She received me, rather sternly, I thoug_The Street of the Eye

I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the

parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself

was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual

cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the

inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and,

equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls

were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most

of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be

seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a

real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a

tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.

For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to

fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of

frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and

determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me

my chance.

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

I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’

I answered, loading my words with all the weight they would carry.

‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted.

And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion--I was nearly

twenty years her junior--she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken

forgiveness.

It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’

I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook

her head. ‘Then why _did_ you dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know.

Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’

She seemed startled. ‘What do you know?’ Her eyes narrowed to gimlet

points. The abrupt change in her manner disconcerted me. ‘What do

you know?’ she repeated defiantly, and, finding me silent, she flung

another question at me, this time a veritable challenge: ‘Do you know

about my son?’

Her son! So that was the cause of all the misunderstanding. ‘Nothing at

all,’ I assured her. ‘Upon my word this is the first I’ve heard of him.

Did you think....’

‘Yes, I did. I thought you disapproved of me, as your predecessor did,

or maybe his wife. I thought you were never going to call.’

‘But why,’ I protested, ‘why should I or anyone presume to disapprove

of you?’ And I wondered what travesty of religion had been current in

this parish before my coming.

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

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

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

‘Yes?’ I said, simulating polite interest when in truth I was

burning with curiosity. But if I hoped to win her sympathy by this

unconventional attitude I was to be woefully disappointed. ‘You don’t

seem to realize the gravity of what I tell you,’ Miss Lettice rebuked

me. ‘It is mistaken kindness to treat a sin so lightly.’

‘I want to be a friend to the parish, not a judge.’ Priggish remarks

rise readily to the lips of a young man such as I was then. ‘Besides,’

I added, ‘if your son was a child of true love there was no worse a sin

than indiscretion.’

But the confessed sinner would not hear of such wickedness. ‘You,

the vicar, to say a thing like that! That’s not the kind of teaching

we want in this parish. Why, I’ve done penance all my life for that

indiscretion, as you dare to call it. I forfeited marriage and sent

my lover away. Not even for the child’s sake would I condone our sin

by marrying. And do you tell me that all my bitter repentance was

unnecessary?’

What could I say? It would have been cruel to convince her that she

had thrown away her happiness in sheer waste, sacrificed her life on

the altar of a false god. I hadn’t the heart to attempt it, so I fell

back, I’m afraid, on Scriptural quotations, and left it at that. The

familiar words seemed to comfort her and to reinstate me in her eyes as

a moralist. None the less she was sufficiently assured of my sympathy

to speak of her love, and as she spoke I began to wonder whether after

all my pity had not been misplaced. Sin or no sin, the memory of her

golden youth was dear to her. She was repentant enough, no doubt, when

she remembered to be; but she did not live by morality alone. The woman

in her still exulted, the woman’s eyes still shone, in the knowledge

that she had, however long ago, been found beautiful. ‘We were very

young,’ she said, with disarming simplicity, ‘and we loved each other

very much. He was all the world to me.’ Her cheeks flushed; her meagre

bosom rose and fell tremulously--and in that moment I saw her as she

had been, young, fresh, adorable, alight with limitless ecstasy, the

incarnation of a man’s desire. The transfigurement endured only for

a flash, and flickered away, leaving me desolated with the stabbing

poignancy of life. From that to this, I thought, we must all pass. To

hide my emotion I led the talk back to her son. ‘And where is he now?’

I asked. ‘Does he often come to see you?’

She smiled wanly. ‘He’s all I’ve got. You see there’s a place set for

him. You’ll take a cup of tea with us?’

The lid of the kettle that stood on the fire was already palpitating.

Miss Lettice made the tea and enclosed the pot in a knitted cosy of

green wool. For the next few minutes we exchanged only tea-table talk.

But afterwards, when I made gestures of going, she confronted me

wistfully, her eyes lit up once again. But this was a new light, and

one more consonant with her years.

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

I expressed eagerness, and she led me to the threshold of a room so

tiny that it made one think of a monastic cell. It was just large

enough to contain a small single bed, ready for use, a wash-stand,

and a miniature dressing-table. The furniture was all of childish

dimensions. In the further corner, under the window, stood a

cricket-bat. I glanced round with the vague smile of politeness. ‘So

this is Bernard’s room. A snug little place. And I see it’s all ready

for his return.’

After a silence Miss Lettice sighed. ‘He would have been eighteen this

coming April,’ she murmured.

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

you mean...?’

‘He was stillborn,’ she confessed, and her glance dropped before my

stare. ‘It was silly not to tell you at once. But Bernard’s all I’ve

got. He’d be a fine big fellow by now.’

To avoid those glistening eyes I turned away, only to encounter a sight

but one degree less pitiful: Bernard’s cricket-bat--symbol of lusty

young manhood, white flannels, sunlit turf--which no cricketer’s hand

had ever grasped. What could I say or do? I was angered as well as

touched by the wanton sentimentality of that room, and having murmured

words of conventional comfort I hurried back to the vicarage. Not

until many hours had passed did I succeed in hustling away my mood of

melancholy; and as I entered my own bachelor bedroom I shuddered to

hear, in imagination, the Good-night uttered by that fond impossible

woman to the ghost with whom she shared her home.

Saunders got out of his chair, as though the story were finished,

and stood with his back to the fire warming the palms of his hands.

There was a moment’s silence, which I saw no reason for breaking, and

then he began talking again. After that, he said, Miss Lettice and I

were quite good friends. I became a constant and welcome visitor at

her cottage: constant because her solitude was something of a pain

to me, and welcome because she knew that to me she could talk about

Bernard to her heart’s content. And that, by Jove, was a privilege

she lost no opportunity of exercising. How many times have I piously

lied to that woman assuring her that my interest in her Bernard was

insatiable! Often, as you’ll readily understand, I was bored beyond

expression, though I never lost my sense of the grotesque pathos of her

life. But I must be careful not to let you suppose that she was a mere

monomaniac. She knew, as well as I did, that she was playing a game of

make-believe: she was not the victim of any sort of delusion, and her

obsession never became pathological or threatened to become so.

Things went on like this for ten years or so. She lived untroubled

among her dreams until some few months ago. During the war Bernard led

an existence even more shadowy than usual. Of course he enlisted, and

was wounded, and won decorations for his valour; and Miss Lettice,

knitting socks for more substantial soldiers, continued to play her

secret game by fancying that they would comfort the feet of her son.

The change came, as I’ve said, not many months ago, and it shewed

itself first of all in our conversations. From those conversations

Bernard was painlessly excluded, and his place taken by a young man

weighing twelve stone or more. You’ll know the name well enough--Jack

Turnbull, the stationmaster’s son. Jack began to loom so large in

the hopes and fears of Miss Lettice that I became uneasy, the more

so because I had been the instrument of bringing them together. It

was this way. During the latter part of the war, and ever since, Miss

Lettice had found it increasingly difficult to manage on her extremely

modest income, and music pupils were more in request than ever. I did

what I could for her by dropping a recommendation here and there, and

among others I enlisted the active sympathy of old Turnbull. Together

we hatched a little conspiracy, the upshot of which was that Jack, a

big hulking fellow approaching thirty years, was fired with a sudden

ambition to become an amateur pianist. Jack had done well in the

army, and finding himself in mufti again, at a loose end, and with a

captain’s gratuity standing to his credit at Cox’s, he lent himself

very readily to the amiable fraud. His three hours tuition a week

was very useful to Miss Lettice; but it proved her undoing. For now

we come to the hopeless passion I spoke of. And I needn’t stop to

assure you that there’s nothing scandalous in this tragic affair. Miss

Lettice fell in love with Jack, but the love she yearned to lavish on

him was maternal love. If you think me perverse in calling that love

a hopeless passion I must disagree with you. It was passion, and it

was, in part, physical passion, as all human love must be. Why do we

shrink from admitting that maternal love is as deeply rooted in the

body as any other? Miss Lettice loved Jack Turnbull for his strength,

his masculinity, his youth, and because, by a fatal coincidence, he was

born in the same month of the same year as her Bernard. In a sense it

was the calendar that killed the Miss Lettice we knew and set in her

stead a witless child. No doubt Jack seemed to her a gift from God,

a wonderful consolation prize, a token of the heavenly forgiveness.

Indeed she told me as much when, with the air of imparting to me her

dearest secret, she said that Jack was coming to lodge with her. She

had bought some pretty things for his bedroom, worked ornamental

bolster-slips with her own fingers, and replaced the dressing-table

by a chest of drawers dragged in from her own room. I hardly dared to

hint my misgiving. ‘Are you quite sure he is coming?’ I ventured. ‘I

fancied he would soon be looking out for a job. Young men can’t remain

idle for long nowadays, you know.’ But she wouldn’t hear of my doubts.

Jack would get work at the station under his father. He hadn’t exactly

promised to come to her, but she had urged it and she knew he would

humour an old woman.

I was by no means so sure, and I made up my mind to tackle Master Jack

at the earliest possible moment. I called at his father’s house and

left a message asking him to make a point, if he could, of calling at

the vicarage. He came the same evening. ‘Well, Turnbull,’ I said. ‘I

hear you’re thinking of changing your quarters?’

He looked as guilty and uncomfortable as though I had surprised him

with his hand in somebody’s till. ‘Has it got round already? Why, I’ve

told no one outside the family. Why can’t people hold their tongues!’

‘My dear fellow,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you. But I really

don’t see why you should be so secretive about it. And it wasn’t your

father who told me.’

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

improved his manners.

‘It was Miss Lettice herself.’

I have never seen a man more astonished. ‘Miss Lettice! Miss Lettice

told you! Damn it, sir, she doesn’t know!’ After a moment’s stupefied

silence he added, with an air of apology, ‘But perhaps we’re at

cross-purposes. What was it that Miss Lettice told you?’

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

about.’

He began striding about the room. ‘We are certainly at cross-purposes

all right. I thought you meant Canada. I’m leaving next week for

Canada.’

‘For a holiday?’ I ineptly inquired.

‘For keeps,’ said Jack. ‘Mounted Police, with a commission soon, I

hope. This country’s gone to the dogs, sir.’

Here was a pretty mess! ‘But look here, Turnbull, Miss Lettice has got

it into her head that you’re going there as a lodger. Have you given

her any cause to believe such stuff?’

At that the swagger dropped off him. ‘That woman, I’m sorry for her,

but she gets on my nerves. She gushes too much for my taste. She wants

to mother me, if you ever heard such rot. And I won’t be mothered.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I cut in. ‘But why say this to me? Miss Lettice

is the person you should complain to. Are you content to let her go on

living in a fool’s paradise?’

Well, you can pretty well guess how the conversation proceeded. We

argued for the best part of three hours. Jack was determined not to

yield to her devouring maternal affection, but he hadn’t pluck enough

to tell her so outright. He preferred to save his own feelings by

equivocation. The coward does it with a kiss, you know, the brave man

with the sword. But I must do him the justice to admit that, short

of brutal explicitness, he did all he could to disabuse her mind of

its fond fiction. I was aghast when I realized that the secret of his

departure was being kept solely in order that he might slip out of

the country without bidding her good-bye. After long battle I wrung

from him a reluctant promise that he would spare her that culminating

cruelty.

