few
hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions. The very
consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the
flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the
meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter
(which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost
security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard
talk of revolution. She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence
of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that
made this world as unsightly as himself. And it was like him to talk
about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of
things that weren't true. The spectacle of this mean little intelligence
refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and
Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common
hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingratitude to the great and
wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man
had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society. She
leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone: "But you must
know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the
fringe of the problem. There's no way of settling the question of
unemployment until the capitalist system's overturned."

He looked at her with wide eyes and assumed an air of being engaged in
desperate conflict. It was evident that his egotism was transforming
this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon. "Ah! You're
a Socialist. They only think of giving people money. But it isn't money
people need. Oh, no. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and lose his own soul?' It's Jesus they need. Give them the Bible
and all their wants will be satisfied," he cried in a shrill peewit cry.

"But the Bible isn't final. There's lots of things we know more about
than the people who wrote it. Look at all yon nonsense they put in about
Adam and Eve because they didn't know about evolution. That alone shows
it's absurd to rely solely on the Bible...."

She looked round for signs of the others' approval. She knew that
Richard agreed with her, for among his Christmas presents to her had
been Huxley's Essays, and when he had talked to her of science she had
seen that research after that truth was to him a shining mystic way
which he would have declared led to God had he not been more reverent
than Church men are, and feared to use that name lest it were not sacred
enough for the ultimate sacredness. But to her amazement he kept his
eyes on the crumbs which he was picking up from the tablecloth, and
through his parted lips there sounded the faintest click of
exasperation. She looked in wonder at Marion, and found her eyes also
downcast and her forefinger tapping on her chin as if she were seeking
for some expedient to stop this dangerous chatter. Ellen despised them
both. They had been terribly exercised at the thought that Roger was
going to preach in the streets, but they did not care at all that he was
delivered over to error. She looked at him sympathetically over the
table, feeling that since these horrid people with whom she had got
entangled did not like him, he might be quite nice, and found him
exchanging a long, peculiar glance with Poppy, which was followed on
both sides by a slow, meaning nod.

He looked in front of him again and his round eyes vacillated between
Richard and Ellen, growing rounder at each roll. Presently he swallowed
a lump in his throat and addressed himself to her. "Ah, you're an
unbeliever," he said. "Well, Captain Sampson says there's always a
reason for it if people can't believe." He moistened his lips and panted
the words out at her. "If you've been doing anything that's wrong--"

A sob prevented him. "Oh, I can't go and spoil this lovely tea, even if
I ought to for Jesus' sake!" he cried. "We're all so happy, I can't bear
to break it up by telling you what it's my duty to do! Poppy, doesn't
mother have everything nice? I've often thought of this tea-table when
I've been eating at places where they did things, roughish. Look at the
flowers. Mother always has flowers on the table, even when it's winter.
Jesus wouldn't expect me to break this up." His face became transfused
with light. "I believe Jesus loves everything that's done nicely,
whether it's a good deed or bread-and-butter cut nice and thin. That's
why," he mourned, so wistfully that all of them save the impassive woman
in uniform made a kind, friendly bending towards him, "I mind not to be
able to do anything really well. But Jesus loves me all the same. He
loves me whatever I'm like!" His brow clouded. "But because He loves me
I owe Him a debt. I ought to preach Him wherever I am, in and out of
season. But I can't spoil this. Aren't we all happy, sitting here? I'll
tell you what. They've asked me to take the Saturday evening service
to-night because the Commandant and the two under him are all down with
influenza. If you'll come and hear me I'll tell you what Jesus wants you
to hear. Oh, mother, Richard, do, do come!"

"Yes, Roger dear, we'll come."

"You won't ... make fun of it?"

"Oh no! Oh no!" Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy. "We
haven't seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought.
There are lots of things about me you don't know. For all you know, what
you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me...."

"What I said about Richard?..."

"About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help
one...."

She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a
pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining: "Oh, mother, if I
could bring you to Jesus! Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I
want!" But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started
to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards. "Yes,"
he cried reproachfully, "Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I
reward Him!"

They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the
tea-leaves in her cup.

"I told a lie!" he answered their common mute enquiry.

"A silly, vain lie. I told you they'd asked me to take the Saturday
evening service to-night. They didn't. I offered to take it. Nobody ever
asks me to preach. They say I can't. Mind you, I don't think they're
right. I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn't speak so
badly. But that's not the point. I told a lie. I distinctly said they'd
asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a
success of things like Richard always does. Oh, what a thing to do to
Jesus!"

"But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry. It
wasn't a deliberate lie."

"Oh, mother, you don't understand," he fairly squealed. "You haven't
been saved, you see, and you're still lax about these things. It does
matter! It was a lie! I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees.
Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?"

Marion answered tenderly: "My dear, of course you can," but Poppy
clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish,
considered exasperation: "You haven't time. We ought to be at the chapel
half an hour before the meeting. It's a quarter to six now."

"Oh dear! oh dear! Is it as late as that? I wanted to write on a piece
of paper what I'm going to say! Now I won't have time! Oh, and I did
want to preach well! Oh, where's my cap?" He began to stumble about the
room.

Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set
an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal. Richard
and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the
anticipation of disorder always provoked in them. "Tcha!" exclaimed
Poppy contemptuously. "But it's there! On the armchair!" cried Ellen:
she could not bear the look on Richard's and Marion's faces. "Where?"
asked Poppy. It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen.
"There! There! Among the cushions," she answered, and rose and went
round the table to pick it up herself. Richard came and helped her.

Roger seemed a little annoyed when Richard and Ellen found the cap for
him among the cushions. Having to thank them spoiled, it could be seen,
some valedictory effect which he had planned. He stood by while they
shook hands with Poppy, who turned her head away as if to hide some
scar, and when she had gone across to Marion tried to get in his
designed tremendousness. By the working of his face, which made even
his ears move a little, they knew they must endure something very
characteristic of him. But into his weak eyes there bubbled a spring of
joyful tenderness so bright, so clear, so intense that, though it would
have seemed more fitting on the face of a child than of a man, it yet
was dignified.

"You make a handsome couple, you two!" he said.

"Richard, you're a whole lot taller than me. When I'm away from you I
forget what a difference there is between us. And the young lady, she's
fine, too."

"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.

He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he
murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite
ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well,
good-bye, mother."

"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out
myself, my dears."

Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat
down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he
would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an
overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and
stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the
sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door:
Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the
click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger,
which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all,
the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn
of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark.
But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body,
and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him
as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the
dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to
their own lives.

