Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of Avalon and of
that vanished legendary world of King Arthur and his knights, and in
the early evening they came to Wells and a pleasant inn, with a
quaint little garden before its front door that gave directly upon the
cathedral. The three tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner
to the sculptures on the western face. The great screen of wrought stone
rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a clear blue sky in
which the moon hung, round and already bright. That western facade with
its hundreds of little figures tells the whole story of God and Man from
Adam to the Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it. It is an
even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that goes round
the chapter house at Salisbury. It presented the universe, said Sir
Richmond, as a complete crystal globe. It explained everything in
life in a simple and natural manner, hope, heaven, devil and despair.
Generations had lived and died mentally within that crystal globe,
convinced that it was all and complete.
“And now,” said Miss Grammont, “we are in limitless space and time. The
crystal globe is broken.”
“And?” said Belinda amazingly--for she had been silent for some time,
“the goldfish are on the floor, V.V. Free to flop about. Are they any
happier?”
It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best left alone.
“I trow not,” said Belinda, giving the last touch to it.
After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the cathedral
and along by the moat of the bishop’s palace, and Miss Seyffert stayed
in the hotel to send off postcards to her friends, a duty she had
neglected for some days. The evening was warm and still and the moon
was approaching its full and very bright. Insensibly the soft afterglow
passed into moonlight.
At first the two companions talked very little. Sir Richmond was well
content with this tacit friendliness and Miss Grammont was preoccupied
because she was very strongly moved to tell him things about herself
that hitherto she had told to no one. It was not merely that she wanted
to tell him these things but also that for reasons she did not put as
yet very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought to
know. She talked of herself at first in general terms. “Life comes on
anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting for ever and then suddenly
one tears into life,” she said. It was even more so for women than it
was for men. You are shown life, a crowded vast spectacle full of what
seems to be intensely interesting activities and endless delightful and
frightful and tragic possibilities, and you have hardly had time to
look at it before you are called upon to make decisions. And there is
something in your blood that urges you to decisive acts. Your mind,
your reason resists. “Give me time,” it says. “They clamour at you with
treats, crowds, shows, theatres, all sorts of things; lovers buzz at
you, each trying to fix you part of his life when you are trying to get
clear to live a little of your own.” Her father had had one merit at any
rate. He had been jealous of her lovers and very ready to interfere.
“I wanted a lover to love,” she said. “Every girl of course wants that.
I wanted to be tremendously excited.... And at the same time I dreaded
the enormous interference....
“I wasn’t temperamentally a cold girl. Men interested and excited me,
but there were a lot of men about and they clashed with each other.
Perhaps way down in some out of the way place I should have fallen in
love quite easily with the one man who came along. But no man fixed his
image. After a year or so I think I began to lose the power which is
natural to a young girl of falling very easily into love. I became
critical of the youths and men who were attracted to me and I became
analytical about myself....
“I suppose it is because you and I are going to part so soon that I can
speak so freely to you.... But there are things about myself that I have
never had out even with myself. I can talk to myself in you--”
She paused baffled. “I know exactly,” said Sir Richmond.
“In my composition I perceive there have always been two ruling strains.
I was a spoilt child at home, a rather reserved girl at school, keen on
my dignity. I liked respect. I didn’t give myself away. I suppose one
would call that personal pride. Anyhow it was that streak made me value
the position of being a rich married woman in New York. That was why
I became engaged to Lake. He seemed to be as good a man as there was
about. He said he adored me and wanted me to crown his life. He wasn’t
ill-looking or ill-mannered. The second main streak in my nature
wouldn’t however fit in with that.”
She stopped short.
“The second streak,” said Sir Richmond.
“Oh!--Love of beauty, love of romance. I want to give things their
proper names; I don’t want to pretend to you.... It was more or less
than that.... It was--imaginative sensuousness. Why should I pretend it
wasn’t in me? I believe that streak is in all women.”
“I believe so too. In all properly constituted women.”