And that is the end of the story. I too was a coward, for I did not

dare to visit Miss Lettice until Jack had gone. In point of fact I

watched him off the premises and then stepped in, unwillingly enough

but hoping to afford the wretched woman some comfort, if only the

comfort of distraction. The front door yielded to my push: it was

seldom locked. I tapped at the door of the sitting-room. There was no

sound from within. Gently I turned the handle and looked in.

‘Good morning, Miss Lettice,’ I said, with a cheerfulness that was

idiotic, I dare say, but what was one to do?

Miss Lettice sat staring at the wall in front of her, staring fixedly,

motionless. Whether she heard my voice or not I don’t know, but she

neither moved nor spoke. I became very anxious and called to her again,

offering such dry crumbs of comfort as came to hand. ‘Don’t grieve,

my dear Miss Lettice. There’s still Bernard left to you.’ Something

of that sort I said to her, but it made no difference at all. She was

struck down, struck worse than dead, by the colossal and cruel power of

love. And while I continued to stare at her with pity and horror, she

slowly turned towards me, as though on a swivel, a face marred out of

recognition by a smile....

Saunders winced. His lips had hesitated in releasing those last words.

Lifting one hand to his eyes, he turned away from me towards his

bookshelves. There, with a book in his hand, he shrugged his shoulders

as if to shake off the grip of a memory.

‘If it’s standard trees you’re having,’ he remarked, ‘you’ll want light

six-feet stakes. Bowers is your man.’

WEDDING-DAY

Wedding-day. It was curiously unreal. His own face grimaced back at

him as he struggled to adjust his tie, a face that no man could feel

satisfied with. ‘I sometimes wish Uncle Edgar hadn’t died after all,’

he confided to the looking-glass. Round and pink, with a wisp of

light brown moustache that didn’t seem to belong to it, that ghost of

himself continued to agonize. Funny, what women could see to admire

in men. As for Florrie’s devotion to himself, the unreasonableness of

it, the obstinacy, positively vexed him. If it hadn’t been for that

little legacy they would have had to wait another five years. Not that

he wanted to wait, but still--five years was five years, time to turn

round in. That fifty pounds a year had made just the difference; it

had brought this day within his immediate reach; his heart’s desire,

glowing like luminous fruit upon an inaccessible tree, had bent

suddenly towards him, and his hand was already poised to grasp it.

Fateful moment. It didn’t bear thinking about. The old man ought not

to have sprung it on him like this.

‘Cheer-O, Bert!’ There was a bang upon the bedroom door, and before

it could be answered the attacking force entered tumultuously. It

was a large red-headed man, dressed unmistakably for the approaching

ceremony, tall, clean-shaven, possessing hands a size too big for his

body.

‘Hullo, elephant!’ He resented the fellow’s entry, and yet in some

vague way he was glad of it. He wanted to be alone with his dreams, but

he feared to be alone with his doubts. Well, in a few hours solitude

would be a thing of the past indeed. Florrie and he would be together,

sleeping and waking, in sickness and in health, till death them did

part. Forty years, perhaps, and never alone. Breakfast with Florrie,

the eight-thirteen to town, the six-five back, a late tea with Florrie,

conversation with Florrie, supper with Florrie; and week-ends spent

going to church or digging in the garden. There was no escape now.

Escape! Who wanted to escape? Not he, anyhow. And that was fortunate,

for here was Maurice, the jubilant best man, and Florrie’s brother to

boot. No escape.

‘You’d better pull your socks up, old feller,’ said Maurice, his face

bisected by a grin. ‘You haven’t got as much time to spare as you seem

to think. Cab’s at the door.’

It was fortunate, he knew, that the tide of events was sweeping him

along, or he would have stood for ever staring at himself in a dream

of indecision. Yet he hated to be bustled. He was still a free man,

and there leapt to life in him a spark of anger against the man who

sought to wrest that freedom from his grasp before the hour had struck.

It would strike soon enough, but until then ... it seemed suddenly

necessary that he should assert his independence of Maurice. His toilet

was already completed, but he would delay a while yet.

‘All right. I won’t keep you a minute.’ He spoke with an affected

coolness, as though addressing an importunate commercial traveller.

And, without haste, he picked up from the dressing-table a small pair

of nail-scissors. With these he began cutting off his moustache.

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

‘Time that thing came off,’ replied Bert, still plying the scissors.

‘Pour me out a spot of water for shaving, there’s a good chap... No,

cold’ll do.’

The world without was ablaze with summer, a beacon in the grey waste of

infinity, a fire-ball flung into the darkness. The sky flamed beauty

down upon the responsive pavements. But he, stubbornly, remained

shut in his cold introspection. It was as if he alone of all created

things was able to resist the infection of gladness that the warm

air held. Forty years, forty years. The dailyness of life terrified

him. The amiable Maurice became for him the symbol of all-conquering

circumstance.

It was a new Florrie who joined him at the altar, a Florrie veiled,

mysterious, and therefore seductive. ‘Therefore’ was the word stressed

by the devil in his brain. But she was undeniably pretty, and so

fragile, so like a piece of exquisite china, that he held his breath

in awe when she yielded her hand to his. This was the lovely ingenuous

child that life, day by day, year by year, would bend and break, and

finally cast aside. His was to be the dubious privilege of watching

that process, of watching the hair go grey, the face wrinkle, the

child-dreams die one by one. His heart beat with a profound pity. Poor

little devil, they were both in the same boat. She too was swearing

her freedom away, taking the veil of everlasting monotony. And,

irrationally, he blamed not himself, not her, but the officiating

clergyman, the guests, and most of all that fellow Maurice. He was glad

that he had not allowed himself to be bustled by Maurice, glad to feel

that soreness of the upper lip which bore witness to his not having

been bustled.

The clergyman at whose feet he knelt was tactfully gabbling words about

the procreation of children. Someone in the pews behind was sniffing

tearfully. That would be Florrie’s mother, no doubt, that angular

female version of Maurice. He became almost bemused by the drowsy

noises, like bees in a bottle, emitted by the priest. The sunlight,

pouring through the stained-glass window, cast a luminous many-coloured

pattern across the chancel floor. The colours entered him--his eyes,

his nostrils, his very veins--and made his blood tingle in tune with

their brightness. A faint purple, like wine stains; a rich yellow,

like harvested corn--they rang their little bell-melodies in his

consciousness till he lost count of time.

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

With Florrie clinging to his arm he went to the vestry; and there a

swarm of relations, like honey-seeking bees, descended upon them.

‘Florrie, you look too sweet!’ ‘Bert, you dear old thing!’ And so on.

Florrie’s younger brother approached, fresh from school. ‘Gratters, old

horse. She’s a good girl. I’ve trained her well. But what’s happened to

the cricket teams?’

‘The what?’

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

Florrie translated. ‘He means your moustache, Bert. Why did you shave

it off? I wish you hadn’t.’

He experienced a pang of compunction. Curse it, why had he shaved it

off? ‘Oh, I don’t know. Thought I’d feel freer without it.’

Maurice, the omnipotent Maurice, bore down on them. ‘Off we go!’ he

said briskly. Why was he always in such a devil of a hurry? Bert and

his bride began marching down the aisle. He wanted to dance: not with

joy, but because it was so difficult to walk against the tempo of

Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

Outside, the world still blazed. And a hundred eyes stared. He handed

Florrie into the waiting cab, and leaped in after her, with grains of

rice trickling down his back. Maurice, the gaoler, shut the door behind

them, and then, with incredible agility, thrust his head through the

open window-space, elongated his neck, and kissed his sister on the

cheek. ‘Best of luck, both.’ He withdrew. The taxi moved on, gobbling

like a turkey. ‘I’m glad I had that shave,’ said Bert viciously. The

forty years began.

DEARTH’S FARM

It is really not far: our fast train does it in eighty minutes. But so

sequestered is the little valley in which I have made my solitary home

that I never go to town without the delicious sensation of poising my

hand over a lucky-bag full of old memories. In the train I amuse myself

by summoning up some of those ghosts of the past, a past not distant

but sufficiently remote in atmosphere from my present to be invested

with a certain sentimental glamour. ‘Perhaps I shall meet you--or you.’

But never yet have I succeeded in guessing what London held up her

sleeve for me. She has that happiest of tricks--without which paradise

will be dull indeed--the trick of surprise. In London, if in no other

place, it is the unexpected that happens. For me Fleet Street is the

scene _par excellence_ of these adventurous encounters, and it was in

Fleet Street, three months ago, that I ran across Bailey, of Queens’,

whom I hadn’t seen for five years. Bailey is not his name, nor Queens’

his college, but these names will serve to reveal what is germane to my

purpose and to conceal the rest.

His recognition of me was instant; mine of him more slow. He told me

his name twice; we stared at each other, and I struggled to disguise

the blankness of my memory. The situation became awkward. I was

the more embarrassed because I feared lest he should too odiously

misinterpret my non-recognition of him, for the man was shabby and

unshaven enough to be suspicious of an intentional slight. Bailey,

Bailey ... now who the devil was Bailey? And then, when he had already

made a gesture of moving on, memory stirred to activity.

‘Of course, I remember. Bailey. Theosophy. You used to talk to me about

theosophy, didn’t you? I remember perfectly now.’ I glanced at my

watch. ‘If you’re not busy let’s go and have tea somewhere.’

He smiled, with a hint of irony in his eyes, as he answered: ‘I’m not

busy.’ I received the uncomfortable impression that he was hungry and

with no ordinary hunger, and the idea kept me silent, like an awkward

school-boy, while we walked together to a tea-shop that I knew.

Seated on opposite sides of the tea-table we took stock of each

other. He was thin, and his hair greying; his complexion had a soiled

unhealthy appearance; the cheeks had sunk in a little, throwing into

prominence the high cheekbones above which his sensitive eyes glittered

with a new light, a light not of heaven. Compared with the Bailey I now

remembered so well, a rather sleek young man with an almost feline love

of luxury blossoming like a tropical plant in the exotic atmosphere of

his Cambridge rooms, compared with that man this was but a pale wraith.

In those days he had been a flaming personality, suited well--too

well, for my plain taste--to the highly-coloured orientalism that he

affected in his mural decorations. And co-existent in him with this

lust for soft cushions and chromatic orgies, which repelled me, there

was an imagination that attracted me: an imagination delighting in

highly-coloured metaphysical theories of the universe. These theories,

which were as fantastic as _The Arabian Nights_ and perhaps as unreal,

proved his academic undoing: he came down badly in his Tripos, and had

to leave without a degree. Many a man has done that and yet prospered,

but Bailey, it was apparent, hadn’t prospered. I made the conventional

inquiries, adding, ‘It must be six or seven years since we met last.’

‘More than that,’ said Bailey morosely, and lapsed into silence. ‘Look

here,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘I’m going to behave like a cad. I’m

going to ask you to lend me a pound note. And don’t expect it back in a

hurry.’

We both winced a little as the note changed hands. ‘You’ve had bad

luck,’ I remarked, without, I hope, a hint of pity in my voice. ‘What’s

wrong?’

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

expect?’

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

‘No, I don’t.’ His cup came down with a nervous slam upon the saucer.

‘Going grey, too, aren’t I?’ I was forced to nod agreement. ‘Yet, do

you know, a month ago there wasn’t a grey hair in my head. You write

stories, don’t you? I saw your name somewhere. I wonder if you could

write my story. You may get your money back after all.... By God, that

would be funny, wouldn’t it!’