When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps
save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber,
fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to
polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped
in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the
candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four
chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair
had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have
known that Ellen had been sitting there too.

Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol
of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words.
Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that
have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."

"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh
formula.

"But you must have an éclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used
to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the
table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that
her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties
they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed
their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite
which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than
whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be,
little, sweet, and moderate.

Marion brought her an éclair on a plate. She took it and stood up,
asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and
Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."

"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found
herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into
the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been
laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the
stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes
which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone
of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've
no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little
gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more
than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked
draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the
disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the
mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side
by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like
rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and
its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable--this tall man
who could assail all things with his outstretched strength, this
broad-bodied woman whom nothing could assail because of her crouching
strength.

Marion stretched out her hand to the fire. Her insanely polished nails
glittered like jewels.

She said in that indifferent tone: "Well, it wasn't so bad."

Some passion shook him. "Mother! Mother! To think of him bringing that
woman into this house--to meet you and Ellen!"

"Hush, oh hush! He does not know."

"But, mother! He ought to! Anyone could see--"

"What she was. Yes, poor woman. But remember I made a bad job of Roger.
I gave him no brains."

"Mother--it mustn't happen again. She can't come here again."

She grew stern. "Richard, you must say nothing to Roger. Nor to her.
She's his love and pride. So far as he's concerned, she's a better woman
than I am. I never put my love and pride in his life. If you speak to
either of them you will ... add to my already heavy guilt. Besides ...
how can she hurt Ellen and me? She's very weak. We're very strong."

"But, mother, you saw what she was."

"More than you did. She's had a child not long since."

"A child?" He stared at her curiously, reverently. "How do you know?"

"Some people get a brown stain on their face when they're having a baby,
and afterwards it lingers on. I had it with you. Not with Roger. She has
it now." She slowly drew her fingers over her face, her eyes wide in
wonder. "It's a queer thing, birth...."

Ellen tingled with shame because such things were spoken of aloud, by
someone old. But Richard muttered huskily: "I wonder what the story
is...."

"Something horrible. She's come from a good home. Her teeth were well
looked after when she was a girl. That hair took some conscientious
torturing to make it what it is. She was caught, I suppose, by her love
of beauty. Did you ever hear anything more pathetic than her name--Poppy
Alicante?"

"I don't see anything more in it than it's an obvious lie."

"It was much more than that. Think of her as a little girl going with
her mother into a greengrocer's and hearing about Alicante grapes, and
asking what Alicante was, and being told it was in Spain, and making the
most lovely pictures of it in her mind and keeping them there ever
since. Oh, she's a poor, beauty-loving thing. That's how the handsome
sailor picked her up in Chatham High Street on Saturday night."

"No doubt you're right," he said, looking into the fire.

"And she hated giving up the child. That's why she snarls at Roger.
Until she gets another she'll be famished. It was taken over, I expect,
by a married sister or brother who've got no children of their own.
She's not allowed to see it now. Not since she left the nice place that
was found for her after she'd got over her trouble. Twenty pounds a
year--because of her lost character; and for the same reason rather more
work than the rest of the servants, who all found out about it. So she
ran away."

He interrupted her: "Supposing all that's true. And I know it is. It's
like you, mother, to read from a patch of brown skin on a woman's face
things that other people would have found out only by searching registry
records and asking the police. It's like the way you always turned your
back on the barometer and read the sky for news of the weather. You're
an old peasant woman under your skin, mother." His voice was hazed with
delight. He had forgotten the moment in the timeless joy of his love for
her. Ellen, in the shadows, stirred and coughed. He broke out again:
"Well, supposing all that's true! Are you going to be honest and be as
clear-sighted about what happened after she ran away? Mother, think of
the things that have been done to her, think of the things she's seen!"

The indifferent tone continued now, although she said: "Think of the
horrible things that have been done to me, think of the horrible things
I've seen! Oh, you're right, of course. Unhappy people are dangerous.
They clutch at the happy people round them and drag them down into the
vortex of their misery. But if you're going to hate anybody for doing
that, hate me. Look how I've dominated you with my misfortunes, look how
I've eaten up your life by making you feel it a duty to compensate me
for what I've endured. Hate me. But don't hate Poppy. Oh, that poor,
simple creature. Even now, after all that's happened, she'd be pleased
like a child if you took her to a fair where there were merry-go-rounds.
Oh, don't hate her. And don't hate Roger." Wildness flashed through her
like lightning through a dense dark cloud. "Don't hate him, Richard!
Take your mind off both of us. We're all right. I can manage everything
quite well. I'm hard. I haven't got all those fine feelings you think I
have. I'm quite hard. I can arrange everything beautifully. Roger's
happy in the Hallelujah Army. He's gone to Jesus for the love I ought to
have given him. I know they're thinking of turning him out. But I'll see
to it that they keep him. I'll pretend to have leanings towards their
religion, and I'll give them money from time to time so that they won't
dare get rid of him. It will be rather amusing squaring them. I shall
enjoy it. We will be all right. Leave us alone. Don't think of us. Think
of Ellen. Think of Ellen. How you hold back from your happiness!" she
cried gibingly. "I tell you, if I had had your chance of happiness when
I was young, neither my mother nor my father would have held me back
from it!"

It was as if her soul had leapt, naked and raging, from out of her mouth
when she said that. Ellen stirred among the cushions, feeling
unformulated shame. She wondered how Richard could endure hearing that
hoarse vehemence from the lips of one whom he must wish to be gentle and
unpassionate. But he was gazing at his mother trancedly and with slight
movements of his hands and feet, as if she were dancing and he desired
to join her in her spinning rhythm; and she, mad, changeable woman,
shivered and pressed her fingers against her mouth to silence herself,
and looked down on her skirt, drawling lazily: "Well, here I am,
standing about in my outdoor clothes. If there's anything I hate, it's
wearing outdoor clothes in the house. However, it'll save me changing,
and I've none too much time if I'm going to be punctual for Roger's
meeting."

She moved towards the door. He followed softly, as her shadow, and held
it open.

When he made to follow her out of the room she turned sharply. "You
needn't come."

"I promised Roger," he said falsely.

"What nonsense!" she blazed. "I'll tell him you had to stay here with
Ellen."

She banged the door on him. He stood staring at its panels, which were
rosy with firelight, and Ellen closed her eyes for weariness. After some
seconds she heard his tread and felt him bend over her. "Ellen," he
mumbled, "I must go with mother. That fool will be too awful on the
platform. I must see her through."

