IV

The following evening his letter came, and Sophia, noting the thinness

of it compared with those others she had had, knew how his need of her

had slackened. She took the letter to her refuge on the wall and sat for

a while unable to read it, the old nausea upon her. Then she took a firm

grip of herself and opened the envelope. As she read it seemed as though

a great blow were struck at her heart. She knew she had expected this,

yet the actuality was worse to bear than she had thought.

Richard laughed at her intention of not writing, and himself wrote her

little over a page. He began, as usual, "Sophia, my sweet," and made a

brief reference to his wife--"She has not had a bad phase yet--and

things are quiet, but what is that when one wants sympathy and passion?

I feel I am caught up in the old life again and something seems to have

gone snap in me. Write to me--for you will write--to my club." The

assurance of his tone jarred Sophia, but what hurt her cruelly was his

brevity. The fact that she had wanted this letter to be a long one had

honestly seemed to him of no importance when set against the fact that

he was not in the mood to write it; for he was the creature of his moods

and consequently unheeding of those which other folk might wish to have

indulged.

Sophia read the letter over and over, and then quite suddenly felt she

could not look at it again, and for the first time since the whole

affair began, she cried. Crouched on the seat she hid her face while the

sobs tore at her and the tears ran over her crossed wrists, and she

heard the sound of her own sobs coming to her from a great distance.

After a while she sat up, dried her wet face and made herself confront

the new aspect of things. She saw that up till now she had not been

wholly unhappy, for she had had the past. If he were going to prove

unworthy the past would no longer be hers to glory in but would become a

time of shame. If--as prevision showed her--she was to know him as unfit

for what she had given, the giving would cease to be her happiness. For

Sophia was still so ignorant she thought mere companionship and the

spiritual force of her feeling had been a continuous giving. The

knowledge that from a man's point of view she had given nothing at all

was spared her. Since the parting she had repeated over and over to

herself two sentences from his letters--"_Virgin Mother, friend and

lover and comforter_" and "_Home means where you are_." If he could

still mean those things she would be perfectly content that he should

never again express them; if he were to mean them less as the old life

and the old allegiance gripped him, then they would cease to be true and

she could not live on them in memory. Few men are strong enough to leave

the past alone, many are so afraid of its re-appearance that they try to

bury it alive--was he going to deal this last and most cruel blow, a

future that would destroy the past? The pitiful part of it all was that

Sophia would never have seen him again sooner than try to revive what

had happened; had he continued to make love to her she would have

refused to let him--all she asked was that the past might be unprofaned.

Reading his letter she began for the first time to realize the

selfishness of his brilliant, lovable drifting nature, and in that

moment her love of him took its firmest hold of her. The merciful phase

of numbness was over, and she entered the deep waters at last. She had

no strength left to struggle, she could only let them go over her head

and await their passing. For her month of joy she was to pay in a year's

pain, and she entered on the payment now.

It was the payment for what she had gone without that hit Sophia

hardest. In what she had given was the supreme comfort--"It was for

him"; and this upheld her even when her want of him was worst, when she

lay the whole night through on the floor of the wall-refuge, thoughts

and pulses knocking out "I want you . . . I want you . . ." against the

stones. It upheld her when, towards dawn, she paced the garden, pausing

every now and then to lean her cheek against the dew-wet lilac leaves;

or when she tangled her hands in the grass till the damp blades

whimpered as she pulled her fingers up them. Sound was a help to her,

and when she roused the grass to cries or stirred the bushes to quick

whispering the voice in herself was quieter. She was never violent to

anything in the garden, and when action became hurried she turned it

upon herself, beating her hands against her thighs. And always "It was

for him" upheld her through the darkest times of paying for what she had

given.

For what she had gone without that help was lacking. It was not passion,

which, when with him, she had never felt, that plucked at her

unbearably, it was the thwarted fruit of passion that haunted and

reproached her. Before his letter came, dream-babies had clustered round

her, wringing their little hands behind a closed transparent door, but

these were visions of what might have been had circumstances been

different--them she could bear. Now thought narrowed and gained in

meaning: one baby surged towards her, cried to her, smiled at her, lay

in air always just away from her breast--one baby that was what might

have been even as things were. How would it matter what other women he

loved better if she had only given him what no other woman had? She saw

herself his slayer in that she had not made life for him in the way a

woman can make it for her lover, by taking it of his and creating afresh

with it. Her own life would be such a small price to pay. For Sophia was

a born creator, and the seeming futility of all she was undergoing, and

the barrenness it bound her to, filled her with a sense of waste.