I couldn’t see the joke, but I was curious about his story. And after

we had lit our cigarettes he told it to me, to the accompaniment of a

driving storm of rain that tapped like a thousand idiot fingers upon

the plate-glass windows of the shop.

A few weeks ago, said Bailey, I was staying at the house of a cousin

of mine. I never liked the woman, but I wanted free board and lodging,

and hunger soon blunts the edge of one’s delicacy. She’s at least ten

years my senior, and all I could remember of her was that she had

bullied me when I was a child into learning to read. Ten years ago

she married a man named Dearth--James Dearth, the resident owner of a

smallish farm in Norfolk, not far from the coast. All her relatives

opposed the marriage. Relatives always do. If people waited for the

approval of relatives before marrying, the world would be depopulated

in a generation. This time it was religion. My cousin’s people were

primitive and methodical in their religion, as the name of their sect

confessed; whereas Dearth professed a universal toleration that they

thought could only be a cloak for indifference. I have my own opinion

about that, but it doesn’t matter now. When I met the man I forgot

all about religion: I was simply repelled by the notion of any woman

marrying so odd a being. Rather small in build, he possessed the

longest and narrowest face I have ever seen on a man of his size. His

eyes were set exceptionally wide apart, and the nose, culminating

in large nostrils, made so slight an angle with the rest of the face

that seen in profile it was scarcely human. Perhaps I exaggerate a

little, but I know no other way of explaining the peculiar revulsion he

inspired in me. He met me at the station in his dog-cart, and wheezed

a greeting at me. ‘You’re Mr. Bailey, aren’t you? I hope you’ve had

an agreeable journey. Monica will be delighted.’ This seemed friendly

enough, and my host’s conversation during that eight-mile drive

did much to make me forget my first distaste of his person. He was

evidently a man of wide reading, and he had a habit of polite deference

that was extremely flattering, especially to me who had had more than

my share of the other thing. I was cashiered during the war, you know.

Never mind why. Whenever he laughed, which was not seldom, he exhibited

a mouthful of very large regular teeth.

Dearth’s Farm, to give it the local name, is a place with a personality

of its own. Perhaps every place has that. Sometimes I fancy that the

earth itself is a personality, or a community of souls locked fast in

a dream from which at any moment they may awake, like volcanos, into

violent action. Anyhow Dearth’s Farm struck me as being peculiarly

personal, because I found it impossible not to regard its climatic

changes as changes of mood. You remember my theory that chemical action

is only psychical action seen from without? Well, I’m inclined to

think in just the same way of every manifestation of natural energy.

But you don’t want to hear about my fancies. The farmhouse, which is

approached by a narrow winding lane from the main road, stands high up

in a kind of shallow basin of land, a few acres ploughed but mostly

grass. The countryside has a gentle prettiness more characteristic of

the southeastern counties. On three sides wooded hills slope gradually

to the horizon; on the fourth side grassland rises a little for twenty

yards and then curves abruptly down. To look through the windows that

give out upon this fourth side is to have the sensation of being on

the edge of a steep cliff, or at the end of the world. On a still day,

when the sun is shining, the place has a languid beauty, an afternoon

atmosphere. You remember Tennyson’s Lotus Isles, ‘in which it seemed

always afternoon’: Dearth’s Farm has something of that flavour on a

still day. But such days are rare; the two or three I experienced shine

like jewels in the memory. Most often that stretch of fifty or sixty

acres is a gathering-ground for all the bleak winds of the earth. They

seem to come simultaneously from the land and from the sea, which is

six miles away, and they swirl round in that shallow basin of earth,

as I have called it, like maddened devils seeking escape from a trap.

When the storms were at their worst I used to feel as though I were

perched insecurely on a gigantic saucer held a hundred miles above the

earth. But I am not a courageous person. Monica, my cousin, found no

fault with the winds. She had other fears, and I had not been with her

three days before she began to confide them to me. Her overtures were

as surprising as they were unwelcome, for that she was not a confiding

person by nature I was certain. Her manners were reserved to the point

of diffidence, and we had nothing in common save a detestation of the

family from which we had both sprung. I suppose you will want to know

something of her looks. She was a tall, full-figured woman, handsome

for her years, with jet black hair, a sensitive face, and a complexion

almost Southern in its dark colouring. I love beauty and I found

pleasure in her mere presence, which did something to lighten for me

the gloom that pervaded the house; but my pleasure was innocent enough,

and Dearth’s watchdog airs only amused me. Monica’s eyes--unfathomable

pools--seemed troubled whenever they rested on me: whether by fear or

by some other emotion I didn’t at first know.

She chose her moment well, coming to me when Dearth was out of the

house, looking after his men, and I, pleading a headache, had refused

to accompany him. The malady was purely fictitious, but I was bored

with the fellow’s company, and sick of being dragged at his heels like

a dog for no better reason than his too evident jealousy afforded.

‘I want to ask a kindness of you,’ she said. ‘Will you promise to

answer me quite frankly?’ I wondered what the deuce was coming, but I

promised, seeing no way out of it. ‘I want you to tell me,’ she went

on, ‘whether you see anything queer about me, about my behaviour? Do I

say or do anything that seems to you odd?’

Her perturbation was so great that I smiled to hide my perception of

it. I answered jocularly: ‘Nothing at all odd, my dear Monica, except

this question of yours. What makes you ask it?’

But she was not to be shaken so easily out of her fears, whatever they

were. ‘And do you find nothing strange about this household either?’

‘Nothing strange at all,’ I assured her. ‘Your marriage is an unhappy

one, but so are thousands of others. Nothing strange about that.’

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

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Are you asking for my opinion of your

husband? A delicate thing to discuss.’

‘We’re speaking in confidence, aren’t we!’ She spoke impatiently,

waving my politeness away.

‘Well, since you ask, I don’t like him. I don’t like his face: it’s a

parody on mankind. And I can’t understand why you threw yourself away

on him.’

She was eager to explain. ‘He wasn’t always like this. He was a gifted

man, with brains and an imagination. He still is, for all I know. You

spoke of his face--now how would you describe his face, in one word?’

I couldn’t help being tickled by the comedy of the situation: a man and

a woman sitting in solemn conclave seeking a word by which to describe

another man’s face, and that man her husband. But her air of tragedy,

though I thought it ridiculous, sobered me. I pondered her question for

a while, recalling to my mind’s eye the long narrow physiognomy and

the large teeth of Dearth.

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

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

She told me a queer tale. Dearth, it appears, had a love and

understanding of horses that was quite unparalleled. His wife too

had loved horses and it had once pleased her to see her husband’s

astonishing power over the creatures, a power which he exercised

always for their good. But his benefactions to the equine race were

made at a hideous cost to himself of which he was utterly unaware.

Monica’s theory was too fantastic even for me to swallow, and I, as you

know, have a good stomach for fantasy. You will have already guessed

what it was. Dearth was growing, by a process too gradual and subtle

for perception, into the likeness of the horses with whom he had so

complete sympathy. This was Mrs. Dearth’s notion of what was happening

to her husband. And she pointed out something significant that had

escaped my notice. She pointed out that the difference between him and

the next man was not altogether, or even mainly, a physical difference.

In effect she said: ‘If you scrutinize the features more carefully,

you will find them to be far less extraordinary than you now suppose.

The poison is not in his features. It is in the psychical atmosphere he

carries about with him: something which infects you with the idea of

horse and makes you impose that idea on his appearance, magnifying his

facial peculiarities.’ Just now I mentioned that in the early days of

her marriage Monica had shared this love of horses. Later, of course,

she came to detest them only one degree less than she detested her

husband. That is saying much. Only a few months before my visit matters

had come to a crisis between the two. Without giving any definite

reason, she had confessed, under pressure, that he was unspeakably

offensive to her; and since then they had met only at meals and always

reluctantly. She shuddered to recall that interview, and I shuddered to

imagine it. I was no longer surprised that she had begun to entertain

doubts of her own sanity.

But this wasn’t the worst. The worst was Dandy, the white horse. I

found it difficult to understand why a white horse should alarm her,

and I began to suspect that the nervous strain she had undergone was

making her inclined to magnify trifles. ‘It’s his favourite horse,’ she

said. ‘That’s as much as saying that he dotes on it to a degree that

is unhuman. It never does any work. It just roams the fields by day,

and at night sleeps in the stable.’ Even this didn’t, to my mind, seem

a very terrible indictment. If the man were mad on horses, what more

natural than this petting of a particular favourite?--a fine animal,

too, as Monica herself admitted. ‘Roams the fields,’ cried my poor

cousin urgently. ‘Or did until these last few weeks. Lately it has been

kept in its stable, day in, day out, eating its head off and working

up energy enough to kill us all.’ This sounded to me like the language

of hysteria, but I waited for what was to follow. ‘The day you came,

did you notice how pale I looked? I had had a fright. As I was crossing

the yard with a pail of separated milk for the calves, that beast broke

loose from the stable and sprang at me. Yes, Dandy. He was in a fury.

His eyes burned with ferocity. I dodged him by a miracle, dropped the

pail, and ran back to the house shrieking for help. When I entered the

living-room my husband feigned to be waking out of sleep. He didn’t

seem interested in my story, and I’m convinced that he had planned the

whole thing.’ It was past my understanding how Dearth could have made

his horse spring out of his stable and make a murderous attack upon a

particular woman, and I said so. ‘You don’t know him yet,’ retorted

Monica. ‘And you don’t know Dandy. Go and look at the beast. Go now,

while James is out.’

The farmyard, with its pool of water covered in green slime, its manure

and sodden straw, and its smell of pigs, was a place that seldom

failed to offend me. But on this occasion I picked my way across the

cobblestones thinking of nothing at all but the homicidal horse that

I was about to spy upon. I have said before that I’m not a courageous

man, and you’ll understand that I stepped warily as I neared the

stable. I saw that the lower of the two doors was made fast and with

the more confidence unlatched the other.

I peered in. The great horse stood, bolt upright but apparently in a

profound sleep. It was indeed a fine creature, with no spot or shadow,

as far as I could discern, to mar its glossy whiteness. I stood there

staring and brooding for several minutes, wondering if both Monica and

I were the victims of some astounding hallucination. I had no fear

at all of Dandy, after having seen him; and it didn’t alarm me when,

presently, his frame quivered, his eyes opened, and he turned to look

at me. But as I looked into his eyes an indefinable fear possessed

me. The horse stared dumbly for a moment, and his nostrils dilated.

Although I half-expected him to tear his head out of the halter and

prance round upon me, I could not move. I stared, and as I stared, the

horse’s lips moved back from the teeth in a grin, unmistakably a grin,

of malign intelligence. The gesture vividly recalled Dearth to my mind.

I had described him as equine, and if proof of the word’s aptness were

needed, Dandy had supplied that proof.

‘He’s come back,’ Monica murmured to me, on my return to the house.

‘Ill, I think. He’s gone to lie down. Have you seen Dandy?’

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

But I was to see him again, twice again. The first time was that

same night, from my bedroom window. Both my bedroom and my cousin’s

looked out upon that grassy hill of which I spoke. It rose from a few

yards until almost level with the second storey of the house and then

abruptly curved away. Somewhere about midnight, feeling restless and

troubled by my thoughts, I got out of bed and went to the window to

take an airing.

