CHAPTER I

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg

Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)

THE JUDGE

by

REBECCA WEST

Author of "The Return Of The Soldier"

New York

George H. Doran Company

1922,

TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER

BOOK ONE

"Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of

the father."

CHAPTER I

I

It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was

crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it

as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The

office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those

decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of Edinburgh

New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that opened just

opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock

and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the

southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that

strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it

keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the

cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy

with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and

remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms

beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was

ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched

it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be

weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of

the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had

proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling

regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached

bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate

and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly

night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of

dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a

past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.

And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would

lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and

said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of

monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a

Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much

of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too

shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they

appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good

look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to

shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see

myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with

the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never

make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I

am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the

succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as

they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came

to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled

themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The

spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just

part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one

had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it

its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough

stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked

desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was

nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months

since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by

this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in

Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult

people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known

as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.

Less than that would do: just to see people's faces doing something else

than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something

else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got

people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no

part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had

first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too

comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert

beginning.

"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this

rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere

congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did

the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time

she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy

of the twilight.

Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those

Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at

school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville

had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket

with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and

they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a

steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a

squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall

delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed

the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,

was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains

and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have

known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had

come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the

terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the

Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),

and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them

flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may

be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,

keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,

terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the

rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a

slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over

the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but

unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed

for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came

after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way

off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring

salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was

channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a

protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat

face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under

his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.

Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the

Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an

Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some

disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to

get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's

gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of

fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.

Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out

into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought

to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,

round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome

death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and

the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.

From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the

sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,

when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining

mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and

green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.

Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,

where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on

seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it

had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns

that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her

feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she

had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its

feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a

mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the

beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,

and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt

might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the

landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed

ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers

of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset

swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and

lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would

sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.

She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would

reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with

a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to

see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not

come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.

But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light

again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of

her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent

that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in

Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of

inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk

with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She

thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the

Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept

them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay

white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had

seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak

to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though

there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out

of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,

constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild

capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified

by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and

she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their

nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose

thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised

it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching

vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a

Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord

Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed

out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish

swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and

the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the

aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she

was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had

worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather

pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer

than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing

in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had

two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever

girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen

had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She

was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin

brown paper out of _Weldon's Fashions_ on to stuff that must not on any

account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with

the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her

shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the

good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her

thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had

always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,

as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now

dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in

Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been

hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a

wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge

among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she

cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to

wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and

spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of

hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used

to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the

housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered

it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At

the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these

accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....

The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly

on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles

against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their

persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the

representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised

his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most

impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,

and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a

high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing

his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right

of way, and Menzies & Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at

Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"--that greeting by which Scot links himself

to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.

Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth

he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that

led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would

prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the

respected townsman. He had meant from the first to end with a paunch.

But now wealth was inalienably his and Beauty could beckon him on no

strange pilgrimages, his soul retraced its steps and contemplated this

bright thing as an earth creature might creep to the mouth of its lair

and blink at the sun. And there was more than that to it. He loved her.

He had never had enough to do with pitiful things (his wife Elizabeth

had been a banker's daughter), and this, child had come to him, that day

in June, so white, so weak, so chilled to the bone, for all the summer

heat, by her monstrous ill-usage....

He said, "Nelly, will your mother be feared if you stop and take a few

notes for Mr. Philip till eight? There is a chemist body coming through

from the cordite works at Aberfay who can't come in the day but Saturday

mornings, and you ken Mr. Philip's away to London for the week-end by

the 8.30, so he's seeing him the night. Mr. Philip would be thankful if

you'd stop."

"I will so, Mr. James," said Ellen.

"You're sure your mother'll not be feared?"

"What way would my mother be feared," said Ellen, "and me seventeen

past?"

"There's many a lassie who's found being seventeen no protection from a

wicked world." He emitted some great Burns-night chuckles, and kicked

the fire to a blaze.

She said sternly, "Take note, Mr. James, that I haven't done a hand's

turn this hour or more, and that not for want of asking for work. Dear

knows I have my hand on Mr. Morrison's door-knob half the day."

Mr. James got up to go. "You're a fierce hussy, and mean to be a partner

in the firm before you've done with us."

"If I were a man I would be that."

"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good

man comes by."

She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to

defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,

but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late. Sometimes

she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an imaginary

group of people whom she desired to be with--well-found people who would

disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and beautiful results;

who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid social life that had

been previously nurtured by separate tender intimacies at hearths that

were more than grates and fenders, in private picture-galleries with

wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries adorned with big-nosed

marble busts. She knew that that environment existed for she had seen

it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League picnic in the grounds of an

Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the secretary had taken her up to the

house. They had waited in a high, long room with crossed swords on the

walls wherever there were not bookshelves or the portraits of men and

women so proud that they had not minded being painted plain, and there

were French windows opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on

an ornate balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many

flowering trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so

broad the intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered

river-bed below. On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few

unnecessary fires she had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity

that the books lying on the great round table were mostly the drawings

of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to

them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the

pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee

that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society

of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin

like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and

whose hair had no short ends round the neck.

But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed

specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had

chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and

restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the

plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh

to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town

she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there

flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad

in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a

more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,

than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a

string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her

neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody

of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the

Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the

pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious

stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down

into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,

but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it

dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth

that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character

since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was

nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by

the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the

town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the

English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade

unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir

Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a

facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on

the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested

that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and

dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of

which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as

inadequately represented by Æneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at

the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the

corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace

ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked

G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as

noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the

Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept

undisguisedly.

II

"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the

gas and seen that she was crying.

At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to

this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that

she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards

the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in

it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her

motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So

she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"

Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and

bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way

she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always

felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at

the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman

whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the

expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has

forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,

but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through

an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,

dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed

by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his

train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired

himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on

her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would

presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite

uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially

conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man

going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at

her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it

radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the

sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was

characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He

had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a

great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a

tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day

when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped

towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It

was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked

her very much.

He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what

should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"

She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of

shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh

accent and always carried an umbrella. He was so like hundreds of young

men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an

air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow,

that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other

representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the

impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity,

for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his

half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So

she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are

awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he's a

doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and

going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy. I don't

know what's the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and

see new people. This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw

the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit

heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was near

turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go

hang!"

They were both law-abiding people. They saw the gravity of her case.

"Not that I want the Pentlands. Dear knows I love the place, but I want

something more than those old hills. I want to go somewhere right far

away. The sight of a map makes me sick. And then I hear a band play--not

the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott's poetry, which I never

could bear, but a band. I feel that if I followed it it would lead me

somewhere that I would like to go. And the posters. There's one at the

Waverley station--Venice. I could tear the thing down. Did you ever go

to Italy, Mr. Philip?"

"No. I go with the girls to Germany every summer."

"My patience!" said Ellen bitterly. "The way the world is! The people

who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany. And I--I'll die if I don't

get away."

"Och, I often feel like this," said Mr. Philip. "I just take a week-end

off at a hydro."

"A hydro!" snorted Ellen. "It's something more like the French

Revolution I'm wanting. Something grand and coloured. Swords, and people

being rescued, and things like that."

"There's nothing going on like that now," he said stolidly, "and we

ought to be thankful for it."

"I know everything's over in Europe," she agreed sadly, "but there's

revolutions in South America. I've read about them in Richard Harding

Davis. Did ever you read him? Mind you, I'm not saying he's an artist,

but the man has force. He makes you long to go."