From the dark fey shape he made against the firelight she knew that he
was not thinking of her, that the life she had given him by her love no
longer ran in his veins. She scratched one of her wrists. If she could
have let the life he had given flow out of her veins she would have done
it. "Ay, do," she said. "I like you to be good to your mother. You never
know how long you may have her with you," she added piously and not
without cheerfulness.

He left her with a kiss that was dry and spurious like a paper flower.
She sank back into the chair and closed her eyes again, and listened for
the closing of the front door which would leave her free to weep or rage
or dance or do whatever would relieve the pressure of the moment on her
brain. She filled in the throbbing tune by thinking of the visitors. It
gave her a curious thrill, such as she might have felt if she had
gratified her ambition to carry a heavy-plumed fan like Sarah
Bernhardt's, to reflect that she had sat in the same room with a bad
woman. A desire for unspecified adult things ran through her veins, as
if she had just heard the strong initial blare of a band. Then she
checked all thoughts, for from the hall she heard the sound of argument.

The door was flung open by Marion. She moved towards the hearth with a
burly speed which marked this moment a crisis in the house of languid,
inhibited movements, and cast herself down on a low stool by the fender.
Richard followed and stood over her, the firelight driving over his face
like the glow of excited blood, the shadows lying in his eye-sockets
like blindness. She cried up at him: "No, I will not go if you come too.
How can I go and sit listening to him, with you beside me hating him!"
He swayed slowly, but did not answer. She stripped herself of coat and
furs and thrust them on him. "There. Take them up to my room. I'm not
going. I'll tell some lie. Better than you hating him like this. And
while you're up you'll find some papers on my desk about the mortgage on
Whitewebbs. Attend to these. And don't come back just now. You drive me
mad when you hate Roger so."

When he had softly shut the door she put her hand to her head and said:
"Oh, Ellen, what has happened to me? I have lost all my strength."

But her voice was still level, and she was but a squat, crouching mass
against the firelight. Ellen did not know whether she was really moved,
nor, if she were, whether she could feel comradely with such emotion,
since she had seen the woman blench at the thought of her son preaching
in the street yet stay complacid at the prospect of him being lost in
intellectual error. So she did not answer.

"You must go for a long walk with Richard to-morrow," said Marion
presently. "Over to Rochford, perhaps, where Anne Boleyn lived. It's
pretty there."

"That would be nice," Ellen answered. She liked it when they talked as
if they were merely strangers. "Do you think it will be fine to-morrow?
Richard said you were awful clever at telling the weather."

"I can't say. I only looked out for a moment. The clouds are going and
the moon's rising. But there's a queer feeling in the air to-night. It's
not like the winter or spring or summer or autumn. It's as if we had
come into some fifth season of the year." She fell silent and sat
tapping the floor with her foot; and asked more loudly but in the same
tone: "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
me?"

Ellen was sure she was being mocked; grown-up people never asked one's
advice. She muttered sullenly: "I don't know"; but as she spoke she
heard from Marion's dark shape a sound of discovery such as a searcher
might make when his groping fingers closed on the lost pearl. Its
intensity convinced, and she leaned forward, crying in full friendship:
"You've thought of something to settle them?"

But Marion answered, with that indifference grown nearly to a sneer:
"Oh, no.... Oh, no...."

Ellen leaned back, hating these adults that like to keep their secrets
from the young.




CHAPTER X


Ellen was still on her knees fiddling with the lock of the French window
in an effort to discover why Marion had found it so difficult to open
and shut, when she saw through the lacquer of reflection which the lit
room painted on the uncurtained glass that a dark mass had come to a
halt just outside. It moved, and she perceived that it was a skirt. She
stood up to face the intruder and looked through the glass into Marion's
eyes. For a moment she stared back in undisguised anger. Of course, if
the woman had had any sense she would never have formed this daft idea
of going for a dander on the marshes at this hour of the night, whether
her nerves were troubling her or not; but she never ought to have
pretended to be so set on it, and let a body feel sure of having the
evening alone with Richard as soon as he had finished with those beastly
papers, if she was going to turn back in five minutes. Then she
remembered that this was Richard's mother, and that for some reason he
set great store by her; and she tried to smile, and laid her fingers on
the doorknob to open it. But Marion shook her head and put out a
prohibitory hand with so urgent a gesture that the unlit lantern which
hung by a strap from her wrist bumped against the glass.

Yet she remained for some seconds longer with her face pressed close to
the window. She was peering into the room with an expression of wanting
to fix its contents and its appearance in her memory, which was odd in
the owner of the house. Ellen moved aside in order not to impede her
vision, and stood disliking her for her pervasive inexplicability and
for her extreme plainness. She had been very ugly all that evening since
she came down to dinner, and now the shining glass in front of her face
was acting in its uncomeliness like a magnifying lens. Her hair had
suddenly become greasy during the last few hours, and it showed in lank
loops where her hat had been carelessly jammed down on her head. In the
same short space of time her face seemed to have grown fatter, and her
skin had taken on the pallor of unhealthy obesity. Against it the dark
down on her upper lip looked like dirt. Her eyes were not magnificent
to-night. After she had stared round the room she looked again at Ellen,
and gave her a forced smile that looked the more unpleasant because the
corners of her mouth were joined to her nose by deep creases. It so
manifestly did not spring from any joy, that Ellen could not answer it
save by just such another false grin. Her honesty hated this woman who
had thus negotiated her into insincerity, and she turned away. When she
looked back the face had gone.

She went back to the fire and sat thinking bitterly what a daft thing it
was for a wife to go wandering round her own house in the night like a
thief. But Marion was altogether an upsetting woman. She had kept the
dinner waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and when she came down
it was revealed that she had caused this delay, which must have
inconvenienced the kitchen and was sheer cruelty to Richard, who had
made next to nothing of a tea, by dressing herself up in a black and
gold brocade affair that it was sheer madness to waste wearing when
there was no company, and putting on jewels which made her stricken
plainness look the more soiled and leaden. Then, once they sat down to
the meal she had done her best to spoil, she had eaten so slowly that it
dragged on interminably; and all the while had kept her great eyes fixed
on Richard's face, so that though he sometimes turned aside and spoke to
Ellen, he was always drawn away from her by his sense of that strong,
exigent gaze. The minute they had finished, when there seemed a chance
of their settling down in some more easy grouping by the fire, Marion
had curtly and disagreeably asked him if he had gone through the papers
about the mortgage; and when he answered that he had not been able to
keep his mind on them she had told him to go upstairs and finish them
just as if he were a child.