I was not the only restless creature that night. Standing not twenty

yards away, with the sky for background, was a great horse. The

moonlight made its white flank gleam like silver, and lit up the eyes

that stared fixedly at my window.

For sixteen days and nights we lived, Monica and I, in the presence

of this fear, a fear none the less real for being non-susceptible to

definition. The climax came suddenly, without any sort of warning,

unless Dearth’s idiotic hostility towards myself could be regarded as

a warning. The utterly unfounded idea that I was making love to his

wife had taken root in the man’s mind, and every day his manner to me

became more openly vindictive. This was the cue for my departure, with

warm thanks for my delightful holiday; but I didn’t choose to take it.

I wasn’t exactly in love with Monica, but she was my comrade in danger

and I was reluctant to leave her to face her nightmare terrors alone.

The most cheerful room in that house was the kitchen, with its

red-tiled floor, its oak rafters, and its great open fireplace. And

when in the evenings the lamp was lit and we sat there, listening in

comfort to the everlasting gale that raged round the house, I could

almost have imagined myself happy, had it not been for the presence of

my reluctant host. He was a skeleton at a feast, if you like! By God,

we were a genial party. From seven o’clock to ten we would sit there,

the three of us, fencing off silence with the most pitiful of small

talk. On this particular night I had been chaffing him gently, though

with intention, about his fancy for keeping a loaded rifle hanging

over the kitchen mantelpiece; but at last I sickened of the pastime,

and the conversation, which had been sustained only by my efforts,

lapsed. I stared at the red embers in the grate, stealing a glance

now and again at Monica to see how she was enduring the discomfort of

such a silence. The cheap alarum clock ticked loudly, in the way that

cheap alarum clocks have. When I looked again at Dearth he appeared to

have fallen asleep. I say ‘appeared,’ for I instantly suspected him

of shamming sleep in order to catch us out. I knew that he believed

us to be in love with each other, and his total lack of evidence must

have occasioned him hours of useless fury. I suspected him of the most

melodramatic intentions: of hoping to see a caress pass between us that

would justify him in making a scene. In that scene, as I figured it,

the gun over the mantelpiece might play an important part. I don’t like

loaded guns.

The sight of his closed lids exasperated me into a bitter speech

designed for him to overhear. ‘Monica, your husband is asleep. He is

asleep only in order that he may wake at the chosen moment and pour out

the contents of his vulgar little mind upon our heads.’

This tirade astonished her, as well it might. She glanced up, first at

me, then at her husband; and upon him her eyes remained fixed. ‘He’s

not asleep,’ she said, rising slowly out of her chair.

‘I know he’s not,’ I replied.

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

coolly. ‘He’s dead.’

At those words the wind outside redoubled its fury, and it seemed as

though all the anguish of the world was in its wail. The spirit of

Dearth’s Farm was crying aloud in a frenzy that shook the house, making

all the windows rattle. I shuddered to my feet. And in the moment of my

rising the wail died away, and in the lull I heard outside the window a

sudden sound of feet, of pawing, horse’s feet. My horror found vent in

a sort of desperate mirth.

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

Shocked by my levity, she pointed mutely to the body in the chair.

But a wild idea possessed me, and I knew that my wild idea was the

truth. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that may be dead as mutton. But James Dearth is

outside, come to spy on you and me. Can’t you hear him?’

I stretched out my hand to the blind cord. The blind ran up with a

rattle, and, pressed against the window, looking in upon us, was the

face of the white horse, its teeth bared in a malevolent grin. Without

losing sight of the thing for a moment, I backed towards the fire.

Monica, divining my intention, took down the gun from its hook and

yielded it to my desirous fingers. I took deliberate aim, and shot.

And then, with the crisis over, as I thought, my nerves went to rags. I

sat down limply, Monica huddled at my feet; and I knew with a hideous

certitude that the soul of James Dearth, violently expelled from the

corpse that lay outside the window, was in the room with me, seeking

to re-enter that human body in the chair. There was a long moment of

agony during which I trembled on the verge of madness, and then a flush

came back into the dead pallid cheeks, the body breathed, the eyes

opened.... I had just enough strength left to drag myself out of my

seat. I saw Monica’s eyes raised to mine; I can never for a moment

cease to see them. Three hours later I stumbled into the arms of the

stationmaster, who put me in the London train under the impression that

I was drunk. Yes, I left alone. I told you I wasn’t a courageous man....

Bailey’s voice abruptly ceased. The tension in my listening mind

snapped, and I came back with a jerk, as though released by a spring,

to my seat in the tea-shop. Bailey’s queer eyes glittered across at me

for a moment, and then, their light dying suddenly out, they became

infinitely weary of me and of all the sorry business of living. A

rationalist in grain, I find it impossible to accept the story quite

as it stands. Substantially true it may be, probably is, but that it

has been distorted by the prism of Bailey’s singular personality I can

hardly doubt. But the angle of that distortion must remain a matter for

conjecture.

No such dull reflections came then to mar my appreciation of the

quality of the strange hush that followed his last words. Neither of us

spoke. An agitated waitress made us aware that the shop was closing,

and we went into the street without a word. The rain was unremitting.

I shrank back into the shelter of the porch while I fastened the collar

of my mackintosh, and when I stepped out upon the pavement again,

Bailey had vanished into the darkness.

I have never ceased to be vexed at losing him, and never ceased to fear

that he may have thought the loss not unwelcome to me. My only hope

is that he may read this and get into touch with me again, so that I

may discharge my debt to him. It is a debt that lies heavily on my

conscience--the price of this story, less one pound.

THE GHOST

Seven days leave--how exhilarating! Freedom was wine in the mouth. And

though of those seven days only three remained he was still enjoying a

delirious intoxication. He had learned the art of squeezing the present

moment dry, of living with all his heart in a happy now, when he

reached one, regarding the long intervals of wretchedness as unmeaning

parentheses.

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

relatives are.’

‘You were both silly and horrid,’ answered his hostess. But her eyes

danced with pleasure as they met his, and the two friends exchanged a

smile of understanding. This was their good time, and they would make

the most of it, wasting no regret on the past and admitting to their

hearts no fear of the great black future that loomed, like a beast of

prey, ready to shatter their happiness with a blow of its paw. It was

a most delightful friendship, and that it depended on mutual liking

alone, and on no sort of conventional tie, constituted not the least

of its charm. Dressed in a white tub-frock, her small face from under

a drooping sun-hat flushing with excitement, Betty--publicly known

as Mrs. Charles Cowley--looked exquisitely cool and fresh and young,

younger even than her years, which numbered twenty-seven. It did

Arnold’s eyes good to look at her, and it sent a warm thrill through

his romantic heart that he was able to enjoy that comforting sight,

able to bask in her jolly friendliness, without a thought of disloyalty

towards her husband, his old friend Charles. So far as he could feel

sorry for anyone this morning he was a little sorry for Charles: not

because Charles was an ill-paid clerk, nor because Charles’s was a

retentive firm conspiring with medical officers to defeat his patriotic

ambition, but merely because on this day of all days he had to remain

cooped up in the city, poor devil.

He put his head out of the kitchen window and inhaled the summer air in

long rapturous draughts. Jove, what a day for picnicking!

‘Hullo!’ cried Betty, at his back. ‘What do you think you’re achieving

by that? You can’t stop to do your breathing exercises now. Why, you

haven’t packed the sandwiches yet!’

Arnold wheeled round and saluted her in military fashion--a form of

humour then in vogue. ‘Sorry, sir!... Anyhow, have you finished washing

up your dixies?’

Betty regarded him with severity. ‘Yes, of course. Haven’t I got my hat

on and waiting for you!’

He repeated the question reflectively. ‘Haven’t I got my hat on and

waiting for you?... In what sense is your hat waiting for me, Betty? As

the dear general said in Bernard Shaw, I’m only a silly soldier-man.

Don’t harass my poor intelligence.’

‘Oh, grammar!’ She annihilated grammar with one pout. Her quick fingers

stacked the sandwiches, and wrapped them in grease paper snatched

from the table drawer. ‘Come along.... No, _I’m_ going to carry the

haversack. You bring the thermos.’

They stepped out of the bungalow and into rural Buckinghamshire.

It was certainly a unique morning. Earth had never before been so

fresh, breathed such fragrance; never before had the sky bent so

intimately over her. After an hour’s walking down narrow lanes between

sweet-smelling hedgerows, and over hills bordered by pinewoods, the

two friends turned into a field-path. Tall feathery grasses, red-brown

dock-flowers and yellow charlock trembled ever so slightly as in

a trance of ecstasy; clover and ladies’-fingers, buttercups and

celandine seemed to Arnold’s imagination to be so many mute faces,

absurdly knowing, wonderfully content. When they reached their second

stile he paused, and Betty with him. The meadow beyond was a symphony

in green and yellow: a curving sweep of long grass and buttercups,

dazzled with sunlight; and on the far side, by a pond, black-and-white

cows were browsing in the shadow of tall elms, some dreaming over a

celestial cud, some stooping to the water, some cropping the jade-green

grass with soft enfolding lips.

‘How still it looks,’ said Betty.

He nodded, drowsed by beauty, yet stabbed by beauty’s pain. He wondered

if he were seeing this vision of England for the last time. ‘And how

alive,’ he answered. ‘It’s as if the whole field were breathing and

feeling. Dare we go into it? It’s like walking over some one’s face.’

Perhaps in that moment that three-days-hence future thrust its ugly

face into Betty’s. Perhaps she recalled Arnold’s solitary lapse from

soldierly reticence, when he had said: ‘It’s not the actual fighting or

the danger. It’s the filth. And chance sights. A decaying human hand

sticking out of the side of a trench--things like that.’ Perhaps she

recalled this, for her face grew unaccountably tense.

‘Come along, Arnold, that’s where we’re going to have lunch. By that

stream.’ She scrambled over the stile before he could offer to help

her. He followed in a more leisurely fashion, a little disappointed

that she had broken the spell of that meadow’s loveliness.

They sauntered across the field, and climbed another stile. Then,

skirting the hedge to the left, they followed the brook until they

found an agreeable resting-place on the sloping grassed bank. They

sat down a few yards from the pond where, as in a picture, the cows

were grouped, knee-deep in cool grass. Into that little lake, which

reflected the sky’s blue and gold, the brook ran clear over a pebbly

bed. Arnold, embracing his knees, rested his chin on them and stared

into the water, admiring the contours and colours of the smooth,

delicately-enamelled stones, and straining the imagination to share the

lives of the minute creatures that were borne past in the stream. Betty

watched him with a covert sidelong look.

A unique morning, yes; and a unique friendship of which Arnold

was immeasurably proud. Beautifully at peace, he found delight in

contemplating their relationship. He and Betty were the most staunch of

comrades. There was implicit trust between them, unshakable fidelity,

and never a thought of love. He could not believe that ever before had

a man and a girl achieved such intimacy without being betrayed into

a wish for a more passionate symbol of that intimacy than mere talk.

But to Arnold, who was still in his earliest twenties, talk was the

best thing in the world. And what talks he had had with Betty! With

what glorious candour she had disclosed to him the secret places of

her mind, places to which even her mother and sisters had never been

admitted! For Arnold it was a fascinating and a sacred experience; and

if Betty’s respect for his intellect was exaggerated, her absolute

trust in his honour was at least well-founded. It was this absolute

trust that added to their friendship the delicious flavour of romance.