"A dirty place," said Mr. Philip.

"What does that matter, where there's life? I feel--I feel"--she wrung

her inky brown hands--"as if I should die if something didn't happen at

once: something big, something that would bang out like the one o'clock

gun up at the Castle. And nothing will. Nothing ever will!"

"Och, well," he comforted her, "you're young yet, you know."

"Young!" cried Ellen, and suddenly wept. If this was youth--!

He bent down and played with the fire-irons. It was odd how he didn't

want to go away, although she was in distress. "Some that's been in

South America don't find it to their taste," he said. "The fellow that's

coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he

doesn't mean to go back."

"Ah, how can he do that?" asked Ellen unsteadily. The tears she was too

proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby. "Property in Rio de

Janeiro! It's like being related to someone in 'Treasure Island.'"

"'Treasure Island!' Imph!" He had seen his father draw Ellen often

enough to know how to do it, though he himself would never have paid

enough attention to her mental life to discover it. "You're struck on

that Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn't so much. My Aunt Phemie was

with him at Mr. Robert Thompson's school in Heriot Row, and she says he

was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and

gossiping with the cabmen on the rank. She wouldn't have a word to say

to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when

all the English were licking his boots. I'm not much on these writing

chaps myself." He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he

had disposed of art.

"And who," asked Ellen, with temper, "might your Aunt Phemie be?

There'll not be much in the papers when she's laid by in Trinity

Cemetery, I'm thinking! The impairtinence of it! All these Edinburgh

people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once,

just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of

Edinburgh!" She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak

shutter.

Mr. Philip chuckled. When a woman did anything for itself, and not for

its effect on the male, it seemed to him a proof of her incapacity to

look after herself, and he found incapacity in women exciting and

endearing. He watched her with a hard attention that was his kind of

tenderness, as she sat humped schoolgirlishly in her shapeless blue

overall, averting her face from the light but attempting a proud pose,

and keeping her grief between her teeth as an ostler chews a straw.

"He had a good time, the way he travelled in France and the South Seas.

But he deserved it. He wrote such lovely books. Ah," she said, listening

to her own sombre interpretation of things as to sad music, "it isn't

just chance that some people had adventures and others hadn't. One makes

one's own fate. I have no fate because I'm too weak to make one." She

looked down resentfully on her hands, that for all her present

fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on

her lap, and thought of Rachael Wing, who had so splendidly departed to

London to go on the stage. "But it's hard to be punished just for what

you are."

He wondered whether, although she was the typist, there was not

something rare about her. He could not compare her in this moment with

his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for

bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing

to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with

which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and

violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have

evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than

that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they

could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite

distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she

was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name

that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of

beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed

for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform

these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because

human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. Suddenly he

wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of

naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying

there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh

his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a

thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was

but for participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so

suspicious of her vividness that he felt furtive and red-eared while he

searched in the purse of his experiences to find the coin that would

admit him to her world. The search at first was vain, for most of them

that he cared to remember were mere manifestations of the kind of

qualities that are mentioned in testimonials. But presently he gripped

the disappointment that would buy him her pity.

He said, "I'm right sorry for you, Miss Melville. But you know ... We

all have our troubles."

She raised her eyebrows.

"I wanted to go into the Navy."

"You did? Would your father not let you?" She said it in her red-headed

"My-word-if-I'd-been-there" way.

"Aye, he would have liked it fine."

"What was it then?" She leaned forward and almost crooned at him. "What

was it then?"

His speech became more clipped. "My eyes."

"Your eyes!" she breathed. He suddenly became a person to her. "I never

thought."

"I'm as short-sighted as a bat."

"They look all right." She frowned at them as though they were traitors.

He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the

University."

She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how

sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well,

well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed

to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw

you capped."

"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."

"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw

your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll

be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when

I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"

"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He

vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he

asked.

"I did at school--"

"Don't you go to dances?"

She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.

With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he

could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her

brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come

to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his

own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible

to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the

daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,

the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville

unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he

wished he could dance with her.

Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances

for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to

enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and

steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black

ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about

with in "La Dame aux Camélias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.

Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which

was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,

just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without

attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint

meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse

his private satisfaction. He was still aware that he was Mr. Philip of

the firm, so he was not going to tell her that for two nights after he

had heard the decision of the Medical Examiners he had cried himself to

sleep, though he was fourteen past. But it was exquisite to know that if

he had told her she would have been moved to some glorious gesture of

pity. His imagination trembled at the thought of its glory as she turned

to him with a benignity that was really good enough, and said

diffidently, because her ambition was such a holy thing that she feared

to speak of his: "Still, there are lots of things for you to do. I've

heard...."

He was kindly and indulgent. "What have you heard?"

Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why,

that you're going to stand for Parliament."

"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.

"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"

"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me

something safe."

"But what will you do?"

He didn't follow.

"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed

with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to

do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are

you going to do?"

"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence.

"We've always been Liberals."

"Ach! _Liberal!_" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep

the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards

by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed

again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to

discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on

her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her

clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to

the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's

heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.

"It is so. I asked her to do a chop for me, so that I won't need to dine

on the train...."

"Mercy me! We'll see the fine cook she is!" She ran out to the landing

(she had never known he was so nice). Mr. Philip found that her absence

acted curiously as a relief to an excitement that was beginning to buzz

in his head. Then she came back with the tray, her cheeks bright and her

mouth pursed, for she and the caretaker had been sandpapering each

other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil

a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's

not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father,

who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the

place."

He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment.

There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was

putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that

were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt

absolutely right.

"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when

he lunches in?" she said.

"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's

room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him,

fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."

Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt

for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the

bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went

back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not

be, as he put it, _infra dig_. And sure enough, when he entered the room

a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got

the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling

himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and

she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and

a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."

He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he

said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join

me...."

She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing

there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was

behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face

was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her

mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping

quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to

something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will

you have some Burgundy?"

She was shocked. "Oh no!"

He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although

principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to

it. Instead, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she

oughtn't to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.

He said, "But it's so pretty!" He could not imagine why he should have

said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an

argument that would weigh with her.

She sighed as who makes a concession. "Oh yes, it's pretty!" And then,

to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose. She was absorbed

in the red beauty in his glass.

It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing. "You'll have a

glass?"

"No, thank you."

"You'll surely have a taste?"

"Ah, no--"

"Just a drop...."

Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure

she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising

her infinite pleasure.

She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.

He passed her his glass.

"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"

Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink

it up! Drink it up!"

She raised the glass to her lips and set her head back that the sin

might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice,

but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for

such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind

cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is

played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....

"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the glass down on the table. "It's

horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her

knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought

wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth.

And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at

school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as

this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.

Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading

her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she

hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of

the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the

light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only

just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he

marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its

close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the

wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably,

"Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk--!" Again he felt

that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her,

walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud

knocking at the outer door.

III

She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked

as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just

part of his sea-going air.

He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I

want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."

"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr.

Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked

interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable

occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself

she stopped as they went along the passage and begged, "You'll not make

him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here

on the very clap of eight."

The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they

stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a

customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh,

certainly; he shall leave on the very clap of eight," he replied

earnestly.

He spoke without an accent and was most romantically dark. Ellen

wondered whether Mr. Philip would like him--she had noticed that Mr.

