Jay laughed. "Treating me as if I were drunk ..." she thought. She did
not feel giddy any more. She could see the familiar outline of the House
against an unpretentious sky, and that calm shape steadied her.
No breath of sound came from the House. The sky was grey, the sea was
grey, there was no hint of sunlight. As Jay came to the door she noticed
that the honeysuckle in the bowl at the hall window was still there, but
dead. The wind had strewn the doorstep with leaves and straws and twigs,
little refugees of the air.
In the hall there was an old woman, dressed in a black dress patterned
with big red flowers. She was knitting. Her stiff skirts spread out in
angular folds round her. Jay knew she was a fellow-ghost, because
their eyes met.
Jay felt swallowed up by the silence. She could not speak, even to
think, she felt, would be too noisy. The stiff skirt of the old lady
made no rustle, the knitting needles made no click. But Jay could see
that she was counting. The House seemed to be full of unmoving time.
Outside the rain began to fall, and that grey sound enclosed the silence
of the House.
After a very long time Jay spoke. "Where is my Friend?" she asked.
"Gone to the War," answered the old woman.
"There is no War in this world," said Jay.
"On the contrary," the fellow-ghost replied, "war is, even here, where
Time is not. War is like air, in every house, in every land, on every
sea. For ever."
Between her sentences she counted. Unpausing numbers moved her lips.
"On these shores," she said, "time and Life and the sea go up and down.
Eternity has no logic. There are no reasons, there is no explanation. But
there is always War. There are fighting sea men in the caves on the
beach. Haven't you seen them, the dark sea people? Haven't you heard
their high voices that were tuned to cut through the voice of the sea?
Haven't you found their very wide, long-toed footprints in the sand? Have
you walked blind through this world?"
"No," said Jay, "I remember. The women decorate their hair with seaweed,
pink and green. I have watched them catch fish with their hands. I have
watched them put their babies to play in the pools among the rocks...."
"On the cliffs," said the fellow-ghost, "men clad in armour share the
camps of the Englishmen who fought at Cressy, and at Waterloo, and at
the Marne. On these seas the most ancient pirates sing and laugh in
chorus with Nelson's drowned sailors, and with men from the North Sea,
men whose mothers still cry in the night for them. Did you think there
was any seniority in Eternity?"
"But I don't understand," said Jay. "Time seems to leave itself behind so
quickly...."
"There is nothing to understand," said the old woman. "There is no
explanation. Time does not move. Men move." The noise of the rain seemed
to wash out everything but remembrance, and there was no feeling in Jay
but a terrible longing to have her Secret Friend with her again, and that
long secret childhood of theirs, and to wipe out half her days and all
her knowledge, and to hear once more those songs upon the sands of the
cove, and to feel the tingling ground of the sunny hills.
"My Friend has never forsaken me before," she said.
She felt a hand press her hand, and she met the eyes of little Mrs. Love.
"Yo're a mousey sort of kid," said Mrs. Love, "sittin' there as if you
was in church. Shall we go 'ome? The rine's gettin' worse an' worse, an'
it's no good wytin'. I'll see you 'ome."
When Jay, very wet and dazed, reached Eighteen Mabel Place, she found a
card pushed under the door. The name on it was Mr. Herbert Russell's, and
there was a suggestion in a beautiful little handwriting on the back of
it that she should ring him up next morning and tell him when to come and
see her, as he had a message from her brother.
"This is the sort of thing that couldn't possibly happen in real life,"
said Jay. "I must be drunk after all. On no doorstep except Heaven's
could one find a message so romantic."
She was instinctively disobedient to Older and Wiser people. She never
entertained the idea of telephoning. She could imagine Mr. Russell
answering the telephone in a prosaic voice like a double bass. She wrote
the following letter:
DEAR SIR--Don't you remember, I was to meet you anyway on the steps of
St. Paul's at ten o'clock next Sunday? I will wait till then for the
message.--Yours faithfully,
JANE ELIZABETH MARTIN, 'Bus-conductor.
"That letter ought to put two and two together for him," she thought, "if
he hasn't done it already. It's a complicated little sum, and the result
is--what?"
She felt hot and feverish when she wrote the letter. And directly she had
posted it she regretted having done so.
"I forget what I wrote," she said. "It is dangerous to post letters to
Older and Wiser Men when drunk."
All that night she lay awake and mourned the desertion of her
Secret Friend.
You promised War and Thunder and Romance.
You promised true, but we were very blind,
And very young, and in our ignorance
We never called to mind
That truth is seldom kind.
You promised love, immortal as a star.
You promised true, yet how the truth can lie!
For now we grope for hands where no hands are,
And, deathless, still we cry,
Nor hope for a reply.
You promised harvest and a perfect yield.
You promised true, for on the harvest morn,
Behold a reaper strode across the field,
And man of woman born
Was gathered in as corn.