They exchanged ideas--on life, on religion, on sex, especially on

sex--with utter unreserve, and with no hint of concession to vulgar

notions of propriety.

‘Look at those jolly little red worms,’ said Arnold, pointing to the

water. ‘I used to dote on those things when I was a kid.’

‘They’re lovely.’ Betty paused before adding, a trifle consciously:

‘Childhood’s the best time, isn’t it? I wish I had a baby.’

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

‘Ah, why! I’ve been married five years. At first we couldn’t afford

it, and now--well, something’s wrong. For two years or more we’ve been

hoping for a child.’

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

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

Charlie.’

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

‘Yes. The doctor told him. Nothing very dreadful, I believe, in the

ordinary way. But it makes it improbable that he’ll ever have a child.’

‘And he wants one?’

Betty turned her head away for one moment. ‘_I_ want one; I want one

bitterly. And he too, in his way.’

Arnold kept his gaze steadily upon the moving water, lest he should

see her tears. He was shocked to think that this girl, so robust, so

affectionate, so ripe for motherhood, should be cheated by the accident

of marriage of a tremendous experience. And why must it be so? In a

sensible society would it be so? Before he had begun to work out all

the implications of that challenge, Betty spoke again.

He was amazed to hear her phrasing his own thoughts. ‘If people were

decent-minded, it wouldn’t so much matter,’ she said. ‘There could be a

temporary marriage with someone else.’

Arnold was delighted with this proof of her emancipation. ‘Exactly.

Nothing simpler. But society won’t change in a hurry. No use waiting

for society. It rests with you and Charlie.’

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

Arnold glowed in agreement. Charles was a good fellow, the best fellow

in the world; he had a level head and a wonderfully rational outlook.

Nothing niggardly about Charles.... And then an extraordinary thought

presented itself. Why could not he himself give Betty her heart’s

desire? Could she possibly have any such notion in her mind? Was it

possible that she liked him enough for that? The dream blossomed in his

imagination. He saw the baby laughing up at him from its cradle; saw it

growing up as the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Cowley. He himself would

see the boy--for a boy it would be--only occasionally, and he would

be known as ‘Uncle Arnold’ or some such nonsense. The situation would

be quite impossibly romantic, like something in a novel, and yet a

triumph of decency and good sense over vulgar middle-class morality.

Betty and he would resume their friendship unchanged and desiring no

change. His respect for her was invincible. She was the wife of his

friend, and that she would always be. He conceived the whole episode

dispassionately, an act of pure friendship. Was it possible that

she...? No, it was not possible. Talk was all very well, but confronted

with the need for action she would falter. His thoughts had been mere

presumption. Some other man, perhaps, but he--he could not expect so

great an honour, and certainly he could not seek it. If she had meant

that she would have said so. Of that he was sure. He dared not make

a suggestion that might be repellent to her: she would be so cruelly

embarrassed, and the perfection of their comradeship would be marred

for ever.

And yet, in a situation so excessively delicate, he must venture

something if he wished to be her friend. He tried to say: ‘You know I

too would do anything to make you happy.’ But the words as they formed

in his mind frightened him. How could he make her realize the utter

purity and loyalty of his desires?

Despite his bewilderment he felt the moment to be exquisitely rich in

beauty and in destiny. The pause lengthened. At last he stammered, ‘In

that event, of course, you would ask ... some friend.’

‘Yes.’ Betty’s tone was cold. ‘Forgive me for boring you.’ She jumped

up. ‘I’m getting stiff. Shall we move on?’

Something had gone wrong. Arnold grappled feverishly with the

incomprehensible. Had he said too much? No, too little. Betty was

already walking away. He could see only her back. When he caught her

up, the sight of her pride made him angry with himself; yet he felt

tongue-tied. He knew that he had failed her in a supreme crisis. Could

he have had that opportunity again he would for her sake have risked

all, and said, ‘Let me be the father of your child.’ But she was

talking now, rather volubly and consciously, of indifferent things.

Nothing would ever be the same again. Anger, jealous anger, flamed in

his heart against the child, never to be born, who stood like a ghost

between them, severing their friendship.

THE HOUSE AT MAADI

PART THE FIRST

_An Afternoon in April_

‘Ugliness, squalor, is only a nuisance,’ he told himself. ‘It is

beauty that hurts.’ Even in the house at Maadi, the house that held

Rosemary Fairfield, he could lose himself in musing; and he remained

lost until he became aware that a tall elderly woman with fine eyes and

silvering hair moved across the room to greet him.

‘You’re Mr. Redshawe, of course. I’m Rosemary’s mother. It was so good

of you to come.’ The young man’s evident shyness moved her to add, ‘You

_have_ met Rosemary, haven’t you?’

‘Thank you.’ He found his voice at last. ‘Yes, I had that pleasure

three days ago in Cairo. She was in the company of Mr. Bunnard, my

chief.’

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

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

His hostess smiled. At ease now, and reposing in the charm of her Irish

voice and the kindliness of her speaking eyes, he smiled in return.

As he looked into her lined face he felt that by holding himself very

still he could almost hear the silken rustle of beauty’s vanishing

skirts.

‘Tell me,’ Mrs. Fairfield said, leaning forward a little, ‘does my

brother-in-law do any work, or do you and the rest do it all?’

He stared a moment at the dubious crease in his trousers. When he

looked up, with a slight smile, ‘I’ve a tremendous respect for Mr.

Bunnard,’ he assured her. ‘More than respect, if it’s not presumptuous

to say so. But of course he’s a very big wig indeed, don’t you see?

It’s only natural that he shouldn’t _do_ very much.’

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

‘How very nice you are,’ she surprised herself by saying, with the

shadow of a tremor in her voice. ‘I’m so glad you came.’

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

terrified at first.’

Her smile was friendlier than ever.

‘Not of me, I’m sure. Of Mrs. Bunnard, perhaps. She is a very positive

person--always has been.’

He wanted to blurt out: ‘No, it was your daughter that I was afraid

of’; but he could not shake off the grip of his reticence.

‘So are all of that cult,’ he said. ‘They teach one their entertaining

guesswork as though it were an exact science.... And Miss Fairfield--is

she too a believer?’

‘Rosemary is rather a baffling girl,’ replied Rosemary’s mother. ‘She

spends a lot of time with her aunt, and listens, listens. Yes, that is

almost all there is to be said about Rosemary: she listens. At this

moment she is no doubt at the Cairo Lodge, hearing about Yoga and Prana

and Kamaloka.’

‘And other patent breakfast foods,’ said Redshawe, with a cadence so

bitter as to bring wonder into his new friend’s eyes.

‘It would be a pity, don’t you think,’ he answered the question in her

glance, ‘if she took all that stuff seriously?’

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

Bunnard.’

Almost boyishly diffident, the spare familiar figure of Redshawe’s

chief sidled towards them. Mr. Bunnard was rather above medium height,

but his earnest concentration on the pattern of the carpet made him

seem smaller. When he raised his head a pair of ingenuous wondering

eyes peered, through the circular lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles,

upon a new world.

‘Ah, Redshawe,’ said Mr. Bunnard, focussing his mild radiance upon the

young man as they shook hands, ‘you’ve come then. How very nice.’

‘You’re just in time to tell us about the Atlantians, Dick,’ Mrs.

Fairfield greeted him, with the air of having been discussing the

Atlantians all the afternoon.

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

‘Yes, I’ve come, sir,’ said Redshawe, ‘and I’ve brought every one of my

seven bodies with me.’

Mr. Bunnard considered this remark with a smile that revealed for the

fraction of a second an excellent set of artificial teeth.

‘Ah, you haven’t forgotten our little talk then.... But you’ve got a

lot to learn yet. Seven planes and all interpenetrating. Is Hypatia at

home, Sheila?’

‘My dear Dick! She is at the Lodge, of course, and Rosemary is with

her. I expect we had better not wait tea for them. They’ll probably

have something in Cairo.’

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

him.’

As though to his cue, the white-smocked, red-tarbooshed Hassan, the

Berber servant, appeared at this moment in the doorway bringing tea

on a large tray. In response to Mrs. Fairfield’s nod he shuffled

noiselessly into the room, bowing and smirking in his expansive

Oriental fashion, and set out the tea-things on an occasional table.

‘Seven planes and all interpenetrating,’ said Mr. Bunnard, appearing

to extract a peculiar comfort from the idea. ‘We generally take tea in

the French manner--or is it the Russian?--with lemon juice instead of

milk. By the by, I’ve got some Thought Forms up in my den, Redshawe,

that might interest you. Angry, affectionate, ambitious, pure, envious,

sensual, and so on: all accurately coloured, you know. I’ve spent a

lot of time on them. You’re not eating anything. I can recommend the

shortbread: it came all the way from Scotland.’

Mrs. Fairfield, roused by a sound outside, turned in the act of filling

Redshawe’s cup for the fifth time, to look out of the window.

‘Here are the truants,’ she said, ‘and we’ve nearly finished.’ And

Redshawe, following her glance, saw the miraculous Rosemary standing on

the gravel path outside. To his excited imagination it seemed that she

was but for an instant poised lightly upon this globe before flying

back to the paradise from which she had descended.

Then indeed came the whirlwind followed by the still small voice. Mrs.

Bunnard, tall, angular, and, though quiet, masterful, with conscious

power invaded the room: power which, however, broke like a spent wave

on the adamant rock of Redshawe’s absorption in Rosemary Fairfield.

‘Mr. Redshawe, how are you?’ said Mrs. Bunnard, grasping his hand. ‘We

have never been introduced, but I know you perfectly. This is my niece.’

‘We have met already,’ fell like a benediction from the lips of

Rosemary, as she gave him her hand.

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

humour. ‘Come, Rosemary!’

A moment later Redshawe was conscious of having stared at the departing

vision. The exodus completed by Mr. Bunnard, he turned to find the

thoughtful eyes of Rosemary’s mother upon him. Divining that she had

read some of his mind he became confused.

Mrs. Fairfield rose to ring the bell: an action so startling to the

disordered nerves of Redshawe that he breathed deep relief when, a

moment later, he heard her ask Hassan to make some fresh tea for the

ladies. His hostess came back into the bay of the room and stared out

at the clustering purple masses of bougainvillea that hung from the

white house, her hands playing listlessly with a fly-whisk.

‘This is the coolest part of the house till the sun goes down,’ she

said, in a tone so void of expression as to fix his instant attention.

‘Afterwards we will sit out on the piazza, and perhaps Rosemary will

play to us.’

‘That will be delightful,’ he answered, politely acquiescent; but his

mind was asking: ‘What is the matter? What is she going to say?’

He became agitated with the expectation of hearing something momentous

about Rosemary. But, after a pause, Mrs. Fairfield did but add the

commonplace remark that his was an uncommon name.

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

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

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

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

to the window.

‘By Jove, you knew my father?’ He got out of his chair in his

astonishment, and found himself, with a sense of shock, face to face

with an old woman who smiled at him wanly.

‘Yes, many years ago.’

‘He never mentioned----’ he began; and stopped, blushing for his

gaucherie. As if in atonement, ‘Please talk to me about my father, if

it won’t distress you,’ he pleaded.

After a long silence, ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘There’s a story I can never

tell you. But we’re going to be good friends, you and I, and some day

we’ll have a long talk about your father.’