Philip didn't seem to fancy people who were very tall. And she perceived

with consternation as they entered the room that he had suddenly been

overtaken by one of his moods. He had taken up the tray and was trying

to slip it into the cupboard, which he might have seen would never hold

it, and in any case was a queer place for a tray, and stood there with

it in his hands, brick-red and glowering at them. She was going to take

it from him when he dunted it down on the window-seat with a clatter.

"What for can he not go on with his good chop?" thought Ellen. "We're

putting on grand company manners for this bit chemist body, surely," and

she pulled forward a chair for the stranger and sat down in the corner

with her note-book on her knee.

"You're Mr. Yaverland?" said Mr. Philip, shooting his chin forward and

squaring his shoulders, and looking as though his father were dead and

he were the head of the firm.

"I'm Richard Yaverland. Mr. Frank Gibson said you might be good enough

to see to my affairs for me. I've got a letter from him...."

Decidedly the man had an air. He slid the letter across the table as if

he did not care in the least whether anybody ever picked it up and

retreated into a courteous inattention. She felt a little cross at Mr.

Philip for not showing that Edinburgh too understands the art of

arrogance, for opening the letter so clumsily and omitting to say the

nice friendly thing. Well, if he was put about it was his own fault for

not going on with the chop, it being well known to all educated persons

that one cannot work on an empty stomach. If this man would go soon she

would run down to Mrs. Powell and get her to heat up the chop again. She

eyed him anxiously to see if he looked the kind of person who left when

one wanted him to, and found herself liking him for the way he slouched

in his chair, as though he wanted to mitigate as much as possible his

terrifying strength and immensity. What for did a fine man like him help

to make cordite, the material of militarism, which is the curse of the

nations? She wished he could have heard R.J. Campbell speak on peace the

other night at the Synod Hall; it was fine. But probably he was a

Conservative, for these big men were often unprogressive. She examined

him carefully out of the corner of her eye to estimate the chances of

his being brought into the fold of reform by properly selected oratory.

That at least was the character of contemplation she intended, but

though she was so young that she believed the enjoyment of any sensory

impression sheer waste unless it was popped into the mental stockpot and

made the basis of some sustaining moral soup, she found herself just

looking at him. His black hair lay in streaks and rings on his rain-wet

forehead and gave him an abandoned and magical air, like the ghost of a

drowned man risen for revelry; his dark gold skin told a traveller's

tale of far-off pleasurable weather; and the bare hand that lay on his

knee was patterned like a snake's belly with brown marks, doubtless the

stains of his occupation; and his face was marked with an expression

that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she

could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not

hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and

yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent

demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly

satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a

drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the

controlled but embarrassed movements of a highly-bred animal approached

by a stranger, that he knew she was watching him, and she took her gaze

away. But she had to look again, just to confirm her feeling that

however fanciful she might be about him his appearance would always give

some further food for her imagination; and presently, for though she was

the least vain person in the world she was the most egotistical, began

to compare the large correctness of his features with the less academic

spontaneity of her own. "Lord! Why has everybody but me got a straight

nose!" she exclaimed to herself. "But it's all blethers to think that an

indented chin means character. How can a dunt in your bone have anything

to do with your mind?" She rubbed her own chin, which was a little white

ball, and pushed it forward, glowering at his great jaw. Then her

examination ended. She noticed that all over his upper lip and chin

there was a faint bluish bloom, as if he had shaved closely and

recently but the strong hair was already pressing through again. That

disgusted her, although she reminded herself that he could not help it,

that that was the way he was made. "There's something awful like an

animal about a man," she thought, and shivered.

"Och, aye!" said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset,

for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by

exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred

in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some

well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property

in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it

appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five

years' lease, which had nearly expired. There was no likelihood of Capel

requiring any extension of this lease, for he was going back to the

States. So now Yaverland wanted to sell it. There ought to be no trouble

in finding a buyer, for it was a famous house. "Everybody in Rio knows

the Villa Miraflores," he said. She gasped at the name and wrote it in

longhand; to compress such deliciousness into shorthand would have been

sacrilege. After that she listened more eagerly to his voice, which she

perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with

suppressed laughter. The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a

straight face than he found in using the flat phrase. And as she

gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his

speech slipped the business leash. There were hedges of geranium and

poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless

palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the

courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many

fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of

precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house

was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a

_rastaqouère_. "Mhm," said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral

slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined

_rastaqouère_ to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost. She would have

laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still

upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he

would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable

expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had

noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and

cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been "done."

But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland's answer.

He hadn't the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa. It happened

this way. He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk! Tchk!" said Mr.

Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his

waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the

atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt

no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to

try to show that he wasn't a Jew. Ellen hated him for that. She believed

in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as

a propagandist measure. And then he had remembered that a friend of his,

de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move. Even

Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he'd given it plenty of fun.

There had been great times at the villa. His phrases, which seemed to

have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine

on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale's snout, and

hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in

his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this

delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that

time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money

from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the

servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a

sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the

dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing

white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the

Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of

birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he

so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and

were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a

good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed

by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment,

that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about

somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she

herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect

crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a

piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their

inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to

honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed

towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all

respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific

manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "Tits,

tits, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the

woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the

impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers

Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were,

as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by

the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by

intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the

cosmic process. It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the

truth....

Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had

knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had

posted to his agents without reading. He had only the vaguest idea how

much money had changed hands. Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled

knowingly, "Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in

Scotland," and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of

the property: the orange grove, for instance. At that Yaverland was

silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered

insolence that he couldn't see why he should, since he wasn't a

marmalade fancier. "Besides, that's an impossible proposition. It's like

selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium

bed...." In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation

of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed

under a tooth while one was eating a good cake. She was disturbed and

wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy

by talking like that. And the reflection came to her that it would be

sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever,

that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected

of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way. But it

struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose

that he would be interested. His talk was in the nature of a monologue.

He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.

Still, he was wonderful. She did not take it as warning of any coldness

or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a

human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are

pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being

particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out

his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have

no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he

was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.

Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the

Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a

packet of letters. "They hold the title-deeds and you'll see how things

are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a

difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on

the correspondence?"

"Och, we can send out to a translator--"

A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one

side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had

suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many

moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled

world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely

to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river

just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the

countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for

women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was

improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just

when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women

being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there

had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her

obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the

prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm

and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.

For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth

in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering

innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on

the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after

being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a

gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.

"Mr. Philip," she said.

Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark

glance on her.

"Mr. Philip," she said. He looked across at her with a blankness she

took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at

Skerry's. I took a first-class certificate. Maybe I could manage the

letters?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Yaverland explosively. He appeared to be about to make

some objection, and then he bit back the speech that was already in his

mouth. And as he tried to find other words the beauty of her body caught

his attention. It was, as it happened, very visible at that moment. The

fulness of her overall had fallen to one side as she sat on the high

stool, and so that linen was tightly wrapped about her, disclosing that

she was made like a delicate fleet beast; in the valley between her high

small breasts there lay a shadow, which grew greater when she breathed

deeply. He looked at her with the dispassionateness which comes to men

who have lived much in countries where nakedness offers itself unashamed

to the sunlight, and said to himself, "I should like to see her run." He

knew that a body like this must possess an infinite capacity for

physical pleasure, that to her mere walking would give more joy than

others find in dancing. And then he raised his eyes to her face and was

sad. For sufficient reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of

women, and he knew it was a tragedy that such a face should surmount

such a body. For her body would imprison her in soft places: she would

be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than

births. But her face was haggard, in spite of its youth, with appetite

for travel in the hard places of the world, for the adventures and

achievements that are the birthright of any man. "It's rotten luck to be

a girl," he thought. "If she were a boy I could get her a job at Rio....