It was not until the compulsion which bread-winners know was making it

clear to Sophia that her last days at Sant' Ambrogio were come, that the

influences at work upon her ever since her arrival, that had first

revealed themselves to her in her walk round the town, fused and

concentrated.

The day had been unbearably hot, and Sophia lay behind closed

_persiani_, the green of the leaves without reflecting on to the

whitewashed walls so that the room seemed a pool of green dusk. Sophia

read a little old Latin _Vita Sanctae Beatae_, which she pondered over

when, in the cool of the evening, she sought the place in the wall.

"She found something," thought Sophia; "I wonder what it was? Peace, of

course, but what got her to it? For outwardly her life was as bare as

mine--and she had never known even what I know of--things. And yet,

they say that in religion there is every experience. . . . I wonder if the

babies she might have borne if she'd married some fellow-peasant ever

beat at her reproachfully? And if so, what it was she found? She lived

here, I suppose, walked in the garden and sat in my place in the wall--I

wonder what she felt here. . . ."

All was very quiet and still on the wall, and for the first time since

Richard's letter had come Sophia's aching was a little soothed, the taut

fibres of her relaxed and her mind slid into receptivity. Then a more

positive change began to make itself felt to her, though she could not

have traced its birth or growth if she had tried.

The first note of difference was a physical one. Sophia was

short-sighted and saw the world in a blur; now her sight began to take

precision of outline and then the things at which she was looking

changed too. The towers were more numerous, and from some of them flags

fluttered out, and not till long after did Sophia remember that there

had been no breeze that evening. Looking for the house over the

tree-tops of the garden she saw that it had shrunk oddly, and an outer

stairway crawled up its wall. On the sundial lay a rosary of dark

beads--Sophia could see its steel cross glitter in the evening light.

These were outward changes, on their heels came the inward change that

made them seem natural to her. It was as though she were in one of those

dreams when the dreamer knows who he is and that he will soon wake up,

and yet does and says the most incongruous things; with this

difference--Sophia had a curious feeling that it was some one else's

dream which had taken hold of her. She struggled against it at first as

against an anaesthetic, but the thing crept over her like a tide.

A child's cry came from the town, and Sophia felt a sudden contraction

at the heart, and with a thrill realized that this new Person in her

felt it also--that they were at one. With that shock of mutual sensation

the fusion became more nearly complete; of Sophia's own consciousness

was left only enough to know that she was still herself, hearing,

seeing, and feeling what some one else had heard and seen and felt

before her in that place. She knew, too, that the drama played in her

soul ever since she came to Sant' Ambrogio, a wordless drama in which no

human being had taken part, was drawing to a climax, and that the human

element had invaded it at last. She was about to learn what it was for

which those weeks, especially that hour outside the wall, had prepared

her.

The air was very clear, and to the long sight with which Sophia was

seeing, seemed preternaturally so, as though everything were set in a

vast crystal which made visible each pebble and grass-blade. A numbness

stole over her body, her hands ached with cold before they, too, lost

sensation, and in this numbed frame her consciousness gathered

intensity. Then with a shock, as sudden as a plunge into cold water, her

mind slid on to what seemed another though not an alien plane. Her

mind's eye saw all the old points of view, the accepted angles of

vision, as though torn up and scattered like flung wreckage over the

shining shore of the world that swung below her; things which had seemed

big were small, all relative sizes were altered, perspective itself

seemed run mad, except that after the first breath the knowledge that

this was the true angle swept over her--that she, or rather, the Person

whose vision she was receiving, was looking at the spiritual world from

the point at which she herself had vaguely imagined gazing at the

physical.

