1
Two days later Anna Gordon sent for her daughter. Stephen found her
sitting quite still in that vast drawing-room of hers, which as always
smelt faintly of orris-root, beeswax and violets. Her thin, white hands
were folded in her lap, closely folded over a couple of letters; and it
seemed to Stephen that all of a sudden she saw in her mother a very old
woman—a very old woman with terrible eyes, pitiless, hard and deeply
accusing, so that she could but shrink from their gaze, since they were
the eyes of her mother.
Anna said: ‘Lock the door, then come and stand here.’
In absolute silence Stephen obeyed her. Thus it was that those two
confronted each other, flesh of flesh, blood of blood, they confronted
each other across the wide gulf set between them.
Then Anna handed her daughter a letter: ‘Read this,’ she said briefly.
And Stephen read:
Dear Lady Anna,
With deep repugnance I take up my pen, for certain things won’t
bear thinking about, much less being written. But I feel that I
owe you some explanation of my reasons for having come to the
decision that I cannot permit your daughter to enter my house
again, or my wife to visit Morton. I enclose a copy of your
daughter’s letter to my wife, which I feel is sufficiently clear
to make it unnecessary for me to write further, except to add
that my wife is returning the two costly presents given her by
Miss Gordon.
I remain, Yours very truly,
Ralph Crossby.
Stephen stood as though turned to stone for a moment, not so much as a
muscle twitched; then she handed the letter back to her mother without
speaking, and in silence Anna received it. ‘Stephen—when you know what
I’ve done, forgive me.’ The childish scrawl seemed suddenly on fire, it
seemed to scorch Stephen’s fingers as she touched it in her pocket—so
this was what Angela had done. In a blinding flash the girl saw it all;
the miserable weakness, the fear of betrayal, the terror of Ralph and of
what he would do should he learn of that guilty night with Roger. Oh,
but Angela might have spared her this, this last wound to her loyal and
faithful devotion; this last insult to all that was best and most sacred
in her love—Angela had feared betrayal at the hands of the creature who
loved her!
But now her mother was speaking again: ‘And this—read this and tell me
if you wrote it, or if that man’s lying.’ And Stephen must read her own
misery jibing at her from those pages in Ralph Crossby’s stiff and
clerical handwriting.
She looked up: ‘Yes, Mother, I wrote it.’
Then Anna began to speak very slowly as though nothing of what she would
say must be lost; and that slow, quiet voice was more dreadful than
anger: ‘All your life I’ve felt very strangely towards you;’ she was
saying, ‘I’ve felt a kind of physical repulsion, a desire not to touch
or to be touched by you—a terrible thing for a mother to feel—it has
often made me deeply unhappy. I’ve often felt that I was being unjust,
unnatural—but now I know that my instinct was right; it is you who are
unnatural, not I. . . .’
‘Mother—stop!’
‘It is you who are unnatural, not I. And this thing that you are is a
sin against creation. Above all is this thing a sin against the father
who bred you, the father whom you dare to resemble. You dare to look
like your father, and your face is a living insult to his memory,
Stephen. I shall never be able to look at you now without thinking of
the deadly insult of your face and your body to the memory of the father
who bred you. I can only thank God that your father died before he was
asked to endure this great shame. As for you, I would rather see you
dead at my feet than standing before me with this thing upon you—this
unspeakable outrage that you call love in that letter which you don’t
deny having written. In that letter you say things that may only be said
between man and woman, and coming from you they are vile and filthy
words of corruption—against nature, against God who created nature. My
gorge rises; you have made me feel physically sick—’
‘Mother—you don’t know what you’re saying—you’re my mother—’
‘Yes, I am your mother, but for all that, you seem to me like a scourge.
I ask myself what I have ever done to be dragged down into the depths by
my daughter. And your father—what had he ever done? And you have
presumed to use the word love in connection with this—with these lusts
of your body; these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and
undisciplined body—you have used that word. I have loved—do you hear?
I have loved your father, and your father loved me. That was _love_.’
Then, suddenly, Stephen knew that unless she could, indeed, drop dead at
the feet of this woman in whose womb she had quickened, there was one
thing that she dared not let pass unchallenged, and that was this
terrible slur upon her love. And all that was in her rose up to refute
it; to protect her love from such unbearable soiling. It was part of
herself, and unless she could save it, she could not save herself any
more. She must stand or fall by the courage of that love to proclaim its
right to toleration.