Lord, she has lovely hair!" He perceived sharply that he was not likely

to be of any more use to her than most men would. All he could do would

be to avert the humiliation which the moment seemed likely to bring down

on her.

"Oh, this is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people

studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful

too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a

marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too

manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the

reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded

himself. "It's the language to learn," he said aloud. "It's the language

of the future. Ever been in Spain, Mr. James?"

"No," said Mr. Philip, "but I was thinking of going there--or mebbe

Italy--ma Easter holidays." Ellen smiled brilliantly at him, for she

knew that he had had no such thought till that evening's talk with her;

she had converted him to a romantic. He caught her eye, only to glare

coldly into the centre of her smile.

It was Yaverland's opportunity, for he had spent two years as chemist at

the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of

talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly

literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain,

but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of

social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance

them. "The mines are Baird's, you know--Sir Milne Baird; it's a Glasgow

firm...." "Mhm," said Mr. Philip, "I know who you mean." Detestable,

thought Yaverland, this Scotch locution which implies that one has made

a vague or incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence

of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself

suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its

disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater

willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the

commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their

own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by

Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general,

which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of

Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.

Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad

political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the

national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over

the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.)

Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few

difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was

sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who,

though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better

by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself

Algodonales on the map and calls itself Aooae.

He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.

It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by

forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,

as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and

a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her

mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed

through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to

Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a

dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt

attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks

deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,

describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow

decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled

with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the

Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius

Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women

that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered

by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He

was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase

that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such

things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,

advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip

could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere

foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the

country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows

what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks

and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and

carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness passed

over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as

though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had

scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes

became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader

streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the

tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became

charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The

people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating

themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or

cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.

He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of

loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had

revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to

the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and

had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any

of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and

the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to

match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of

being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone

into a café and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a

wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of

an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who

had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not

lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night,

forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit

here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl

who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and

famined...."

But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay

account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had

framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily

pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the

long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland

that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding

path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly

in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a

forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a

Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and

asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at

another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their

dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers

of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time there was

trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was

treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the

rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the

many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to

the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its

snowy crest. Ah, such a country!

He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged

bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation

settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely

they're crool. Bullfights and that--"

He could not let that pass. "You don't understand. It's different over

there."

"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.

Philip.

"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in

space...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much

crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of

view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other

and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's

life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there were the

horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from

the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that

gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,

rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it

wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far

back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified,

with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your

unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of

a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its

governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence

till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't

attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our

civilisation.

Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the

experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his

magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and

yet was as substantial as any man of action.

Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of

primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest

swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The

echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching

sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it

wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found

his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and

eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions

were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy

over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp

fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,

envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he

was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be

the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some

night the position might not be reversed--that it would not be he who

stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some

happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That

was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even

now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;

and Ellen thrilled to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to

a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to

persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern

history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the

visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and

the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling

lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times

existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive

man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the

bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were

the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much

decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of

meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and

dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't

see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by

the number of people who never saw.

"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get

over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."

Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and

perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk

in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is

buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread

out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.

Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,

thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for

themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they

repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had

responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't

perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this

fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that

all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a

national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns

sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the

British Empire--keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and

blows to mules and dogs.

It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new

that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He could give them another

illustration of that. He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a

flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo--"that's a street,"

he interjected towards Ellen, "called after a statesman they

assassinated, they don't quite know why." In the flat there lodged a

priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning,

as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an

automobile and took him away for an hour. Presently he was told the

story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had

listened to it as one didn't often listen to twice-told tales, for it

was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra

Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the

Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the

roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode. The man in the

automobile had lost his wife. He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he

had gone through a good deal to get her. When he first met her she was

another man's wife. He said nothing to her then, but presently the way

that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the

Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and

her husband called him out. The duel was fought on some sandy flat down

by the river, and the husband was killed. It was given out that he had

been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who

had killed him. In another year she was dead of fever. Her husband gave

great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house

where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable

gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad. When he returned

he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it

except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say

Mass over the woman's bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.

Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years

since she had died. That was a queer enough story for the present day,

with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the

lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it

was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron. But

the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the

automobile. For he was the Marquis d'Italica, the finest Spanish

aviator, a man not only of the mediæval courage one might have guessed

from the story, but also of the most modern wit about machines....

Yaverland bit his lip suddenly. He had told the story without shame, for

he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the

bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman's

bed may sometimes be an altar. But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and

his ears were red. Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.

For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen. "I had forgotten

she was a girl," he thought miserably. "I thought of nothing but how

keen she is on Spain. I don't know how girls feel about things...." But

she was sitting warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at

a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder. She had

liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made

her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her

sex always did. But the rest she had thought lovely. It was a beautiful

idea of the Marquis's to turn the bed into an altar. Probably he had

often gone into his wife's room to kiss her good-night. She saw a narrow

iron bedstead such as she herself slept in, a face half hidden by the

black hair flung wide across the pillow, a body bent like a bow under

the bedclothes; for she herself still curled up at nights as dogs and

children do; and the Marquis, whom she pictured as carrying a robin's

egg blue enamelled candlestick like the one she always carried up to her

room, kneeling down and kissing his wife very gently lest she should

awake. Love must be a great compensation to those who have not political

ambitions. She became aware that Yaverland's eyes were upon her, and she

slowly smiled, reluctantly unveiling her good will to him. It again

appeared to him that the world was a place in which one could be at

one's ease without disgrace.

He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was

gripping Mr. Philip's hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his

face. "Ah, there's one thing," he said quite lightly, though the vein

down the middle of his forehead had darkened. "You see from those

letters that a Señor Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house.

He's not to have it. Do you understand? Not at any price."

The effect of this restriction, made obviously at the behest of some

deep passion, was to make him suddenly sinister. They gazed at him as

though he had revealed that he carried arms. But Ellen remembered

business again.

"Those letters," she reminded Mr. Philip, "had I not better read them

over before Mr. Yaverland goes?"

Yaverland caught his breath, then spoke off-handedly. "You're

forgetting. They don't speak Spanish in Brazil, but Portuguese." And

added confidentially, "Of course you were thinking of the Argentine."

She was as hurt by the revelation of this vast breach in her omniscience

as the bright twang of knowingness in her voice had told him she would

be.

"Yes," she said unsteadily, "I was thinking of the Argentine."

He shook hands with Mr. Philip, and she took him down the corridor to

the door. She blinked back her tears as he stood at the head of the

stair and put up his collar with those strange hands that were speckled

like a snake's belly, for it seemed a waste, like staying indoors when

the menagerie procession is going round the town, to let anything so

unusual go away without seeing as much of it as possible. Then she

remembered the thing that she had wanted to say in the other room, and

wondered if it would be bold to speak, and finally remarked in a voice

disagreeable with shyness, "The people up on the Pentland Hills use that

word you said was in Shakespeare. Snow-broth. When the hill-streams run

full after the melting of the snows, that's snow-broth."

He liked women who were interested in queer-shaped fragments of fact,

for they reminded him of his mother. He took pains to become animated at

her news.

"They do, they do!" Ellen assured him, pleased by his response. "And

they say 'hit' for 'it,' which is Anglo-Saxon."