Round this spiritual globe she saw the Breath of God hang as the air

hangs round the earth, and she saw it full of ebbing and flowing like a

current-whorled river. She saw how no wind left emptiness where it had

been, but how the elastic tissue thinned out, spread, gathered together,

ran here and there so that no outflow was without its inevitable

influence of contraction: the whole sphere of air was a medley of

pattern, always rhythmic and interchanging. She felt how this elasticity

was brought into play over the surface of the spiritual world, how

actions, sins, pains of mind and body, rack this way and that as they

would, were always enveloped by the divine Breath, even as on the

material globe not a wave can break or a leaf stir but the river of air

holds true. Always the movements of the Breath made a pattern, as

invisible to the soul in the midst of it as the wind-pattern is to those

on earth, a pattern inevitable in the sense that achieved beauty always

strikes the eye, as being inevitable in its rightness.

Then, this measure of universal comfort given, sensation narrowed and

concentrated, not on her soul, but on the soul which had felt long ago,

probably far more intensely, what she was seeing by it and through it

now.

As Sophia felt the anguish of the Person who had absorbed her, she

realized it was the same as hers--the fear and pain of barrenness.

Whether she had known all along that it was the repeat, the echo, of a

vision of Beata's that was on her, or whether she only knew it then, she

could never have told. No actual child that might have been cried to

the Beata consciousness, only natural longings apart from any one

person, yet the anguish bit keenly, for with it went fear--the deadly

fear lest barrenness should be deliberate sin against life. Powerless to

help, Sophia saw the thought turn in the other's mind, and with that

they both entered into the last phase of the vision. Here Sophia, who

had not trained herself, like Beata, to prolonged sustaining of the

will, flagged and began to fail. A brightness that was too strong for

her, a sense as of great Shapes, a looming Presence, swept on to her,

wrapped her round, overweighted her. She struggled to keep up with the

Beata consciousness, for she knew if only she could succeed in that she

would find the answer to her own sorrow and Beata's fear. The outer

world had begun to come back, the towers of the town showed as through a

mist, some growing more and more definite; some, those of Beata's day,

wavering uncertainly. . . . She strained her flagging nerves, caught at

her subsiding energies in one last effort. . . . A divine warmth suffused

her breast; sky and air were filled with the gleam of a fiery Child that

flashed towards her, filled her arms; and sank, not away, but into her

very soul and, like quick stars, she saw the wounds on His hands and

feet.

With that she knew, as Beata had known, that this was the reward of

virginity, that each virgin could mother the Christ-child afresh. She

knew that to those to whom the joy of making a living body with its

corresponding soul is denied, creation is not stilled, that there need

be no barrenness in a garden enclosed. For she saw that there is no

sterility save that of the wilful mind.

With a shock the present reeled into its place; spiritual vision was

past and physical vision lost keenness as her own blurred sight swam

back to her; and, worn out, hardly conscious of her own life, but filled

with peace, Sophia lay along the seat in the kindly dusk.

She was still to know month upon month of pain; sometimes acute as when

she stayed out of doors all night and made sounds and hurt herself

physically to distract her mind's distress; but mostly an ache that bore

on her like a weight, sometimes invading dreams and always by her

bedside when she awakened. She was to find that for the friendship she

could have made so exquisite he had no gift; she was to feel the many

hurts his lack of thoughtfulness inflicted; she was to bear the

unhappiness of seeing him unworthy of all that might have been so good

in him as he let himself drift into flirtations where not one of his

finer senses was touched. She was to feel one sharpest hour of any, when

the time came, which, if she had given herself would have seen his child

in her arms. . . .

And through everything, through the dreadful London months of loneliness

and the cruder physical hardships of extreme poverty; through her weary

clear-eyed knowledge of him she was to come back perpetually to the

refrain--that surprised herself after a few weeks of comparative calm

when she hoped she was "getting over it"--of "How I love him." She had

no high-flown theories of love; she knew he was not what is tritely

called "the right man," he was more--he was the one she loved well

enough to forgive for not being the "right one," and in those moments

there was no evading the simple fact that she would have given all the

rest of her life to have been his wife for one year and have borne him a

child.

But, through and above and around all that, went the memory of Beata's

vision which she too had seen. The vision itself was often dark and

meaningless to her in the actuality of her love and pain, but of the

knowledge that she had had it she was never bereft. Also, it was hers to

create those pleasant fruits and chief spices of which the greatest

love-song in the world tells as growing only in a garden enclosed.