She held up her hand, commanding silence; commanding that slow, quiet
voice to cease speaking, and she said: ‘As my father loved you, I loved.
As a man loves a woman, that was how I loved—protectively, like my
father. I wanted to give all I had in me to give. It made me feel
terribly strong . . . and gentle. It was good, good, _good_—I’d have
laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby. If I could
have, I’d have married her and brought her home—I wanted to bring her
home here to Morton. If I loved her the way a man loves a woman, it’s
because I can’t feel that I am a woman. All my life I’ve never felt like
a woman, and you know it—you say you’ve always disliked me, that you’ve
always felt a strange physical repulsion. . . . I don’t know what I am;
no one’s ever told me that I’m different and yet I know that I’m
different—that’s why, I suppose, you’ve felt as you have done. And for
that I forgive you, though whatever it is, it was you and my father who
made this body—but what I will never forgive is your daring to try and
make me ashamed of my love. I’m not ashamed of it, there’s no shame in
me.’ And now she was stammering a little wildly, ‘Good and—and fine it
was,’ she stammered, ‘the best part of myself—I gave all and I asked
nothing in return—I just went on hopelessly loving—’ she broke off,
she was shaking from head to foot, and Anna’s cold voice fell like icy
water on that angry and sorely tormented spirit.
‘You have spoken, Stephen. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to
be said between us except this, we two cannot live together at
Morton—not now, because I might grow to hate you. Yes, although you’re
my child, I might grow to hate you. The same roof mustn’t shelter us
both any more; one of us must go—which of us shall it be?’ And she
looked at Stephen and waited.
Morton! They could not both live at Morton. Something seemed to catch
hold of the girl’s heart and twist it. She stared at her mother, aghast
for a moment, while Anna stared back—she was waiting for her answer.
But quite suddenly Stephen found her manhood and she said: ‘I
understand. I’ll leave Morton.’
Then Anna made her daughter sit down beside her, while she talked of how
this thing might be accomplished in a way that would cause the least
possible scandal: ‘For the sake of your father’s honourable name, I must
ask you to help me, Stephen.’ It was better, she said, that Stephen
should take Puddle with her, if Puddle would consent to go. They might
live in London or somewhere abroad, on the pretext that Stephen wished
to study. From time to time Stephen would come back to Morton and visit
her mother, and during those visits, they two would take care to be seen
together for appearances’ sake, for the sake of her father. She could
take from Morton whatever she needed, the horses, and anything else she
wished. Certain of the rent-rolls would be paid over to her, should her
own income prove insufficient. All things must be done in a way that was
seemly—no undue haste, no suspicion of a breach between mother and
daughter: ‘For the sake of your father I ask this of you, not for your
sake or mine, but for his. Do you consent to this, Stephen?’
And Stephen answered: ‘Yes, I consent.’
Then Anna said: ‘I’d like you to leave me now—I feel tired and I want
to be alone for a little—but presently I shall send for Puddle to
discuss her living with you in the future.’
So Stephen got up, and she went away, leaving Anna Gordon alone.
2
As though drawn there by some strong natal instinct, Stephen went
straight to her father’s study; and she sat in the old arm-chair that
had survived him; then she buried her face in her hands.
All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new
loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an
immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense
need to find an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being. All around
her were grey and crumbling ruins, and under those ruins her love lay
bleeding; shamefully wounded by Angela Crossby, shamefully soiled and
defiled by her mother—a piteous, suffering, defenceless thing, it lay
bleeding under the ruins.
She felt blind when she tried to look into the future, stupefied when
she tried to look back on the past. She must go—she was going away from
Morton: ‘From Morton—I’m going away from Morton,’ the words thudded
drearily in her brain: ‘I’m going away from Morton.’