He noticed that her overall, which she was growing out of, fitted

tightly on her over-thin shoulders and showed how their line was spoilt

by the deep dip of the clavicle, and wondered why that imperfection

should make her more real to him than she had been when he had thought

her wholly beautiful. Again he became aware of her discontent with her

surroundings, which had exerted on her personality nothing of the

weakening effect of despair, since it sprang from such a rich content

with the universe, such a confident faith that the supremest beauty she

could imagine existed somewhere and would satisfy her if only she could

get at it. He said, with no motive but to confirm her belief that the

world was full of interest, "You must go on with your Spanish, you know.

Don't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine

stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to

whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young

girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who

had landed on his feet.

"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.

He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in

something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She

attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first

excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in

bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village

street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the

ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold

rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining

with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a

yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not

imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and

long scrolls.

Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a

second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on

his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to

lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not

half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up

your chop, if you'll wait."

"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.

She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and

winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days

before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her

departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes

came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was

watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a

conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was

standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though

he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not

step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was

set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew

what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the

door. Because the thing that he had meant to do seemed foul when he

looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,

he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to

have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that

had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always

thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,

dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with

such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which

she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they

became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until

it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him

stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than

the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was

making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his

degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and

the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then

she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this

trouble she had brought on him.

When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.

Yaverland's a most interesting man."

He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for

his heart was making him very uncomfortable. He wished some crude

gesture, some single ugly word, would do it. "You thought him an

interesting man?" he asked naggingly. "You don't surprise me. It was a

bit too plain you thought so. I'll thank you not to be so forward with a

client again. It'll give the office a bad name. And chatting at the door

like that!"

He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the

hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the

needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he

placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for

emergencies, a book of court plaster.

"I'm sure I'll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville," he

said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of

the door. "Good night."

IV

She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.

"It can't hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She

wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of

Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered

the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's

blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip

can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm

a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world

except the enfranchisement of women and getting on...."

She felt better. "There's nothing in life you can't get the better of by

thinking about it," she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes

with her handkerchief. She could easily pass off her tearstains as the

marks of a bad cold. "It's a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body's

affliction, but sometimes I'm glad mother's so short-sighted.

"He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how," she thought,

with a sudden renewal of rage. "Now I should have minded awful if he had

noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish. It was a

mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine." But

indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure

that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent. She began to

recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against

a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a

marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through

a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of

solidification of a sunset. Dreamily she moved to the little house in

the corner....

It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were

the man of the house.

"Mercy, Ellen, you're late! I was getting feared!" cried her mother, who

had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in

the lock. She liked that sound. Ellen thought herself a wonderful new

sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been

surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how

much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own

soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend

her daughter was a son.

"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with

masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."

CHAPTER II

I

Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold _Votes for Women_ in Princes Street,

and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green

poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.

This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for

it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should

be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been

sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as

there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady

Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many

bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had

lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty

she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a

careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the

passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to

tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.

For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds,

which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the

black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the

dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic

shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because

the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and

made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to

appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the

people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her

silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her

by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the

height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,

if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous

causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous

old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had

been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and

her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel

women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for

personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments

irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung

scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian

environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the

smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant

ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought

Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to

do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."

She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it

with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're

mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her

teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got

thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad

as you, my dear, thinking you look like Phyllis Dare with yon wee, wee

pigtail. You evidently haven't realised that a Scotch girl can't help

looking sensible. That graceful butterfly frivolity that comes so easy

to the English, and, I've haird, the French, is not for us. I think it's

something about our ankles that prevents us." She looked at the girl's

feet, said "Ay!" in a manner that hinted that they confirmed her theory,

and turned away, remarking over her shoulder, "Mind you, I admire your

spirit, setting out to look like one of these light English actresses

when your name's Davidina Todd." The wind was trying to tear the poster

from the cord that held it to her waist, the cold was making her sniff,

and as she gave her back to this flimsy little fool she caught sight of

a minister standing a yard or two away and giggling "Tee hee!" at her.

It was too much. She darted down on him. "Are you not Mr. Hunter of the

Middleton Place United Free Church?" she asked, making her voice sound

soft and cuddly.

He wiped the facetiousness from his face and assented with a polite

bob. Perhaps she was the daughter of an elder. Quite nice people were

taking up this nonsense.

"I heard you preach last Sunday," she said, glowing with interest. He

began to look coy. Then her voice changed to something colder than the

wind. "The most lamentable sairmon I ever listened to. Neither lairning

nor inspiration. And a _read_ sairmon, too."

As his black back threaded through the traffic remorse fell upon her.

"Here's an opportunity for doing quiet, uncomplaining service to the

Cause," she reproached herself, "and I'm turning it into a fair picnic

for my tongue." Everyone was rubbish, and she herself was no exception.

Her hair was nearly down. And she had to stay there for another hour.

But she determined to endure it; and Richard Yaverland, who afar off had

formed the intention of stopping and speaking to the girl with the

poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and

romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on

the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come

into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had

distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh.

He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his

emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being

and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his

desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for

their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it

was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does

not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was

not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and

kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but

powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to

himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying.

Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I

must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until

he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.

And Ellen thought, "Why, here is the big man who has been in Spain and

South America and has the queer stains on his hands! How big he is, and

dark! He looks like a king among these other people. And how wonderful

his eyes are! He is miles away from here, seeing some distant beautiful

thing. Perhaps that mountainside he told us about where the reflection

of the sky is like a purple shadow on the snow. A poet must look like

that when he is thinking of a poem. But--but--if he keeps on staring up

there he won't see me and buy a paper. I should like to interest him in

the Cause. And I daren't speak to him." She flushed. Though Mr. Philip's

claw had not done all the hurt it hoped, it had yet mauled its victim

cruelly. "That would look bold."

But in the nick of time his eyes fell on her. He gave a start of

surprise and said in his kind, insolent voice:

"Good morning. So you're a Suffragette."

She was pleased to be publicly recognised by such a splendid person, and

answered shyly; but caught a glint in his eyes which reminded her that

she wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of

the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it

possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not

have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had

given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her

brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with

such a pliable profile.

"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the

change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I

think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all

these blighters going by."

"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one

hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for

the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark

Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But

you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally

clear and audible speakers. Women are."

"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair,

or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"

"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff

that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never

admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she

was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment

someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a

schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.

But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen

past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."

"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded

it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better

write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow

and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of

person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket

they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she

wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get

it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that

vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find

out about this little girl--I who don't care a damn about anything or

anybody?"

* * * * *

He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she

had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her

signature. Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most

beautiful people who have ever lived. It was like climbing to a towered

castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called

"Seaview." She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey

weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night

before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female

creature would have worn. But she had looked even younger then; he

remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and

receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a

party. It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had

been having in that dreary office could possibly be. And into the pretty

print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising

through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little

solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the

beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and

twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he

had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.

He looked at her sharply and said to himself: "I wonder...."

Oh, surely not! The note of her face was pure expectancy. As yet she had

come upon nothing fundamental of any kind. He had no prepossessions in

favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same

class as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved. He would have hated

this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.

There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any

longer. "Good-bye; I hope I'll see you at the meeting," he said; and

then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, "and

look after my villa for me."

"Yes, we'll do that," she said competently, and looked after him with

smiling eyes. "Oh, he looks most adventurous!" she thought. "I wonder,

now, if he's ever killed a man?"

II

"Is my frock hooked up all the way down?" wondered Ellen, as she stood

with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall. "Not that I care a button

about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry

was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind,

for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings. She had

taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling

up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss

Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had

spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her

grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of

love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the

hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and

up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near

unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people

were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as

herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic

women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by

sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were

making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl's

penknife and more like a soldier's sword. "I'm being a politikon Zoon!"

she boasted to herself. She had always liked the expression when she

read it in _The Scotsman_ Leaders.