Ellen raised her upper lip over her teeth at the thought of Marion's
subsequent awkwardness. There had not, when she announced her plan of
taking Richard and Ellen up to town the next morning and spending the
day shopping and going to a theatre, been the least real party-giving
joy in her tone. Her will seemed to be holding her voice in its hands
like a concertina and waving it to and fro and squeezing out of it all
sorts of notes; but the sound of generous happiness would not come. And
when Ellen tried to tell her that it was very kind of her, but for
herself she would rather stay quietly in the country and go for a walk
with Richard, the woman had simply lifted her voice to a higher pitch
and said: "Oh, but it'll be great fun. We must go before Sunday is on
us." She was evidently one of those managing bodies who are accustomed
to ride rough-shod over the whole world, and often do it under the
pretence of kindness. It was most cunning the way she rang for the cook
to try and make it seem that there was a pressing domestic reason for
her taking this jaunt. But cook had let her down badly, staring in such
ingenuous amazement, and blurting out: "Oh Lor', mum, I don't want no
aluminium set now. All I said was I thought our copper saucepans would
need re-coppering in a year or so, and that, considering the trouble and
expense that meant, we might as well restock with aluminium." There had
been a hysterical stridency about the way in which Marion had flouted
the woman's protests by repeating over and over again: "Yes, you shall
have them now. There's not the smallest reason why you should wait for
them. I shall go up to Harrod's to-morrow morning."

Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face
and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing
gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening
the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die
if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life
could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the
creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the
garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely.
Ellen crossed to one of the small leaded windows which were on each side
of the French window and looked out of the open pane in its centre. It
was as she feared. The light streaming from the room showed her Marion
standing half-way across the lawn, looking up at the top storey of the
house. As the ray found her she lowered her head and made a jerky,
embarrassed movement in the direction of Ellen, who, feeling merciless,
continued to hold back the curtain. Marion drew her cloak collar up
about her ears and stepped aside into the darkness. Ellen went and sat
down by the fire. From something in Marion's bearing, she knew that she
would not be back for some time.

It would be beautiful when Richard came down to her. Now that the room
was purged of its late occupant she felt herself becoming again the
miracle that Richard's love had made her in the days before they left
Edinburgh. Her heart beat quicker, she was sustained by a general mirth
and needed no particular joke to make her smile. She felt the equal of
the tall flame that was driving through the fire. It did not worry her
that Richard was not with her, for she knew that at each moment she was
recovering more and more of that joy in life which had previously come
to her every morning, though those were greyer than here: which had been
a real possession, since Richard had often, when he was tired, found
such restoration in reading its signs on her as a footsore man might
find in throwing himself in long grass: which had been gradually going
from her ever since the house had begun to draw her into its affairs.
Now she was regaining it; though, indeed, ever to have become conscious
of it, as she had during the time of being without it, was to have lost
the glad essence of it. She quailed and rejoiced like a convalescent who
sets out to put his strength to the test, when she heard the slamming of
a door overhead.

He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said:
"Where's Marion?"

It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the
window, of the dark loiterer in the garden. Murmuring, "Oh, she'll be
back in a minute," she opened her arms to him.

He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very
close. "Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run
across the road!" he whispered in her ear. She knew immediately, from
the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his
lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he
too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself
with it. She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he
avoided her kiss and said irritably: "I wonder if Roger made an awful
ass of himself preaching to-night?"

"I've no doubt," answered Ellen, "that he made Jesus most dislikeable.
But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a
setback here and there."

"It's not that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having
mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had."
He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.

Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his
face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers;
but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift
from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill
with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer,
closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with
him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a
steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they
were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as
itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times
which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found
the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye
first saw.

"'Lamport and Holt. _Bruyère_, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for
Rosario. _Lalande_, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande.
_Leighton_, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. _Vestris_, left
Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to
Pernambuco?"

"Once," he said.

"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.

"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."

"Like Venice? Why?"

"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."

She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be
suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some
symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he
had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating
past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had
made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the
silence settle.

After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"

She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as
it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out,"
she said timorously.

"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"

"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and
that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."

"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to
the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the
east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird
of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the
end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he
exclaimed.

"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen
felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the
woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There
was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and
yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.

"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He
turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been
incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me
she was doing this?"

Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it?
You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each
other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like
children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces.
She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this
trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all
day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him,
slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing
that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her
head after the day she'd had. And I could never think she was a woman
who'd be afraid of walking in the dark. And it seemed natural enough.
Because it has been a day for her, hasn't it?"

He agreed grimly: "Yes, it's been a day," and looked over his shoulder
at the quiet silvern garden, and shivered. "Tell me," he asked, with a
timidity that filled her with fear, since it was the last quality she
had ever expected to colour his tone to her, "what was she like, before
she went out?"

"Oh, verra bright," said Ellen, with conscious acidity. "She was all for
making arrangements for you and me to go up to town with her to-morrow
and see a play, and I don't know all what. And she had the cook in to
tell her about some aluminium saucepans that we're going to buy
to-morrow if we go."

"Oh!" He was manifestly relieved. "Well, I suppose it's all right."

"Yes, it's all right," she told him pettishly; and then tried to make
amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion. "I can understand why your
mother thought it would do her good to go out. If you've lived all your
life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you. No
doubt," she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she
was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion's more pathetic aspect,
"the poor thing's gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit
of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young. Richard,
Richard, what have I said?"

He looked at her coldly. "Nothing. What could you have said?" But he
went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him
hasten, and opened it and stepped outside. Against the moonlight he was
only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to
the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful
look of rage which had made her cry aloud. He stepped in again and said:
"I'm sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her."

She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with
him. "May I come with you?" she asked through tears.

"No, no, it wouldn't be any fun for you," he answered fussily,
"scrambling about these fields in the dark."

"Let me come with you!" she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows
knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be
to him sombre with the day's events, and cried: "I shall feel afraid,
waiting here."

"Very well. Go and put your things on. But be quick."

He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged
the time spent in waiting for her. Wearily she followed him out of the
window. From what her mother had told her about men, she had always
known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of
worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that
she was being tiresome when she was not. But she would never have
believed that it could come so soon. And it was spoiling her. She no
longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of
her own nobility. Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by
pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which
tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his
presence no matter at what price. There was no knowing where all this
would end.