The grave, comely house would not know her any more, nor the garden
where she had heard the cuckoo with the dawning understanding of a
child, nor the lakes where she had kissed Angela Crossby for the first
time—full on the lips as a lover. The good, sweet-smelling meadows with
their placid cattle, she was going to leave them; and the hills that
protected poor, unhappy lovers—the merciful hills; and the lanes with
their sleepy dog-roses at evening; and the little, old township of
Upton-on-Severn with its battle-scarred church and its yellowish river;
that was where she had first seen Angela Crossby. . . .
The spring would come sweeping across Castle Morton, bringing strong,
clean winds to the open common. The spring would come sweeping across
the whole valley, from the Cotswold Hills right up to the Malverns;
bringing daffodils by their hundreds and thousands, bringing bluebells
to the beech wood down by the lakes, bringing cygnets for Peter the swan
to protect; bringing sunshine to warm the old bricks of the house—but
she would not be there any more in the spring. In summer the roses would
not be her roses, nor the luminous carpet of leaves in the autumn, nor
the beautiful winter forms of the beech trees: ‘And on evenings in
winter these lakes are quite frozen, and the ice looks like slabs of
gold in the sunset, when you and I come and stand here in the
winter. . . .’ No, no, not that memory, it was too much—‘when you and I
come and stand here in the winter. . . .’
Getting up, she wandered about the room, touching its kind and familiar
objects; stroking the desk, examining a pen, grown rusty from long
disuse as it lay there; then she opened a little drawer in the desk and
took out the key of her father’s locked bookcase. Her mother had told
her to take what she pleased—she would take one or two of her father’s
books. She had never examined this special bookcase, and she could not
have told why she suddenly did so. As she slipped the key into the lock
and turned it, the action seemed curiously automatic. She began to take
out the volumes slowly and with listless fingers, scarcely glancing at
their titles. It gave her something to do, that was all—she thought
that she was trying to distract her attention. Then she noticed that on
a shelf near the bottom was a row of books standing behind the others;
the next moment she had one of these in her hand, and was looking at the
name of the author: Krafft Ebing—she had never heard of that author
before. All the same she opened the battered old book, then she looked
more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her father’s small,
scholarly hand and she saw that her own name appeared in those notes—
She began to read, sitting down rather abruptly. For a long time she
read; then went back to the bookcase and got out another of those
volumes, and another. . . . The sun was now setting behind the hills;
the garden was growing dusky with shadows. In the study there was little
light left to read by, so that she must take her book to the window and
must bend her face closer over the page; but still she read on and on in
the dusk.
Then suddenly she had got to her feet and was talking aloud—she was
talking to her father: ‘You knew! All the time you knew this thing, but
because of your pity you wouldn’t tell me. Oh, Father—and there are so
many of us—thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no right
to love, no right to compassion because they’re maimed, hideously maimed
and ugly—God’s cruel; He let us get flawed in the making.’
And then, before she knew what she was doing, she had found her father’s
old, well-worn Bible. There she stood demanding a sign from
heaven—nothing less than a sign from heaven she demanded. The Bible
fell open near the beginning. She read: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon
Cain. . . .’
Then Stephen hurled the Bible away, and she sank down completely
hopeless and beaten, rocking her body backwards and forwards with a kind
of abrupt yet methodical rhythm: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain,
upon Cain. . . .’ she was rocking now in rhythm to those words, ‘And the
Lord set a mark upon Cain—upon Cain—upon Cain. And the Lord set a mark
upon Cain. . . .’
That was how Puddle came in and found her, and Puddle said: ‘Where you
go, I go, Stephen. All that you’re suffering at this moment I’ve
suffered. It was when I was very young like you—but I still remember.’
Stephen looked up with bewildered eyes: ‘Would you go with Cain whom God
marked?’ she said slowly, for she had not understood Puddle’s meaning,
so she asked her once more: ‘Would you go with Cain?’
Puddle put an arm round Stephen’s bowed shoulders, and she said: ‘You’ve
got work to do—come and do it! Why, just because you are what you are,
you may actually find that you’ve got an advantage. You may write with a
curious double insight—write both men and women from a personal
knowledge. Nothing’s completely misplaced or wasted, I’m sure of
that—and we’re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize
this, but meanwhile there’s plenty of work that’s waiting. For the sake
of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted
perhaps, many of them, it’s up to you to have the courage to make good,
and I’m here to help you to do it, Stephen.’
BOOK THREE