And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause

and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their

way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a

viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered

her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of

the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a

heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of

dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark

Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved

swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily

choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous

of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to

say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone

might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there

was no doing anything for them.

But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances

on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a

peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a

heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring

at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against

his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent

interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the

woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of

the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took

his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like

him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."

She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his

neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and

oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes

maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the

platform. "How long he is looking at them!" she said to herself

presently. "No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle. I believe such

men are very susceptible to beautiful women. I hope," she continued with

sudden bitterness, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will

take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at

Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he

went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed

otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which

made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet

when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his

attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with

panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes. She did not permit herself

irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not

terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and

stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently: "What have I to do

with this man? I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.

Then I suppose I will have to use them as pawns in my political and

financial intrigues."

Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman's

speech. Dr. Munro had just sat down. Her sensible square face looked red

and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and

from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what

she had been doing. This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen,

who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic

of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its

affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the

bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and

untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality

but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet

this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which

nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn

a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered

activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"

she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the

grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the

doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner

all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a

community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly

be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was

content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her

perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous

and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend

with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought,

and her heart turned over with fear.

But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain

against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very

far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends

in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with

its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its

shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a

sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great

music. Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind

bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses

hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying--for

already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from

the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her

followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the

hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were

imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and

how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells,

huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats, clad in nothing but

coarse vests because they would not wear the convict clothes, breathing

the foul sewage-tainted air for all but that hour when they were carried

up to the cell where the doctor and the wardresses waited to bind and

gag them and ram the long feeding-tube down into their bodies. This they

had endured for six weeks, and would for six weeks more. She spoke with

a proud reticence as to her sufferings, about her recent sojourn in

Holloway, from which she had gained release by hunger-striking a

fortnight before.

"Ah, I could die for her!" cried Ellen to herself, wet-eyed with

loyalty. "If only it weren't for mother I'd go to prison to-morrow." Her

love could hardly bear it when Mrs. Ormiston went on, restrained rage

freezing her words, to indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her

and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous

education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional

distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the

meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind

her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things

Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life

with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views

confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt

an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had

always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were

sombre, such as deep symphonies of an orchestra, the black range and

white scaurs of the Pentland Hills against the south horizon, the idea

that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns

cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of

life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the

field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in

eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she

rapturously recognised that same authentic quality.

But what good was it if one woman had something of the dignity of nature

and art? Everybody knew that the world was beautiful. She sent her mind

out from the hall to walk in the night, which was not wet, yet had a

bloom of rain in the air, so that the lights shone with a plumy beam and

all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock

was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the

mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the

lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that

would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass

that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end

of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's

pictures--the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a

fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking

in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made

loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at

the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong

hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there

was no question!

But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly

parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could

hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the

Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure

motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face

about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like

that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was

seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.

Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride

up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that

shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting

policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could

not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in

geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat

brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and

she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her

yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at

the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones

lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen

had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John

Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anæmia or

spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within

themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of

hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of

actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to

assert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts

were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling

kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater

earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of

establishing their sex. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type,

who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political

abasement before the male, a new way of calling attention to what

otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would

detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the

Government and the majority of respectable citizens were on the side of

this pale, sickly, mad young woman against the brave, beautiful Mrs.

Ormiston. People were horrible.

And there was Mr. Philip.

Oh, why had she thought of him? All the time that she had been in the

hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her

untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for

her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the

accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not

then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that

anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers

sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror

of the event, called massacres. She had begun to know better late last

Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room after taking down

some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick,

ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr.

Mactavish James's desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom

that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before

she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.

"Have you come straight off the train?" it was in her mind to say. "Will

I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?" But he looked strange. The

driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the

shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was

performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and

hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his

breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and

has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved,

and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead

to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the

clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle

that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and

whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one,

and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this

accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity,

and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making

advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.

"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else

for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the

umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously,

and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no

need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of

hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could

not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit

he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top

window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a

cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her

alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual

refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and

ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's

all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence

fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are

you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in

typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness

with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.

Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always

made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a

gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and

drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made

him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and

set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you,

lassie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her

shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be

well spoken of. But there was worse than that--something so bad that she

would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought

of it in a harsh, short sentence. _"When Mr. Morrison went out of the

room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."_

Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip

being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I

will kill him...."

There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had

finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.

Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of

the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.

Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped,

but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the

advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in

the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call

sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced

that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.

Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument

between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an

indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment

against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried

mothers.

Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of

unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of

woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that

she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl

and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had

only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And

she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There

was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the

world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,

that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them

for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she

came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the

garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves

and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's

houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.

Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for

somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was

the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in

pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she

would not know.

Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna

McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair

and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about

married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had

broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and grass and

daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by

the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's

books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words

on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was

wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering

had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her

hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove

her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But

there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret

with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was leaning against

the wall in that dark place beyond the window laughing at her, partly

because she was such a wee ninny not to know, and partly because when

she did know the truth there would be something about it which would

humiliate her. She cast down her eyes and stared at the floor so that

none might see how close she was to tears. She was a silly weak thing

that would always feel like a bairn on its first day at school; she was

being tormented by Mr. Philip. Even the very facts of life had been

planned to hurt her.

Oh, to be like that man from Rio! It was his splendid fate to be made

tall and royal, to be the natural commander of all men from the moment

that he ceased to be a child. He could captain his ship through the

steepest seas and fight the pirate frigate till there was nothing

between him and the sunset but a few men clinging to planks and a

shot-torn black flag floating on the waves like a rag of seaweed. For

rest he would steer to small islands, where singing birds would fly out

of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run

aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long,

loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while

he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed;

at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there

would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful

kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away

from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died

there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and

princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern

face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now

they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of

course, but it was a joy to think of him.

She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.

III

There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his

motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this

ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors

in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas

made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd;

that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was

coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he

was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure

had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the

half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen

Melville. The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that

it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was

wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the

eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had

remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as

a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her

profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was

very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile

than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was

something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him

feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the

spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other

beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.

The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping

reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found

that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman

with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand

and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which

manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not

beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had

she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or

small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and

believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious

pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been

stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the

ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far

forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how

vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking--as just for the moment that

the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he

certainly had thought--that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the

discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.

The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a

cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch

face--the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the

world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was

sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the

_Gondomar_, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that

medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from

Mukden. Harsh things she was saying--harsh things about the decent

Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London

for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being

shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for

solicitation.

He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the

Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the

world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian

man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the

celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same

stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.

For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag

to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at

their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of

pity.

The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because

she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection

of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her

beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the

audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in

which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather

than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways

that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly

and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their

intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to

fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict

with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then

they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and

touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was

neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had

the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this

irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,

half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed

on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey

suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was

vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She

was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their

beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from

the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.

She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made

a garden of his soul, had any right to be.

That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at

grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of

shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of

the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as

she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under

her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him

haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he

nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught

her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious

swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.

But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention

to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way

she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged

body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his

mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was

one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern

for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often

thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by

those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the

chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting

their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the

tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening

to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.