But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it
had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had
handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard,
while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like
walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised
a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated
with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like
ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard
piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white
paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled
hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had
gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into
the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and
led her up in a slanting course towards the top of the elm-hedge that
striped the hill. It was rough walking over the steep frozen hummocks,
and she wished he would not walk so fast. But it was lovely going up
like this, and with every step widening the wide, whitely-blazing view.
The elm trees stood like chased toys made by silversmiths where the
light struck them; and in the darkness seemed like harsh twiggy nets
hung on tall poles to catch the stars. Scattered over the polished
harbour, the black boats squatted on their shadows and the tide licked
towards them with an ebony and silver tongue. But far out in the fairway
a liner and some lesser steamers carried their spilling cargo of orange
brightness, and the further fringe of the night was spoiled by the
comprehensive yellow wink of a lighthouse; and these things tainted the
black and white immaculacy of the hour. It was not on earth but overhead
that the essence of the night displayed itself. Light rushed from the
moon into the sky like a strong wind, carrying before it some shining
vapours that might have been angels' clouts blown off a heavenly line.
It was as if some horseplay was going on among the ethereal forces; for
the stars, dimmed by the violent brilliance of the moon, were like
tapers seen through glass, and were held, perhaps, by invisible beings
who had been drawn to their windows by the sound of carnival. To its
zenith the night was packed with gaiety.

"Richard, Richard, is it not beautiful?" she cried.

"Yes, yes," he answered.

They reached the topmost elm in the row, and opened a gate into a field
which stretched inland from the hill's brow. Under the shadow of its
seaward edge they still walked westerly, the ploughed earth looking like
a patch of grey corduroy lying to their right. It struck her that he was
moving now like a hunter stalking his quarry, as if the lightness of his
feet were a weapon, as if he were looking forward to an exciting kill.
At the corner of the field they stopped before a gap in the hedge.
Triple barbed wire crossed a vista of close-cropped grass running to
trees that lifted dark spires against the pale meridian starlight.

"Wait," said Richard.

He went forward and stamped down the long grasses at one side of the
gap, and then bent nearly double and seemed to be pressing against
something with his hands and his knee. The barbed wire began to hum, to
buzz excitedly; there was the groan of cracking wood, and the grunt of
his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her
face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am
like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be
true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced
and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the
stake which supported it.

"Come on," he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They
walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was
hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled
by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide
Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads.
It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who
was walking on ahead, though there did not seem any reason why they
should walk in single file, for the ground was level and the grass
short. There was indeed a suavity about this place which was not to be
found in fields or commons. The line of trees towards which they were
going was only a spur of a dense wood that stretched inland, and light
from some moonflooded place beyond outlined their winter-naked bodies
and showed them beautiful with a formal afforested grace.

"Is this a park?" she whispered, running forward to his side.

"Yes. My father's park."

"Oh!" she breathed in surprise; then, flaming up in loyalty, cried:
"What a shame it isn't yours!"

He made an exclamation of anger and disgust, and said coldly: "Can't you
understand that I am glad that nothing which was his is mine?"

Meekly she murmured: "That's natural, that's natural," and fell behind.

They passed the lacy clump of withered bracken, casting a shadow much
more substantial than itself, which was the last dwindled outpost of
the screen of trees; and Richard hissed over his shoulder, "Hush!"
though she had not spoken. But nothing could spoil this. The silver
forest waited in a half circle round a clearing that looked marshy with
moonbeams; and in the centre of the arc, set forward from the trees,
shone a small temple, looking out to sea. It had four white pillars,
which were vague with excessive light, columns of gleaming mist; and
these upheld a high pediment, covered with deep stone mouldings which
cast such shadows and received such brightness that it looked like a
rich casket chased by some giant jeweller. That it should last longer
than a sigh did not seem possible.

But it endured, it endured; until the urgent advocacy of romance which
was somehow inherent in its beauty, and which was not likely to be
fulfilled, caused an ache. She caught her breath in a sob.

"You think it beautiful?" asked Richard, close to her ear.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"

"I had a summer-house in that villa of mine at Rio," he said, hotly and
defiantly, "which was just like this, but much more beautiful."

He stepped forward and began to move towards the temple with that air of
stalking a quarry. She followed him wearily, feeling that it was not
right that they should have come here like this. They should have come
in some different way. At each step the temple grew higher before them,
more candid, more immaculate, but its beauty did not soften his
inexorable aspect. When they could see the pale wedges which the moon
drove in between the columns he paused and stared, and drew from his
pocket something dark which lay easily in his hand. "What's that? What's
that?" she asked in panic. "Only an electric torch," he muttered,
without surprise at her suspicion, and went with springing, silent,
detective gait up the three steps of the temple.

She remained without, drooping. Would he find his mother there? She
hoped so, for then they could all go home and leave this place, which
she felt despised her. The tall trees of the forest, lifting their bare
branches like antlers against the stars, seemed to be holding their
heads high in contempt of her defeat. For so to be forgotten was defeat.

No sounds came from the temple, and she timidly went up the steps and
passed into the interior, which was cut by the colonnade into narrow
chambers of shadows and broader chambers of light. At first she could
not see him anywhere, and cried in alarm: "Richard!"

"I'm here," he answered. He was standing beside her, leaning against a
pillar, but put out no hand to soothe her fear.

"Have you not found her?" she quavered.

He let the yellow circle of the electric torch travel over the cracked
stucco-wall that faced them, the paintless door at its left extremity,
the drift of dead leaves on the stone floor.

"What does that door open on to?" asked Ellen, forgetting the reason for
their search in the queerness of the place.

"A staircase up to the room above."

"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the
existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up
there, do you think?"

He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.

"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall
high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I
stood up there, wouldn't it?"

There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like
a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has
she told you anything about it?"

"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just
thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You
take me up too quick."

His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course
she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's
what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here
together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely
he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche,
though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular
soilure.

"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand
on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those
bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"

"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered,
sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to
slow thoughts.

She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands,
close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted
by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out
towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the
woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the
trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene
in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and
the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little
thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud
laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree
and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands,
and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered
with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw
suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a
dancing lantern.

She ran back to the temple. All she cared for really was pleasing him.
"Richard, Richard! I've found her! She's down there on the marshes!"

He was out beside her in a second. "Where? How do you know?"

"I saw her lantern down on the marshes!"

When they got back to the hill's edge the light was still to be seen,
bobbing along towards the elm brow. Richard clipped Ellen's waist to
show her how well pleased he was with her. "Ah, that'll be Marion!" he
said. "Nobody else would be on the marshes at this hour." Then a little
wind of anger blew over his voice. "Has she been to his tomb? Can she
have been to his tomb in the time? It's a steep climb for her. I
wonder.... I wonder...."

The lantern bobbed out of sight behind the elm row. Feeling that they
were again alone together, Ellen raised her lips to be kissed, but he
had already turned away. "Let's go home now!" he said urgently. "I want
to know where she's been."