Embarrassed, he murmured lame thanks.

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

shall be good friends.’

The door was slightly ajar and in the contracted doorway flashed the

smile of Mr. Bunnard.

‘Come along, Redshawe,’ chirped Mr. Bunnard. ‘The ladies are coming

down to their tea. Slip away while you can and have a look at my

Thought Forms.’

Redshawe, obeying this unwelcome summons, mused deeply on the story

that he was never to hear.

PART THE SECOND

_Sheila Dyrle_

Somewhere, no doubt, in Sheila’s personality, the story was written

down; and she could have turned for young Redshawe the pages that she

so seldom and so reluctantly turned for herself. She was an emotional

but not a sentimental woman, and retrospect was a melancholy luxury

that for the most part she denied herself. So far as she could she

denied it to herself now, although the young man had troubled the deep

waters of her mind. If for a moment she looked back her life appeared

to her as a fruitless quest for something--who knows what?--for beauty,

for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting

fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. Intimations

of such a reality had again and again quickened desire within her. But,

even in the moment of stretching out the hands to clasp it, ‘beauty

vanishes, beauty passes’....

* * * * *

Half a century before, in her early teens, Sheila had emerged from her

sister’s bedroom into the green distempered corridor of the school

infirmary, hotly denying in her heart that Helena was dying. She

wondered at the obtuseness of these people who had seen the sweet bloom

of Helena’s cheeks and the lustre of her eyes, and yet drained their

vocabulary of euphemisms hinting at death. Weak and wasted indeed she

was, but full, still, of the serene joy that was her peculiar gift to

the world. God couldn’t be so foolish or so cruel as to let Helena die.

That would surely have been too sorry a joke even for the deity of Aunt

Hester’s imagination.

‘Why is every one so silly?’ she complained to Aunt Hester, who had

waited in trembling silence till her coming. ‘Helena’s getting better.

Of course she is.’

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

talk?’

‘We couldn’t let her talk much. She’s still so weak. But she said she

would soon be out and about again.’

Tears began trickling down the lined leathery cheeks of Aunt Hester:

cheeks that had suddenly the grotesque air of having been corrugated

for the sole purpose of being wept upon. ‘Poor darling! Did she say

that?’

‘Oh, aunt, why will you believe those silly people?’ Sheila’s voice

rang out. ‘She must get well--she _must_!’

‘We must hope on,’ quavered Aunt Hester, furtively dabbing her eyes

with a little sodden ball of handkerchief.

Sheila, alone in her faith, succumbed to the fear that tried to hide

itself in anger. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘It’s a beastly shame ... to

give up hope. Think how _well_ she looks! She’s been making plans for

the summer holidays.’

At that Aunt Hester turned away her head, hunched up her back, and

frankly sobbed, leaning against the back of a chair. All her prim

dignity had vanished, and for the first time Sheila saw in her aunt an

old frail woman. The shock of that discovery passing, she stared for

a moment in sullen misery at the queer-shaped convulsive figure; then

turned abruptly away and went, dry-eyed, into their bedroom.

In bed she thought she could hear her sister’s voice in delirium,

although she knew that there were two walls and a passage between

them: it muttered interminably until she had to bite her lips together

to prevent herself from screaming. Aunt Hester soon came into the

room, undressed herself by moonlight, and tumbled on to her knees. She

remained kneeling, with her face and arms lying limply across her bed,

for what seemed hours; and Sheila stared stupidly at the ceiling and

strained her ears at every trivial sound. For a moment she closed her

eyes....

And when she opened them again, birds were chattering outside her

window and pale dawnlight, like a ghost, was in the room. ‘Like a

ghost,’ Sheila said, and shuddered. Aunt Hester was not there; her bed

had not been slept in.

Sheila got quickly out of bed, a dry sob of fear breaking from her, and

ran barefooted into the green corridor. She stood quite motionless for

a while, one hand resting on the door handle, and listened; tiptoed

a few steps up the passage, her eyes fixed dreadfully on the room

that held Helena; and drew back again. Time became a throbbing agony.

Her thought dizzied itself by ceaselessly revolving round the glazed

white door that had brass figures, 17, screwed upon its middle panel,

but her eyes steadily stared. ‘Seventeen,’ said some chattering thing

in her brain: ‘that’s her age. Is that why they put 17, or is it a

coincidence?’ But she was not to be distracted by silly questions. The

door began to open.

Slowly the glazed white door that had stared back at her for so long,

mutely reiterating ‘17,’ began to open, as though it had come to life.

‘A big white waistcoat,’ said Sheila’s chattering brain. Like a silly

flat face it moved aside to make room for something that with funereal

step passed out: a bent figure in black tight-fitting bodice and

white lace cap. Aunt Hester’s right hand drew the door to behind her,

and with an abrupt resolute gesture she flung up her head and stood,

regally tall, a black figure of doom framed in the white doorway. In a

silence like death itself the eyes of these two stricken creatures met.

That meeting of eyes was an icy blast in the green twilit corridor.

It froze the running water of Sheila’s thought and made her catch

her breath. Gradually, while they looked at each other, Aunt Hester

crumpled and shrank again to the meagre dimensions of a bent old woman;

she stumbled forward to meet her niece with feebly gesticulating arms.

The next morning she had answered the mute question of Sheila’s eyes

and was enfolding her rigid passive body.

The single word she saw forming on her aunt’s lips released the locked

flow of Sheila’s thought. Her mind became once more almost insanely

active. One dry gasp escaped her, and no other sound. The springs of

pity were barren in her: this sobbing woman was a stranger. Helena

was dead. She turned away from her aunt and went slowly back into the

bedroom. Helena was dead. ‘Very well,’ said Sheila’s mind, and she,

ignoring that, suddenly thought that if God were to appear to her at

that moment she would strike him with her hand. And that would have

been how silly! He would only laugh. Helena was dead. She stared,

dry-eyed, out of the window and saw the sun newly risen in his glory.

The leaves of the acacia were a luminous green; a thrush in its

branches poured out bubbling melody. All the universe was alive with a

stabbing futile beauty. Helena was dead.

No tears came to release the pent grief. Why was that? ‘Like the woman

in the poem,’ muttered that mental chatterbox and began iterating ‘Home

they brought her warrior dead. Home they brought her warrior dead.’ It

was in a little red book. ‘Rose a nurse of ninety years.’ Was it ninety

or eighty? And Rose was a girl’s name, but it wasn’t the nurse’s name.

Rose a nurse. A nurse rose. Rise, rose, risen. And on the third day

he rose again from the dead. Who was it did that? The little red book

had an odd name on its cover.... And suddenly Helena came before her,

alive, alive, and happy as she had always been. What nonsense. Helena

was dead.... Like a city besieged Sheila fought against the cruel

memories that invaded her.

Aunt Hester came with food on a tray, and urged her to try to eat

something, just a morsel, just a sip. What was the good of it all? And

the voice of Aunt Hester stayed with her interpolating dull remarks

about funerals, trains, Penlington, nice to be home again, poor dear

mother, make a friend of Jesus, try not to brood, into Sheila’s busy

thought. But Sheila pushed them all from her. She was eager to brood.

Without brooding, life was empty: a dry husk. She surrendered herself

now, opened her heart to that host of memories: they tumbled in, a

looting rabble. She lived over and over again her days with Helena: her

thought sped through the years ever more quickly, until in a sickening

rush it reached the dead wall of the present. Helena was dead, God

had stupidly killed her. And would they have to try to sing a hymn

about--what was it?--each within his narrow bed, safe home at last,

Jesu’s breast, blend the living with the dead.... Aunt Hester was back

again, urging her to cry. ‘You do the crying, aunt.’ Had she said that

or only thought it? She wished Aunt Hester would go away with her talk

of the kind nurse, just a sip or two, quite a peaceful passing dear,

try to pray, home again soon, take her with us. What was the sense in

saying ‘take her with us’ when Helena was dead? There was nothing to

take home. There was nothing to take home except what was in the white

room, number seventeen. They’d put it in a box ... not Helena; Helena

was gone away ... Sheila was jealous of anything that came to thrust

itself between her and her memories; but she could not still the almost

febrile activity of her aching brain: her random thoughts danced on

dizzily over the bottomless black pit.

* * * * *

Back in the house at Penlington. A locked room now, with It, shut up in

a shiny coffin, on trestles. And to-day, at noon, It was to be taken

away.

Noon. The long-tailed black horses trampled on Sheila’s heart. Six men

entered the house and mounted the stairs--tramp, tramp, tramp--and

stopped.... They returned more slowly, their breathing more noisy,

their footsteps less regular. Sheila turned her face from the window

lest she should find horror made visible.

She stood in the stuffy room, waiting for the others to come

downstairs. Although the windows were wide open the atmosphere was

stiflingly hot. The drowsy hum in which all summer sounds were merged

floated in oppressively, and the clock’s ticking was a burden.

She was very uncomfortable and wretched in her black clothes; her

gloved hands perspired. She caught sight, through the trees in the

garden, of the waiting carriage.... Why were all these things necessary?

Uncle Peter came downstairs, followed by Aunt Hester and a school chum

of Helena’s. Other draped figures came, including a strange girl-cousin

with her husband; but none was of the slightest consequence.

In the crawling carriage now; and idiot birds were singing happily

outside. Sunshine, dusty roads, blue cloudless sky, hot air, silly

singing birds, the window-fittings in the carriage, Uncle Peter with

his expanse of waistcoat and great gold chain and perspiring face,

the split in the third finger of her black glove, the ill-repressed

sniffling of the cousin, a scratch in the paint over Uncle Peter’s

head, the houses and hedges moving slowly past them, people at the

side of the road with raised hats, a team of cricketers in a distant

field and the gleam of their white flannels in the sunlight: of all

these things she was conscious, and of the black pit, Helena dead, and

the slow miserable rumble of wheels.

She wondered why God would not speak to her. A new hope flickered. She

would listen for His voice, that still small voice in the soul. But the

only voice she heard, whether within or without, was Uncle Peter’s.

‘It really _is_ hot,’ he said conversationally, as they got out of the

carriage.

And now added to the horror and the heat was the sight of the coffin

being borne into that squat evil building, that house of death, the

cemetery chapel, and, presently, a dull droning voice in melancholy

monotone:

‘_In the morning it is green and groweth up; but in the evening it is

cut down, dried up and withered. For when thou art angry all our days

are gone; we bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told.

The days of our years are three score years and ten._’

And Sheila, a tiny girl again, was having happy romps with Helena in a

garden full of flowers and sunshine. Helena was clapping her hands and

laughing; Helena was lifting her, shoulder-high, to kiss a very tall

rose that was really a princess imprisoned by black magic.... And then

she was going to Helena for her music lesson, and Helena pretended she

was just an ordinary pupil (for that was part of the game) named Linda

Smith. ‘And what are you going to play this afternoon, Linda?’...

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

The man was still there, the long-faced cadaverous man droning out his

words. And now they were out again in the scorching sun, standing, the

men bare-headed, round an open grave. She heard the women sobbing;

she saw Uncle Peter with bent head, a great red boil peeping over

his collar from the pink folds of neck. And now the coffin was being

lowered. Something seemed to clutch her by the throat; but the tears

would not come.