You promised honour and ordeal by flame.
You promised true. In joy we trembled lest
We should be found unworthy when it came;
But--oh--we never guessed
The fury of the test.
You promised friends and songs and festivals.
You promised true. Our friends, who still are young,
Assemble for their feasting in those halls
Where speaks no human tongue.
And thus our songs are sung.
I have very rarely found Sunday in London a successful day. I hate
idleness without peace, and festivity without beauty, and noise without
music. I hate to see London people in unnatural clothes. I hate to see a
city holding its breath.
Jay waited ten minutes on the steps of St. Paul's for Mr. Russell. This
was not because he was late, but because she was early; and this again
was not because she was indecently eager, but because she had hit on an
unexpectedly non-stop 'bus. She felt a fool for ten minutes. And when you
have waited ten minutes on those enormous steps under the eye of the
pigeons, you will know why she felt a fool.
Mr. Russell arrived in Christina the motor car, and simultaneously a
shower fell. From the first moment Jay felt unsuccess in the air of that
much-anticipated day. She was introduced to Christina, and said, "But we
can't take that thing into the Cathedral."
"We don't want to," said Mr. Russell, although, as he was a born driver,
the challenge made him instinctively measure with his eye the depth of
the steps, and the width of the doorway, from Christina's point of view.
"We don't want to pray. We want to talk."
Anonyma would have been astonished to hear him say this.
"As a matter of fact," said Jay, "I brought Chloris for the same reason."
Chloris was eating the bread which a kind but short-sighted old lady
believed herself to be giving to the pigeons.
Mr. Russell had hardly been able to imagine his 'bus-conductor in any
dress but that of her calling. Now that he saw her in unambitious
London-coloured things, he was glad to notice that her clothes were not
Sunday clothes, but the sort that you forget about directly you look away
from them.
This was the sort of day that breaks up delusions, and as Christina the
motor car started away, Jay discovered that her hat was not adequately
attached to her head. There are few discoveries more depressing than
this at the beginning of a day of movement.
The bells of St. Paul's began to sing. Little fairy bells dodged behind
and about the great notes. But Christina soon swept the sound into the
forgotten air behind her.
"I've got a lot to talk to you about," said Mr. Russell as he headed
Christina Hackney-way. He was conscious that he was taking his miracle
curiously for granted. I don't think he really believed in it yet. For
Mr. Russell all truth was haunted by the ghost of a clanking lie. He
discerned deceit on the part of Providence where no deceit was. "I'll
give you your brother's message first, because it interests me personally
least. He is gone. There was a sudden move across the Channel last week,
and he went--I suppose--ten days ago now. The message he hadn't time to
give you was an appeal to give up 'bus-conducting. He had an absurd idea
that you walked out with men-conductors in Victoria Park."
"Not at all absurd," said Jay. "Not half so absurd as the idea of driving
out with a casual fare. I know some delightful conductors and drivers;
we joke together when the traffic sticks. There is one perfect darling
called Edward; his only fault is that he drives a mere Steamer. But we
always bow, and once when a horse fell down and we got hung up for twenty
minutes in the Strand, he sang me a little song about a star."
Mr. Russell listened to all this very attentively, and then continued:
"Your brother wants you to go back to your Family. His last words to me
about it were that if you could manage to be ladylike for three years or
the duration of War, at the end of that time he and you would go and live
by your two selves in New Zealand, and if you liked you need wear no
skirts at all there, but riding breeches all the time."
"Ladylike!" snorted Jay. "What's the use of ladyliquity even for five
minutes? So Kew sent you as an antidote? I suppose he didn't know you
were one of my fares?"
"A fare," said Mr. Russell sententiously, "may, I suppose, be a wonderful
revelation, because you only see your fare's eyes for a second, and the
things you may see have no limit, and you never know the silly little
truth about him. Yet even so, there is more than a ticket and a look
between you and me, and you know it."
"Possibly there is a Secret World between you and me," said Jay. "But
that's a pretty big thing to divide us."
"Supposing it doesn't divide us?" said Mr. Russell, looking fiercely at
the road in front of him. "Supposing it showed me how much I love you?"
"How disappointing!" said Jay in the worst of possible taste. (She was
like that to-day.) "You're ceasing to be an Older and Wiser, and trying
to become an ordinary Nearah and Dearah."
("Oh, curse," she thought in brackets. "I shall kick myself to-night.")
"That's a horrid thing to say," said Mr. Russell. "But still I do
love you."
"It sounds very Victorian and nice," said Jay, wondering if he could
still see her through her veil of bad temper. "But, you know, in spite of
Secret Worlds, and secret souls, and centuries of secret knowledge, we
still have to keep up this 1916 farce, and leave something of ourselves
in sensible London. How do I know you're not married?"