The place seemed far more beautiful to her than it had done before. "Oh!
Now you're sure she's quite safe, mayn't we stay here a little?" she
begged.

"No, no. Some other night. I'll bring you to-morrow night. But not now,
not now."

She followed laggingly, looking about her with infatuation. There was
something religious about the scene. Rites of some true form of worship
might fitly be celebrated here. All appeared more majestic and more
sacred than in the strained, bickering moments before she showed him the
lantern. Now she perceived that it was the silver circle of trees which
was the real temple, and that the marble belvedere was but a human
offering laid before the shrine. It was in there, along the ebony paths
which ran among the glistening thickets, that one would find the
presence of the divinity.

"Oh, Richard! It will never be so beautiful as this on any other night!
Let us stay!"

"No. It will be just as good any moonlit night. I swear I'll bring you.
But now I want to get back home."

He slipped her arm through his to make her come. She stumbled along,
turning her face aside towards those mystic woods. At the end of those
paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all
sides by the forest; and there was something there.... Another temple? A
statue? An event? She did not know. But if they found it, they would be
happy for ever....

"Richard--"

"No."

He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the
ploughed field. When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row
they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard
gate, the bobbing lantern.

"She's going fairly quickly," he said softly, speculatively. "I wonder
if she's been to his tomb? Do you think she's had time?"

"I don't know," Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when
he must be aware she could not tell.

"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and
bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth
at their feet. "We'll find out when we get home. Let's hurry back."

They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread
that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite
nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance. The
humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at
shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the
lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She
was the lucky woman, Marion.

"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in
fine style."

"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to
ask her where she has been."

"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull,
drilling persistence.

When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she
standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such
extraordinary things?"

Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the
left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady
rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she
said pettishly.

He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which
pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment
there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed
on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed
past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in
the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"

The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen
crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and
prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight
beams were still unclouded.

"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a
revolver.

Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a
doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.

"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"

It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's
sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and
wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown
some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.

"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm
Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my
married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would
auntie give us the clothes she was making?"

The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the kitchen
brightness at them.

"Where is your mistress?" Richard asked them, cutting into the girl's
sweet, silly speech. "Has she come back?"

The servants all started making twittering, consequential noises. "No,
sir, she isn't." "We didn't know, any of us, you was out till the lady
and gentleman come."

"What lady and gentleman?"

The two younger women shrunk back and left the cook to answer. "Mr.
Roger Peacey, sir, and the lady." From the hindmost girl there came a
giggle.

That was why they had not heard the knocking at the door. They had all
been sitting laughing at his mother's other son and going over the
family history. Ellen shrank back from the light. Marion's misfortunes
made things very ill to deal with; they seemed to bring out the worst in
everybody. And how the whole affair was hurting Richard! He turned on
his heel and walked back to the trellis arch and went through it without
waiting for her. By the time she had followed him round the corner of
the house he was opening the French window into the dining-room. He
found it quite easy to open; again she thought with rage and contempt of
the way that Marion had fumbled with the handle. She had to run along
the path lest in his forgetfulness he shut her out into the night.

She found him halted just within the room, pulling off his gauntlets
and forcing a white smile towards Roger, who was standing swaying on the
hearthrug, his cheeks dribbled with tears. Poppy stood beside him,
staring sullenly at a blank wall, her mouth a little open with distaste
for him.

"So you're giving us another visit," said Richard, in that hollow
conscientious tone of kindness he had used to them in the afternoon.

Roger opened his mouth but could not speak; then flapped his hands to
make it plain this was an occasion of importance, and cried bleatingly:
"I've come to say that I forgive you all."

"Forgive us!" exclaimed Richard, swept away to the bleak extremity of
rage. Then checked himself. "Oh, for not coming to your meeting. We
hoped you would. Ellen was tired."

"I couldn't bear to think of you p'raps going to bed and feeling that I
was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I've got
Jesus I'll forgive anything that anybody does against me!" His voice
wallowed rhapsodically. "So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of
going straight back to the Colony."

Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to
disassociate herself from him, from the situation.

"That was good of you," said Richard.

"And now"--the whistling tone came back in his speech--"I want to tell
mother!"

"You can't do that. She isn't in."

"What, weren't you all out together? Didn't she come home with you?"

"No."

"Then, love o' goodness, where is she at this time of night?"

"Down on the marshes," said Richard casually. "She had a headache. She
thought a walk in the night air would do her good." Slowly and
deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the
table.

"Oh," murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and
straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the
wood. Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his
brother's face. "Here! What's the matter with mother?"

"Nothing! Nothing!" exclaimed Richard in exasperation. "She's down on
the marshes, having a walk."

"Oh, but you can't take me in that way!" the pallid creature cried,
wringing his hands. "I can see you're frightened about mother!"

"I'm not," said Richard vehemently.

"You needn't try to fool me. I'm stupid about everything else, but not
about mother! And I could always feel what was going on between you two.
Many's the time I've had to leave the room because you two were loving
each other so and I felt out of it. And now I know you're frightened
about her! You are! You are!"

"I'm not!" shouted Richard.

Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and
had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight. "If you'd got
Jesus," he said tartly, "you'd learn to be gentle. Like He was." He
recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy's hand, which she tendered him
deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for
orders. "Now you'd better tell me what it is about mother that's making
you frightened. She'd not be pleased, would she, if she came in and
found you treating me like this, as if I hadn't a right to know anything
about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?"

That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see. He looked down at his
white knuckles and unclenched his hands. "It's really nothing," he told
Roger in that false, kind voice. "I went upstairs after dinner to look
over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here. When I
came back Ellen told me she'd gone out for a walk on the marshes. It
struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went
out and had a look round, but couldn't see her anywhere. There's not the
slightest occasion for worry."

Roger stared at him, sucking his front teeth. "But you're frightened!"
he said explosively.

"I am not."

"You are. You think she's come to some harm down on the marshes." He
slipped past him and flung open the French window, calling in a thin,
whistling voice that could not have been heard fifty yards away:
"Mummie! Mummie!"

A convulsion of rage ran through Richard. With one hand he jerked Roger
back into the room by his coat-collar, with the other he slammed the
French window. "Be quiet. I tell you she's all right. I know where she's
gone."

"Where, then?"

"Never mind."

"Where? Where?" His hands fumbled for the doorhandle again.

"Oh, stop that!" Richard loosed hold of him with the expression of one
who had grasped what he thought to be soft grass and finds his palms
scored by a fibrous stalk. He said, and Ellen could see that he liked
saying it as little as anything that he had ever said all his life long:
"If you must know, I think she's gone up to my father's tomb."