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

‘Come along, dear,’ said Aunt Hester, taking her arm. And Sheila,

waking as from an evil dream, saw compassion looking out of the eyes

of Uncle Peter. She was the centre of this tragedy. For an instant she

luxuriated in the emotion of her position; enjoyed the accession of

self-importance; rolled mourning like syrup on her tongue. She caught

herself in the act; and her heart turned sour and said to her, ‘How

hateful you are!’

Helena’s death is of signal importance in the history of Sheila because

it was the occasion of her first serious quarrel with God. And though,

as the years went on, she did in a measure make it up with Him, the

reconciliation was never complete. She never ceased, from that day,

to relish Mr. Hardy’s gestures of contempt for the President of the

Immortals. The name of God, none the less, resumed something of its old

majesty. She depersonalized Him, disembodied Him, transmuted Him from

solid substance into a kind of immanent gas, a presence that disturbed

her with the sense of elevated thoughts. She dabbled in the literature

of popular mysticism, deriving comfort from its comfortable abstract

phrases, its Cosmic Urges, its Universal Self. She read a text-book on

Hegel; and the Hegelian paradox, ‘Being and not-being are identical,’

she rolled on her tongue until it assumed the flavour of truism. While

she was on the crest of this enthusiasm Kay Wilton came, to renew the

promise of a transcendental happiness.

But let us turn the pages more quickly until we come upon a Sheila of

nineteen years, with the Kay adventure past but still fresh in her

mind. With her school-friend Hypatia Fairfield she sat in a coign of

the cliff at Selborne and gazed musingly at sea and sky. Sheila was too

busy with her dream to be very interested in Hypatia’s talk about her

clever brother who had just gone to Cambridge: his profound knowledge

of history, his intellectual honesty, and his sarcasm poured so

liberally on a certain Paley whose _Evidences of Christianity_ he had

been forced to study for the Little Go. Slightly bored by the recital

of this brother’s deeds and sayings, Sheila began a little to scorn

her friend’s sisterly partiality. Even the severe, the rational, the

proudly unconventional Hypatia was not immune from that human weakness.

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

‘Liked anyone?’

‘A boy, I mean.’

‘Why, of course, Edward----’

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

been....’

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

‘Well, yes, in love.’

‘No.’ Hypatia shook her head, firmly, but without the scorn that Sheila

had half-expected to see. ‘I never have. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I just wondered.’

For a moment Hypatia contemplated a distant ship. ‘Look at the sun on

that sail,’ she said.... ‘Have _you_ ever been?’

Sheila nodded, scrutinizing closely a smooth white stone she had dug up

with her fingers from the chalky soil.

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know?’

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

Margaret’s.’

‘Do you mean it’s over now?’

Sheila began trying to explain everything. The effort took her away

for a moment to the first dim beginnings of love, four or five years

back, and then brought her swiftly to the greater glory and deeper pain

of the year just gone. Hypatia listened with quiet attention to the

rambling, shy, and inadequate narration.

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

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

‘I had a friend, Sophie Dewick. She used to go. And they used to have

lantern lectures and concerts and things. It wasn’t bad.’

The lantern slides had been a disappointment, being concerned almost

entirely with graphical statistics about alcohol. The only picture

worth while was that of a flea, magnified some thousandfold, happily

reminiscent of the _New Geology Reader_ and of Poe’s stories. This was

an inadequate sugar coating to the pill of chemical analysis. But Mr.

Beak made everything worth while--Mr. Beak, with spare figure, polished

pate, and black bushy eyebrows. When he rose, lifting his hand for

silence in order that he might announce ‘Hymn Number twenty-thwee--the

twenty-third hymn,’ he seemed like a military commander admitting

defeat but determined not to surrender; he seemed, to himself perhaps

as to his sympathizers, the last champion of sobriety in a drunken

world. This sense of desperate purpose pervaded the whole proceedings

of which Mr. Beak had the conducting: the religious service had always

this invincible air of being held round an open grave--the open grave

of one who, without doubt, had sipped claret-cup at some festival

in his youth and in riper years had taken to wife-beating, smoking,

swearing, and the other vices incidental to dipsomania. Mrs. Beak,

plump, rosy, and smiling, chatted pleasantly to every one and made

optimistic secretarial announcements.

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

‘Did you lose your heart at once?’

‘Not a bit. There was something about him: I don’t know how to express

it--a sort of mute poetry in his face. But I didn’t really give a

thought to him then. He seemed a nice boy; nothing more.’

Later she discovered that he had sad grey eyes, a submissive mouth,

untidy light brown hair. He wore his high double collar and his black

tie with an incongruous effect, like a cherub masquerading as a clerk.

Sheila’s interest in Kay, her urgent desire to protect him, led her

into strange places; for he was a youth of inscrutable impulses. The

Band of Hope was good fun; and to accept sometimes the hospitality of

Sophie’s pew in a strange chapel full of green gloom was a defection

from Wesleyanism that Aunt Hester found it easy to forgive: the easier

when she reflected that it was a further step from the dreaded Popery.

But the Seven Days’ Mission was something that taxed Sheila heavily.

A new humility was growing upon her; the beatific vision of Kay drew

her with a power she found irresistible. So innocent, so shy a boy,

so unaware of his own attractiveness, he seemed to be crying out for

sympathy. She read an unspoken appeal in his big eyes; she discovered

a pathos of inexpressiveness in his lame confused speeches. That he

admired her was a gradual revelation that at first she hardly dared to

face: that she longed to know him and to be his friend she admitted to

herself at once with her usual candour. Why then did this young prince,

this strayed denizen of the celestial meads, choose such odd ways of

spending his time? What force impelled him to attend that curious orgy

of emotion, the Seven Days’ Mission? She found the riddle hard to read.

Humbly and patiently she set herself the task of trying to understand

these religious fervours.

Sheila and Kay talked rarely, and never of matters more deep than the

Band of Hope, _Pickwick Papers_, the weather, the oddities of common

acquaintances, and the mock-tragedy in blank verse that Clive Bunter

had written for the Social Evening. The rehearsals for this play drew

them together every Tuesday for four weeks; but the play was never

presented to the public, for the dress-rehearsal was attended by Mr.

Beak and Mr. Turley, and these gentlemen, deacons both, were seized

with alarm at the prospect of theatricals, however innocuous, taking

place in a lecture-hall so near the sacred precincts of the church.

Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.

‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.

‘But they were awfully funny, those two,’ Sheila remarked. ‘People so

comic must have a spark of goodness in them somewhere.’

‘Goodness!’ said Clive Bunter, ‘Gallons and gallons of it. It ought to

be put a stop to, this monopoly of goodness. But as for brains--all the

brains in the Band of Hope wouldn’t fill a pin’s head.’

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

Sheila, who considered Clive rather conceited, laughed with relish. She

was at some pains to show her appreciation. Perhaps it was this that

encouraged Kay to ask, when, later, she turned to leave the others:

‘May I come a little way with you?’

She said ‘Please do,’ and pointedly refrained from calling out ‘Good

night’ to Sophie, who was walking some yards ahead with the Hero of the

doomed play, a gentleman by whom of late she had been rather engrossed.

Sheila and Kay walked for a while in silence down a broad avenue of

trees bordered on one side by dark woods, and on the other by scattered

houses. A yellow strip of moon hung, glowing in the blue, above the

woods.

She began telling him that she was to be sent away to St. Margaret’s, a

school in Selborne; that the term was thirteen weeks long; and that her

aunt talked of going to live in Selborne permanently. This meant that

she and Kay might never meet again.

Kay surveyed this prospect dismally. They discussed it in elaborately

casual tones. And all the while she was thinking how delicious were the

stillness and the moonlight and this unspoken love. Even the impending

separation was beautiful, tragic, uplifting. When at his suggestion

they sat down on a borough council seat facing the woods, she caught

her breath and trembled at the exquisite beauty of his shy avoidance of

her eyes.

‘Frightfully thick those woods are,’ he said.

But that was said to gain time, she knew. A feeling almost of fear came

over her. He was going to try to put into words this wonderful, this

unutterable love.... If only it could remain unspoken, and they sit

here for ever in silence!

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

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

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

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

speak.

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

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

shoulder.

They kissed shyly, hesitatingly, as though afraid lest by doing so they

should break the spell of beauty that bound them.

* * * * *

Hypatia listened, slightly frowning.

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

‘Told you?’

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

Her voice died away into silence.

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

ever.’

She resumed her story after a pregnant silence. The sound of the sea

soothed her with its rhythm.

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

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

horizon.

‘Well?’ said Hypatia gently, after a long pause. ‘Did he forget all

about you or something of that sort?’

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

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

The first letter made her eyes moist with tenderness; but every one

that followed came with a whisper of impending tragedy. He wrote always

of the church, of the office, of the garden, of the Band of Hope: round

these things his immortal soul revolved.

Next Sunday fortnight I am to give a paper at the Young People’s

Bible Class. Mr. Dewick asked me if I would and he said he would be

very pleased if I would say yes and I could not very well get out

of it as I had no excuse ready. I have chosen for my subject Sunday

Observance; it is a good subject but I find it hard to put many

thoughts down on paper about it. I will write and tell you how I get

on. We had a really broad-minded sermon last Sunday on the text ‘By

their fruits ye shall know them,’ it upset some of the very strict

people I fancy but Mr. Dewick liked it and so did I. The preacher,

whose name I forget, he was from Barnet, said that there had been

some quite good atheists, but I thought he took a very extreme view

when he said that some atheists lived much better lives than the

average christian. It seemed to me that he put that bit in just so

as to sound paradoxical and daring. Father has been very busy in the

garden, pruning his roses, as the weather has greatly improved these

last few days. There is a new fellow now at the office, but I cannot

say I like him much, he is a bit of a rough diamond; rough anyhow, I

am not so sure about the diamond. I think he drinks and he certainly

uses bad language, but if one tells him of it he only gets more

offensive. By the by, isn’t it funny that you should be still at

school while I’m at business when we are both seventeen and within a

few months of each other?

Passages like this frightened Sheila by indicating a gulf of mental

disparity fixed between Kay and her. ‘It’s only superficial,’ whispered

her love. ‘He’s not like that really. He’s not a good letter-writer:

that’s all.’ And she tried to silence her own critical spirit with

tender memories of his wooing. ‘Can love be scared away by a bad

literary style?’ she asked herself. But her mind worked on against

her: by no manner of violence could she prevent its probing into the

substance of Kay’s frequent letters. In spite of her protests it coined

for her a new word, Kayesque, to express a certain indefinable quality,

a taint, manifest in his way of thinking and writing. Indefinable or

not, it was undefined, for she dared not define it. To have confessed

even to herself that it meant complacency, mediocrity, total absorption

in the commonplace, would have precipitated disaster.

And to quicken her faculty for detecting the Kayesque there was the

constant companionship of Hypatia Fairfield. From the moment when

Sheila woke, one midnight, to find Hypatia sitting up in bed reading

by candlelight _The City of Dreadful Night_ the two girls were fast

friends. This was but one book from the secret hoard of five that

Hypatia discovered to Sheila on that exciting night. She found the

school library altogether too prim, too like Miss Fry the head, to suit

her taste.

‘They starve you here, don’t they?’ she said, opening her locker and

exhibiting her treasures one by one.