“I tried to devote that streak to Lake,” she said. “I did my best for
him. But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an idealist about
women, or what you will, to know his business as a lover. And that side
of me fell in love, the rest of me protesting, with a man named Caston.
It was a notorious affair. Everybody in New York couples my name with
Caston. Except when my father is about. His jealousy has blasted an
area of silence--in that matter--all round him. He will not know of that
story. And they dare not tell him. I should pity anyone who tried to
tell it him.”
“What sort of man was this Caston?”
Miss Grammont seemed to consider. She did not look at Sir Richmond; she
kept her profile to him.
“He was,” she said deliberately, “a very rotten sort of man.”
She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial. “I believe I
always knew he wasn’t right. But he was very handsome. And ten years
younger than Lake. And nobody else seemed to be all right, so I
swallowed that. He was an artist, a painter. Perhaps you know his work.”
Sir Richmond shook his head. “He could make American business men look
like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and he was
beginning to be popular. He made love to me. In exactly the way Lake
didn’t. If I shut my eyes to one or two things, it was delightful. I
liked it. But my father would have stood a painter as my husband almost
as cheerfully as he would a man of colour. I made a fool of myself, as
people say, about Caston. Well--when the war came, he talked in a way
that irritated me. He talked like an East Side Annunzio, about art and
war. It made me furious to know it was all talk and that he didn’t mean
business.... I made him go.”
She paused for a moment. “He hated to go.”
“Then I relented. Or I missed him and I wanted to be made love to. Or
I really wanted to go on my own account. I forget. I forget my motives
altogether now. That early war time was a queer time for everyone. A
kind of wildness got into the blood.... I threw over Lake. All the time
things had been going on in New York I had still been engaged to Lake.
I went to France. I did good work. I did do good work. And also things
were possible that would have seemed fantastic in America. You know
something of the war-time atmosphere. There was death everywhere and
people snatched at gratifications. Caston made ‘To-morrow we die’ his
text. We contrived three days in Paris together--not very cleverly. All
sorts of people know about it.... We went very far.”
She stopped short. “Well?” said Sir Richmond.
“He did die....”
Another long pause. “They told me Caston had been killed. But someone
hinted--or I guessed--that there was more in it than an ordinary
casualty.
“Nobody, I think, realizes that I know. This is the first time I have
ever confessed that I do know. He was--shot. He was shot for cowardice.”
“That might happen to any man,” said Sir Richmond presently. “No man
is a hero all round the twenty-four hours. Perhaps he was caught by
circumstances, unprepared. He may have been taken by surprise.”
“It was the most calculated, cold-blooded cowardice imaginable. He let
three other men go on and get killed...”
“No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know nothing
about. It was vile, contemptible cowardice and meanness. It fitted in
with a score of ugly little things I remembered. It explained them all.
I know the evidence and the judgment against him were strictly just and
true, because they were exactly in character.... And that, you see, was
my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to whom I had
given myself with both hands.”
Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed in the
same even tones of careful statement. “I wasn’t disgusted, not even with
myself. About him I was chiefly sorry, intensely sorry, because I had
made him come out of a life that suited and protected him, to the
war. About myself, I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest
realization that what you and I have been calling the bright little
personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over and done
with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot. And there I was,
with fifty years of life left in me and nothing particular to do with
them.”
“That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.
“It didn’t seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of something or
go to pieces. I couldn’t turn to religion. I had no religion. And Duty?
What is Duty? I set myself to that. I had a kind of revelation one
night. ‘Either I find out what all this world is about, I said, or I
perish.’ I have lost myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of
something bigger than myself. And becoming that. That’s why I have
been making a sort of historical pilgrimage.... That’s my story, Sir
Richmond. That’s my education.... Somehow though your troubles are
different, it seems to me that my little muddle makes me understand how
it is with you. What you’ve got, this idea of a scientific ordering of
the world, is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been
feeling my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold of
this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a still greater
economic and educational control of which it is a part. I want to make
that idea a part of myself. Rather I want to make myself a part of it.
When you talk of it I believe in it altogether.”
“And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you.”