The resemblance went no further than this spiritual attitude, for this

woman was second-rate stuff. Her beauty was somehow shoddy, her purple

gown the kind of garment that a clairvoyant might have worn, her

movements had the used quality of photographers' poses. Publicity had

not been able to change the substance of the precious metal of her soul,

but it had tarnished it beyond all remedy. She alluded presently to her

preposterously-named daughters, Brynhild, Melissa and Guendolen, and he

was reminded of a French family of musicians with whom he had travelled

on the steamer between Rio and Sao Paulo, a double-chinned swarthy

Madame and her three daughters, Céline, Roxane and Juliette, who sat

about on deck nursing musical instruments tied with grubby scarlet

ribbons, silent and dispirited, as though they were so addicted to

public appearance that they found their private hours an embarrassment.

But he remembered with a prick of compunction that they had made

excellent music; and that, after all, was their business in life. So

with the Ormistons. In the pursuit of liberty they had inadvertently

become a troupe; but they had fought like lions. And they were giving

the young that guarantee that life is really as fine as storybooks say,

which can only be given by contemporary heroism. Little Ellen Melville,

on the other side of the hall, was lifting the most wonderful face all

fierce and glowing with hero-worship. "That's how I used to feel about

Old Man Guthrie of the _Gondomar_ when I was seventeen," he thought.

"It's a good age...."

When he was seventeen.... He was not at all sure that those three years

he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life. It came back to

him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the

ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on

the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open

sea. The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the

sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a

brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a

sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the

southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were

at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen's dreams of land,

but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith

Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the

flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.

He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the

island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the

storms should take him. There were the four crumbling grey towers of

Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint

spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling

white speck which he knew to be his father's tomb. He hated that he

should be able to see it even from here. All his life that mausoleum had

enraged him. He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have

died before his son was a man. He suspected him of creeping into his

coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his

son's revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive

tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.

Eastward, a few fields' length along the ridge, was the belvedere on his

father's estate. He had not looked at it for years, but from here it was

so little like itself that he could bear to let his eyes dwell on it. It

was built at the fore of a crescent-shaped plantation on the brow of the

hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like

great green wings spread by a small white bird. And eastward yet a mile

or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of

Yaverland's End. Under that thatch was his mother. She would be asleep

now. Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn. With a

constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now,

lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head

and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn

across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.

Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead. At the picture

he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for

having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid

sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on

the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors. Then he

recognised the necessity of this adventure. It was his duty to her to go

out into the world and do great things. He had said so very definitely

to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.

So that boy, thirteen years before....

He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to

do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had

done nothing and was nothing. He saw his soul as something detached from

his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and

acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in

reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and

cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the

woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon

him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,

grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her

distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he

remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.

"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were

those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father

Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation

were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from

the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of

fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were

the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick

men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists

and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the

strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions

and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.

They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better

than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a

suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.

"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with

himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied

tartly.

There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably

good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington

till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of

adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his

imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the

result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women

about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite

with heat and that only with concussion--these facts had from his

earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it

had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere

diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had

read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But

now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of

no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the

special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches

without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his

results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors,

who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to

work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all

species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of

beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings

of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that

would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was

lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had

felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest

discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but

a Spirit.

But now none of these things mattered. He was caught in the net of life

and nothing that was above it was of any use to him; as well expect a

man who lies through the night with his foot in a man-trap to be

comforted by the beauty of the stars. The only God he could have any use

for would be the kind the Salvationists talk about, who goes about

giving drunken men an arm past the public-house and coming between the

pickpocket and Black Maria with a well-timed text. There was nothing in

Science that would lift him out of this hell of loneliness, this

conviction of impotence, this shame of achievementless maturity. He

perceived that he had really known this for a long time, and that it was

the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his

day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to

be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage

at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine

movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared

at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break

the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly

over the commercial uses that were to be made of his work. What was the

use of sweating his brains so that one set of fools could blow another

set of fools to glory? Oh, this was hell!...

The detestable blonde was now holding the platform in attitudes such as

are ascribed to goddesses by British sculptors, and speaking with a

slow, pure gusto of the horrors of immorality. For a moment her

allusions to the wrongs of unmarried mothers made him think of the proud

but defeated poise of his mother's head, and then the peculiar calm,

gross qualities of her phrases came home to him. He wondered how long

she had been going on like this, and he stared round to see how these

people, who looked so very decent, whom it was impossible to imagine

other than fully dressed, were taking it. Without anticipation his eyes

fell on Ellen and found her looking very Scotch and clapping sturdily.

Of course it must be all right, since everything about her was all

right, but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying

to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was

just the final proof of how very much all right she was. Only a girl so

innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical

presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and

made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind

was white as her hair was red.

He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was

powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no

good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that

makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men

act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an

end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that

these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women

whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most

casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's

entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he

was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her

honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but

would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their

responsibilities.

Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten

how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a

transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio;

back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner

at old Hermes Pessôa's preposterous house, that was built like--so far

as it was like anything else on earth--the Villa d'Este mingled with the

Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an

end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the

guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old

Pessôa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so

that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to

the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed

out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling

that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the

brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood

six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that

smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red

dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this

mad new house, in this mad new society. He had pulled one out and lain

back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was

beating violently. He hated being there, but he had to make sure. Much

rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of

those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay. "Then

marriage is right," he said to himself. "Where there is real love one

wants to go to church first."

Others who had wearied of the party drifted down to this recess of

peace. An elderly Frenchman with a pointed black beard, and a slim, fair

English boy with tears on his long eyelashes, sat themselves down in two

of these great chairs, with a bottle of wine at their feet and one

glass, from which they drank alternately with an effect of exchanging

vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all

never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the

Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally,

mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not

grieve. It is always thus when one forgets the Church."

There came later another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who

sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of

elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him

alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson

brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the

high windows, black with the outer night but streaked and oiled with

reflections of the inner feast. Opposite there hung a Bouguereau, which

irritated him--nymphs ought not to look as if they had come newly

unguented from a _cabinet de toilette_. Below it stood an immense

Cloisonné vase, about the neck of which was tied a scarlet silk

stocking. He remembered having seen it there on his last visit six

months before. She must have been an exceptionally careless lady. Out

here there were many ladies who were careless of their honour, but most

of them were careful enough about tangible possessions like silk

stockings. A fresh outburst in the babel at the other end of the room

did not make him turn round, though the French banker had cried in an

ecstasy, "_Tiens! c'est atroce!_" and had bounded up the hall. He sat

on, hating this ugly place of his delay, while the Frenchman and the boy

kept up an insincere, voluptuous whisper about God and the comfort of

the Mass....

At last he rose to his feet. It was a quarter to twelve, and time for

him to go. He went up the hall, treading on lobster claws and someone's

wig, and looking about him for a certain person. He could not see him

among the group of revellers that stood in the space before the large

folding-doors, and for a minute a hand closed over his heart as he

feared that for once the person whom he sought had gone home before

morning. But presently he saw a long chair by the wall, and on its

cushions a blotched face and a gross, full body. He bent over the chair

and whispered, "De Rojas, de Rojas!" But the fat man slept. Hatred

gushed up in him, and a joy that the night was secure, and he passed on

to the folding-doors. But from the little group that was gathered round

the table, which before the dinner had supported the Winged Victory that

now lay spread-eagled on the floor, there stepped Pessôa. He bade him

good-night and thanked him for a riotous evening, but perceived that

Pessôa was waving a cocked revolver at him and saying something about

Léonore. What could he be saying? It appeared incredible, even to-night,

that he should really be saying that every departing guest must kiss

Léonore's back and swear that it was the most beautiful back in Brazil.