Roger shook his head solemnly. "No. You're wrong. She hasn't gone there.
And she's come to harm."

"Why in God's name do you say that?" burst out Richard.

"I know. I've known all the evening. That's really why I came back here
after the service. That talk about forgiveness was just something I made
up as an excuse. I knew quite well that something was wrong with
mummie." His pale eyes sought first Richard and then Ellen. "Don't you
believe a person might know if something happened to another person," he
asked wistfully, "if they loved them enough?"

There was indeed such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard
and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it
is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of
the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really,
Roger, she was quite bright before she went out. Ellen, tell Roger...."

But Roger stared out at the empty silver garden and whimpered
inattentively: "I can't help it. I want to go down to the marshes and
look for her."

"Very well," agreed Richard, blinking. The sight of the love in those
weak eyes made his voice authentically kind. "We'll go down. She ought
to be easy to find as she's carrying a lantern. You're quite sure she
has got a lantern with her, Ellen?"

"Oh yes," said Ellen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back
and looked through the window."

"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"

"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his
mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the
door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the
glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went
away."

"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in
amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a
reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before
she went out."

She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her
that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all
in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about
us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and
talked to her about saucepans."

"What saucepans?"

"Aluminium saucepans."

"But what about them?"

She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple
in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the
narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on
hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get
them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."

For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her
because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She
really was all right, Ellen?"

"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."

Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure
of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring
things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was
not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it
had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned
towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face,
which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will
most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."

Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He
turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here,
Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so
preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for
Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."

They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than
their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate
into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but
he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop
about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and
Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and
hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.

Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an
extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do
that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."

"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the
exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.

"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the
teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and
drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:
"Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with
her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the
flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life
was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk
restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly:
"That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in
the sky. Is that Chatham?"

With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that
those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered
what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in
Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it
was."

"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed
her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was
quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.

Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What
chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this
woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so
wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's
brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and
ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes
fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned
out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the
moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she
was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and
crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night
searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.

She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had
whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window
into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and
advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the
farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound
of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there
was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was
no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family
had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been
unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran
downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she
begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the
parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in
her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut
on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had
been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look
like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.

There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was
sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the
night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on
the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections
of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as
pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head
on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly
enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the
breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that
had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood
Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered
about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o'
you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear
nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went
in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said:
"Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the
fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was
held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it
were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became
more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture
of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her
wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"

That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped
back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he
muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric
switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her
hands.

"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"

"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the
sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it
difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In
the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the
right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there
over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for
years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right
up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."

Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked
foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story,
"But when did you find the lantern?"

"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way
along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon
as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the
lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."

They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any
moment it might move or speak.

"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the
light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of
those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened
yet!"

He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."

"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"

He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead.
There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's
dead."

It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if
he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly
unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and
hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously
stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank
into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick
and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her
flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but
the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken
all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat;
and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously
exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food."
He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked
round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling
in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.

"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."

He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head
mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a
thing on my stomach."

"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying
for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."

That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor
Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.

Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he
laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did
you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"

"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."

"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing
but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."

"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to
worry."

"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone.
"It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled:
"Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to
the sallowness of the morning.

When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his
hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was
saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you
silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"
and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.

Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.
"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.

"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"

But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had
been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's
mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
me?"

"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was
deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."

She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for
persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint,
barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife
for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been
alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a
charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should
understand her sacrifice and grieve.

"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so
that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.
"She wore high heels for her age--"

That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She
was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the
chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.
This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she
had gone back on it.

"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on
the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."

Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room
where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to
the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much
longer."

"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly
when she was unhappy."

His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not
know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal
her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear,
you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."

"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."

Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.
Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do
nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in
the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a
theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as
anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must
notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and
final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of
force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that
never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect
crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always,
till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell
him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring
were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering
nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the
window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the
ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had
seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his
inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate
her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her
life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he
would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained
inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened
women....

"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it
was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate
and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which
chair?"

"Yon, at your hand."

He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out
of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she
wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very
upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And
for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just
because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily
enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they
needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him stroking the soft
velvet, laying his cheek against it.

"And the desk? You say she sat there while she talked to cook?"

"Yes."

She hated the way he sat down in front of it; in a heap, like a tired
navvy. By her death Marion deprived her of her beautiful lightfooted
lover. But she must wait. He would come back. She became aware that
Roger was speaking to her. It appeared that he had sobbed in his cup and
had sent jets of tea flying over the tablecloth, and he was now
apologising.

"Never heed," she told him comfortingly; "we'll have a clean one for
lunch." "I didn't mean to," he quavered piteously, but she checked him.
Richard had turned over his shoulder a white face.

"She sat here?..."

"Yes. While the cook stood talking to her, she sat there."

"She ... You didn't notice ... when she was sitting there ... if she was
scribbling on the blotter?"

"Yes, she did. I noticed that."

"Ah ... ah...."

       *       *       *       *       *

She was beside him in the time of a breath. But he had not fainted,
though his head had crashed down on the wood, for his fingers, buried in
his hair, still laced and interlaced. She did not dare touch him; but
she grovelled for the blotter, which at the moment of his groan had
fallen to the floor, and stood staring at it. For a second her attention
was dispersed by a shudder of disgust, for she felt Roger's noisy
mouth-breathing at her ears. Then the proof leapt to her eyes. There was
a rim of plain paper round the calendar on the inside of the cover, and
this was covered with words and phrases written in the exquisite small
script of Marion. "This is the end. Death. Death. Death. This is the
end. I must die. Give him to Ellen. I must die."

Roger tumbled back towards Poppy. "The awful sin of self-destruction!"
he wailed.

This proof struck through her with an awful, unifying grief. She had had
evidence of Marion's intention which had convinced her mind, but it was
all derived from ugliness: from the awkwardness of the woman's talk, the
plainness of the face against the glass, the intrusive loitering of a
squat figure in the garden. The soul had hearkened to these ugly
messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it
had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as
briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the
power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at
its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living
might grieve for any that is dead, now knew the sorrow appropriate to
the destruction of Marion's wide, productive body. For what her spirit
learned and admitted it had always known of that burning thing which had
been Marion she looked round the room in reverence, since she had lived
there. The light on the handle of the French window caught her eye, and
she wept. She had been annoyed with Marion because she could not turn
it. But who would not find it difficult to open a door if it was death
on which it opened?