Each one had a brown-paper cover bearing in large block letters a

title specially designed to propitiate the eye of Authority, should

Authority happen to come round some day with a master-key. _Foxe’s Book

of Martyrs_ clothed with righteousness the impious pages of Spencer’s

_First Principles_, and _The Life of Livingstone_ invested _Monte

Cristo_ with a garb of sanctity. Shelley beat his luminous wings behind

the broad back of Robinson Crusoe.

‘It’s a pity Miss Fry is such a frump,’ said Sheila, when they had got

into their beds and Hypatia had blown the light out.

Hypatia agreed. ‘I’m awfully glad you woke up. We might never have got

to know each other if you hadn’t caught me reading.’

‘I don’t expect we should,’ responded Sheila, glowing with the

excitement of a new friendship.

‘I was absolutely isolated,’ Hypatia said. ‘Oh, why ever didn’t you

come to St. Margaret’s before?’

Sheila laughed. ‘I would have done it if I’d known, perhaps. And yet I

was sorry to leave my other school.’

‘Was it decent there?’

‘Well, they didn’t teach us much, but it was very comfortable and

homelike. I’d practically grown up there. It was a day school. They

didn’t worry me much. Two or three of us in the Sixth used to spend a

lot of our school hours producing a school mag.’

‘Unofficial, I suppose?’

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

‘Did you write stories, or what?’

‘Oh, things, you know,’ said Sheila. ‘It was only a lark. A kind of

skit on the official journal.’

‘They’re too ladylike here for anything so vulgar as journalism,’

complained Hypatia to the darkness.

‘I expect so.’

‘Miss Fry with her Ministering Children!’ added Hypatia scornfully....

‘By the way, are you church, chapel, or what?’

‘The last,’ said Sheila. ‘I’m rather keen on Edward Carpenter just now.

Have you read him?’

‘Yes. Whitman and water,’ replied Hypatia. ‘I’m an agnostic personally.

So are my people.’

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

always orthodox.’

Hypatia laughed. ‘Are you Irish?’

‘Part of me is.’

‘The voice part,’ said Hypatia.

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

‘Your voice is lovely.’

Sheila heard Hypatia’s bed creak, and then the sound of a match being

struck. Hypatia bent over her.

‘And you’ve Irish eyes too,’ she said. The match flickered out, and she

went back to her bed. ‘They’re blue. Blue eyes and dark hair.’

She struck off at a tangent.

‘You’ll like Spencer. He makes your brain simmer. I said that before,

didn’t I? Especially on the Unknowable. Funny, some people think

there’s nothing unknowable.’

‘Beautiful people,’ said Sheila. ‘The salt of the earth. You’d think,

to hear them talk, that they were present at the Creation of the world

taking shorthand notes.’

There was silence for a few minutes.

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

suppose we ought to....’

* * * * *

For weeks together, in defiance of Kay’s letters, Sheila abandoned

herself to her dream of love, and the Kay of her imagination was a

lover beyond criticism. It was become an article of her faith that it

was this perfect lover, not the author of the letters, whom she would

meet again on her return from school. Him she had indeed seen on the

night of their love’s visible flowering. They had but to be together

again, and she would know him for what he was, master of a speech more

eloquent than words. And while she dreamed of this blissful reunion a

letter came that rent her heart.

DARLING SHEILA.--Do not be surprised if I don’t write for several

days. Dad died suddenly yesterday.

Your loving KAY.

She recalled Helena’s death, re-living some of that agony; and

compassion for Kay wrung bitter tears from her. Into her letter she

poured a torrent of love and pity and passionate protest. She yearned

for the moment when she would see him face to face and offer for his

comfort the balm of her lips.

* * * * *

‘You see,’ explained Sheila, ‘I couldn’t tell you then, Hypatia. It

would have been disloyal. I didn’t admit even to myself that there was

anything to spoil our happiness. I thought that as soon as I saw him

again, and touched him, that horrible doubt would vanish.’

‘And didn’t it?’

‘Yes, for a moment or two. Then it came back ... and grew and grew ...

to a hateful certainty.’

‘Yes?’

‘The separation had lasted for the best part of a year, because I

didn’t go home for the long summer holiday: Auntie came here instead.

And during that time we’d both developed, he and I.’

‘He was more Kayesque than ever?’

Sheila flinched.

‘Oh, don’t remind me of that detestable invention of mine,’ she

begged.... ‘He’d changed--oh, incredibly! Even his appearance. There

were still wonderful moments--sometimes when the light fell on his hair

... and he was slightly freckled, you know,’ she added.

‘But he was changed.’

‘He was just like his letters. And when he was saying certain

things--stuffy things--he even _looked_ like his letters.’

‘And the mute poetry?’ asked Hypatia presently.

Sheila stared miserably at her own feet.

‘I don’t know what became of that,’ she confessed. ‘It was there, you

know,’ she added, seeing a gentle incredulous smile flit over her

friend’s face. ‘Hypatia, it was, really. I _saw_ it.’

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

‘Well, as soon as I was certain,’ said Sheila simply, ‘I had to tell

him, of course.’

‘That it was hopeless?’

Sheila nodded.

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

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

it?’

‘He thought--’ Sheila began, with a little bitter laugh ... then

stopped, and looked at Hypatia with pain in her eyes. ‘He thought I had

stopped caring, Hypatia!’

She rose to her feet.

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

Seven years later, on the platform of Penny’s Heath station, Sheila

discovered a new Hypatia Fairfield: tall, dark, severe, with thoughtful

eyes and aggressive chin; by everyday standards a plain young woman,

but redeemed from unattractiveness by an air of absorbed interest

in some vision of her own. Since leaving school the two girls had

exchanged letters of prodigious length. Once or twice they had visited

each other’s homes, but these visits had provided an intercourse less

intimate, less real, than that of their letters. Into the bubbling

pot of that correspondence was poured all the raw egoism, all the shy

solemn discoveries, of two active minds passing through the adventure

of adolescence. Their knowledge of each other at school had been a mere

passing acquaintanceship compared with this new intimacy that only

distance and the postal service had made possible.

Recently they had begun to drift apart. Aunt Hester’s disapproval

of normal life made the house at Penlington something of a prison;

Aunt Hester’s friends were anæmic, uncongenial. ‘Nothing ever happens

to me,’ she said to herself. ‘I never meet anyone or do anything.

Things just go on, every day alike.’ She began to indulge herself in

pessimism. Compared with the soothing syrup of Aunt Hester’s religion,

despair was almost intoxicating: she tasted it eagerly, as though it

had been wine. In those days she and Hypatia had echoed each other

rapturously enough, agreeing--with what delight--that life was but a

dry husk and death a fit ending to a witless scheme. But now Hypatia,

with a fatal instinct for novelty, had subsided into the arms of a new

religion, a religion that made summary end of all problems by denying

their existence. It was this, Sheila divined, that had put that look of

assured calm into her eyes.

‘So here you are then,’ said Hypatia, shy, as ever, of demonstration.

‘Where’s your trunk? I’ve got the trap in the station-yard.’

With Sheila and her belongings safely in the trap Hypatia took the

reins between her capable fingers and drove away.

‘It’s very jolly here,’ said Sheila.

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

visit!’

‘It is.’

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

yet?’

‘My quest?’

‘You wrote some months ago saying that you could never rest until you

had found a philosophy that would hold water?’

‘I’m still seeking,’ admitted Sheila.

‘You’ll never find it,’ remarked Hypatia, with calm certainty, ‘in the

direction you are looking in.’

‘No?’ said Sheila good-humouredly.

‘Well, you’ll have plenty of chance here of inspecting every fad,’ said

Hypatia. ‘They’re a lively set, our neighbours. There’s almost every

shade of belief and unbelief possible to the human mind represented

here, you’ll remember, and every shade has its club or church or

soap-box.’

‘Even your shade?’ interposed Sheila.

‘Yes. Though that’s altogether different,’ Hypatia retorted. ‘Still I

can understand that you think it just one more little sect and nothing

else. When you are in science you will see everything more clearly.’

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

that your fundamental doctrine?’

‘True, matter does not exist, if that’s what you mean,’ said Hypatia.

‘That is perhaps Our Leader’s greatest discovery. God is All-Good, the

very Principle of Goodness, and man is His reflection. Sin, disease,

and death----’

‘Exist in the reflection but not in the reflector,’ remarked Sheila.

‘Are your people of the same way of thinking?’

‘Oh no.’ Hypatia shook her head. ‘Mother’s _trying_ to understand, but

Father’s making no attempt at all.’

‘What about your brother?’

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

book.’

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

‘So did I. So did everybody. He got a good first in his Tripos. But he

doesn’t really care for law. History’s his great subject.’

‘What’s the book about?’ Sheila was excited by the thought of meeting

in the flesh this maker of books.

‘I believe he calls it _A History of the Religious Idea_, but he’s very

reticent about it. It’s a very proud exhibition of ignorance, no doubt.’

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

Hypatia sniffed.

‘Not at all. You misunderstand me. Edward, you see, is an agnostic.

_Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne sais rien_, you know. He

professes to know nothing about God and so on, and is just as proud of

his ignorance as I used to be of mine.’

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

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

try to understand.’

From the field they were passing _Fairfield’s Hygienic Corsets_ blazed

in letters of red above the hedge. The factory chimneys blotted out the

horizon.

* * * * *

Hypatia’s father was a spare, bullet-headed man with mutton-chop

whiskers of a sandy hue and an indomitable nose that he had followed

faithfully _per aspera ad astra_. The stars of Mr. Fairfield’s

attainment were commercial prosperity and for his son the education

that he himself had been denied. It became more and more apparent to

Sheila, during that drive from the station, that for Hypatia’s parents

Edward, the firstborn, was the being round whom the world revolved. For

him the sun shone and the little stars clapped their hands. Fairfield

senior, at first indifferent to Edward, had been trained in son-worship

by his wife. Behind a brusqueness that passed for eccentric humour Mrs.

Fairfield concealed power. Worshipping her son, for his advancement

she had used her husband unsparingly, guiding his energy consistently

in the direction of most commercial gain, and curbing his desire

to spend himself, a prophet in the wilderness, in fruitless public

advocacy of freethought. Her subjugation of her husband, himself a

being of great though erratic energy, was the gradual achievement of

twenty-five years.

‘Well, Miss Dyrle,’ said Hypatia’s father briskly. ‘Here you are again!

We’re glad to see you. You know that.’

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

‘Ah,’ he added, ‘here’s my wife. The honoured guest’s arrived, me dear,

and I’m just extending to her, in the name of the family, a hearty

welcome.’

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

‘Now this _is_ a treat,’ she said, holding out both her hands. ‘My dear

Sheila! I may still call you Sheila, mayn’t I? You are so _often_ in

our thoughts!’

Sheila murmured her pleasure.

‘Must take us as you find us,’ admonished Mr. Fairfield. ‘We’re homely

folk with no airs. No education to speak of. Couldn’t afford it. And

now that we can afford it--it’s too late.’

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

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

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

remarked Hypatia.

Her father laughed.

‘Heard the news?’ He turned to Sheila. ‘Hypatia’s saved. Got a new

religion. Mine wasn’t good enough for her.’

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

‘When you and Edward were nippers I told you my religion. Be afraid of

nothing except doing wrong. That’s mine. Everything in the garden’s

lovely: that’s yours.’

She received me, rather sternly, I thought, but without discomposure.