"Richard, I love your mother!" she sobbed. "I love your mother so!"

He muttered something. In case he was speaking to her she bent down and
listened. But he was repeating over and over again in accents of irony:
"Give him up to Ellen. Give him up to Ellen. Oh, mother, mother...."

By the passion for Marion that was wringing her she could measure the
flame that must be devouring him. There was a strong impulse in her to
feel nothing but pity for him; to apprehend with resignation that there
might be a period ahead during which he might feel hatred for her,
loathing her for being alive when his mother, who deserved so well, was
dead. She stepped backward from the desk so that he need not be vexed by
any sense of her. Yet she had a feeling as she moved that she was
taking a step infinitely rash, infinitely dangerous....

She became aware that behind her Roger was shaking words out of his
weeping body. "You ought to be on your knees, you two! You've killed my
mummie with your wickedness!"

"What's that?" she murmured, turning on him. "What's that?" She was not
quite attentive. A picture was forming in her consciousness which, when
it was clear, would tell her why it was perilous to leave Richard to his
grief....

"Aw, shut up!" hissed Poppy, and tugged at his arm.

But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She
saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out
what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught
you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said
pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till
Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it
wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."

Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual
shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when
she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far
worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been
appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because
there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain
the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a
thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was
glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were
reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being
evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself
the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose
dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd
accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it
was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is
felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious
man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in
her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has
come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and
a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over
the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with
resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there
should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and
perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round
which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but
of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned
against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery
of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses
which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she
had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would
have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always
suspected to be danger....

"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I
thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that
she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her
for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you
weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you,
and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers
thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first
service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."

It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell
her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to
his passion.

"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I
suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay
here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave
you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"

Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother,
shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of
the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which
housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel
dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly
as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly,
but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who
allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than
themselves to dwell in their men's attention.

"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark
what your brother's saying of us!"

He stirred. He sat up.

"He says we're bad."

He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face,
though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.

"It's no use you looking at me like that," said Roger tearfully but
resolutely. "I'm as good as you. In fact, I'm better now that I've got
Jesus. And I tell you straight, you've killed my mummie with your
beastly lust. Mind you," he cried, in a tone of whistling exaltation
inappropriate to his words, "I'm not pretending I'm without sin myself.
I did evil once with a woman at Blackburn, but I saw the filthiness of
my ways. Old man, I do understand your temptations!"

What was Richard's hand searching for on the breakfast table? She bent
forward to see, so that she might give it to him.

Richard had found what he wanted. His fingers tightened on the handle of
the breadknife.

"Let's put an end to this," he said.

He drove the knife into Roger's heart.

"Mummie!" breathed Roger. Meekly, but with no sign that he had any other
quarrel with the proceedings save that they were peremptory, he sank
down on the chair beside him and fell forward, his head lying untidily
among the tea-cups. This, no doubt, was the disorder which Marion had
always foreseen; to prevent which she had practised her insane tidiness.

He held the attention much less than one had thought a dead man could.

"God," said Poppy, "this is a copper's business. I'm off before they
come. They think I know something about a thing that happened down in
Strood last Easter, though God help me I don't. They kind of mixed me
up with someone else. Let me go."

"Right," said Richard, and put his hand into his pocket and brought out
a fistful of coins. "Take this. Good luck."

She snatched it, and with no further look at any of the company, ran out
by the French window.

They stood looking down on Roger. Death revealed no significance in him.
The smallness of his head, the indefinite colour of his hair, palliated
what had occurred and made them feel incredulous of their knowledge that
presently much importance would be attached to it.

Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Well, it's all cleared up now,"
he murmured. "It is as if she had never seen Peacey...."

Ellen broke into sobs. "'Tis I who made you do it. I thought of my poor
mother and how she'd suffered through not making my father think of her
first and last--and you were sitting there thinking of nothing but
Marion--and I knew if you heard what Roger was saying about us you'd
think of me, so I made you listen. If I hadn't given you yon dunts on
your shoulders you never would have heard him and never would have
killed him. Oh, my love, what I have done to you, and me that would have
died rather than hurt you! But I saw my mother plain--"

"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his
arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"

"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."

"But there's nothing left."

"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."

"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's
something still."

He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes
roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked
thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it
and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.

"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.

There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and
contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's
infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like
for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the
kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not
to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."

At the door he turned.

"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.

She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure,
as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no
going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about
her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it
was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror
of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but
horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there
broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the
miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home
in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in
brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago
dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged
but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.

He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.

"Come," he said. "Come."




CHAPTER XI


Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...

Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no
tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the
seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the
further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it
confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds
pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they
could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to
take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden
staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they
could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the
grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and
she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his
shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be
there when he returned.

But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what
life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a
corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread
between two human tendencies: the insane sexual caprice of men, the not
less mad excessive steadfastness of women. Roger had died, Richard was
about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female
faults--Harry and Marion ... Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and
father.... And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life's
disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous. Her love had not been
able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love; and
how like a doom that love had lain on him.... Since life was like this,
she would not do what Richard asked. She tried to rise that she might
flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs
of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.

But she could not move. Although her mind was still arguing the matter,
all the rest of her being had consented. She was going to do this thing.
In panic she looked along the wall at Richard, wishing he would come
back to her. But he was going on talking to the fishermen, though he
held their waders in his hand. She quite understood why he was doing
that, and watched him through tears. This was the last time he would be
able to exercise that charm of which he was a little vain, since on all
his few future days his intercourse with his fellows would be strictly
specialised; so he was taking the opportunity. In watching him and the
reflection of his magnificence in the fishermen's smiling subjugation,
she was shot through by a pang of pride and exultation. Though the night
should engulf Richard and Marion, the triumph was not with the night. In
throwing in her lot with them and with the human race which is
perpetually defeated, she was nevertheless choosing the side of
victory....

She leaned back against the slope and waited. This was a good place to
wait. The call of the redshanks, the cloud shadows that moved over the
marshes like the footprints of invisible presences, made her feel calm.

Nevertheless her heart could not help but beat quick with fear. She
wished that he would come and comfort her. But though he had left the
fishermen he was not coming straight to her. He had climbed the sea-wall
and was looking out to the east, to the open sea, over the country of
the mud. He was thinking of Marion, and wondering where the tide had
carried her. The inexorable womb was continuing to claim its own. She
wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his
obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in
the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out
before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the
safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant
demand.

She sat and looked at the island, and wondered whether it was a son or
daughter that waited for her there.