He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see

how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor Léonore.

She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her

breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled

down to her waist so that her back was bare. Such a broad, honest back

it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood

as a model for Millet's "Angelus." She looked over her shoulder and

smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy.

They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had

gone with hopes of having a good night's rest for once, since Hermes was

giving a stag-dinner. They had not even given her time to wipe off all

the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples,

or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some

white snippets of the _Jornal de Commercio_. She bore no malice, the

good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she

likes to stay there: still, men are men, and mad, so what can one

expect?

He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one

woman. He flicked the revolver out of Pessôa's hand and flung it through

the nearest window. The thick glass took a little time to fall.

"My friends will wait on you in the morning," Pessôa had spouted, and he

had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to Léonore, and

kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she

smiled sleepily, and said in English, "Go on, you bad man!" She spoke so

slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a

foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost

that had found a lodging in her broad mouth. Then the men fell back to

let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the

Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple

livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass

of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays

of light which were pollutions of the moonlight. He thought of that

blotched face, that gross, full body.... It was a night of strong

moonlight. He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where

the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness. Palms stood up

glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight

fantasy of form. The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas'

villa gleamed like the spears of heroes. He stared between them at the

red façade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there.

The thought struck him with terror. If she were not waiting for him the

moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his

heart-beat turn to stillness.

Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores. This was his house. Yet he

entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall

that enclosed his own gardens. The magnolias stood blazing white on the

lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the

poising fireflies' weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a

smoke. He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but

he did not dare to go out into the light. He passed the door that led

from his to de Rojas' garden, which had been made when a father and son

had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up

because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours. If it had not been

unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty.... He stood in

the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple,

not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his

mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if

Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to

him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her

to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the

summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw

the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his

woman in his arms, finding her lips....

It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember

nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its

ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He

knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it

meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved

Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the

magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.

Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her

fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go

on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable

of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to

remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything

that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan

a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan

to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy

if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind

himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.

Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real

to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest

had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a

blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these

Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.

He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that

last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one

she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this

unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour

should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out

their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two

children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting

each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and

unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his

comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church,

who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her

not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two

tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only

promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought

of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her

were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.

Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest

of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They

stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from

the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon

immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of

life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the

courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that

questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated

brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats

that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars

because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately

because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality

that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet

surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who,

if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either

bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it,

but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film

of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one

could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a

chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came

to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could

laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with

speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this

woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing

satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.

He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite

lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen

Melville.

He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.

IV

When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at

him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set

eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she

was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the

face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she

couldn't come it over _him_. And he asked if he might see her home.

She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some

tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air

of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you

stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian

Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park

Square out by the Meadows!"

"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.

"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a

queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I

suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit

down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the

takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought

R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has

paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so

full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured

velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal

for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a

minute."

He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became

melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to

summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place

were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood

about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on

the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown

surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would

jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left

higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And

doubtless, if there is a beneficent Providence that really picks the

world over for opportunities of kindliness, halls which are habitually

let out for political meetings are allowed means of relieving their

feelings which are forbidden to other collections of bricks and mortar.

But he mustn't say that to Ellen. To her political meetings were plainly

sacred rituals, and in any case he was not sure whether she laughed at

things.

She called to him from the doorway, "I'm through, Mr. Yaverland!" She

was wearing a tam-o'-shanter and a mackintosh, which she buttoned right

up to her chin, and she looked just a brown pipe with a black knob at

the top, a mere piece of plumbing. He thought it very probable that

never before in the history of the human race had a beautiful girl

dressed herself so unbecomingly. But that she had done so seemed so

peculiarly and deliciously amusing that as he walked by her side he

could hardly keep from looking at her smilingly in a way that would have

puzzled and annoyed her. And outside the hall, when they found that the

mist, like a sour man who will not give way to his temper but keeps on

dropping disagreeable remarks, was letting down just enough of itself to

soak Edinburgh without giving it the slightest hope that it would rain

itself out by the morning, he caught again this queer flavour of her

that in its sharpness and its freshness reminded him of the taste of

fresh celery. He asked her if she hadn't an umbrella, and she replied,

"I've no use for umbrellas; I like the feel of the rain on my face, and

I see no sense in paying three-and-eleven for avoiding a positive

pleasure."

By that time Ellen was almost sure that he was smiling to himself in the

darkness, and was miserable. It was a silly, homely thing to have said.

"Ah, what for can he be wanting to see me home?" she thought helplessly.

"He is so wonderful. But then, so am I! So am I!" And as they went

through the dark tangle of small streets she turned loose on him her

enthusiasm for the meeting, so that he might see that women also have

their serious splendours. Hadn't it been a magnificent meeting? Wasn't

Mrs. Ormiston a grand speaker? Could he possibly, if he cared anything

for honesty, affirm that he had ever heard a man speaker who came within

a hundred miles of her? And wasn't Mrs. Mark Lyle beautiful, and didn't

she remind him of the early Christian martyrs? Didn't he think the women

who were forcibly fed were heroines, and didn't he think the Liberal

Governments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times?

"Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only

give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy

barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed

little things about her. She had had very little to do with men,

perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not

naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft

and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do.

Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as

though she trod on grass.

Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you

must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's

fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with

herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she

was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear

infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.

To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could

listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My

mother's keen on the movement."

"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she

speak, or organise?"

"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a

little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary

gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his

mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland

was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the

stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and

weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived

as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the

darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the

infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor

souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which

disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It

makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there

in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any

more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be

continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware

that those questions existed. He simply noted that she was being happy.

Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each

other, going home in the rain.

They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like

shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope.

"Edinburgh's a fine place," he said. "It can handle even an asphalt

track with dignity."

"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from

it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman

want to go wandering about the world?

From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you

a sailor?"

"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."

Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"

"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he

was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she

thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of

men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a

channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man

who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his

head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a

mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the

reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked

like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She

wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her,

which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that

even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were

passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything,

when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that

softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel

anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for

there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that

was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of

soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors. If she lived

near here she must be very poor. But without embarrassment she turned

to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and

pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by

the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained

window, to be a very mean little house. "The Square's through here," she

said. "Come away in and I'll find you a membership form for the Men's

League...."

Beyond the archway lay the queerest place. It was a little box-like

square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat

houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its

shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its

neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews. They sent out in front

of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a

paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a

lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as

a terrier shakes a rat. Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued

bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins. On the

fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public

park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by

garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and

beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with

that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night. He,

too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible

that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole

business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were

sleeping in these little houses. They were probably poor little people,

for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one

lighted window. And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in

the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he

had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner

house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon,

the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the

door and invited him in with something of an air.

"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness,

"Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out

light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said,

"What's that you say, Ellen?"

"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a

minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client

from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find

him a membership form."

She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and

fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew

she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to

carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a

little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it

were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr.

Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit."

A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook

his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a

large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured

by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that

someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too

gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had

not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as

well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare

bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet

once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a

fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip,

though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no

present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.

The aged are terrible--mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which

none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered

round them.

She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had

been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes

and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so

dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself.

The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the

wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so

unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather

upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big

steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse

climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by

signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers

Bibles--engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and

there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn

from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand

dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered

somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.

The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if

he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had

been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite

she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made

when they heard that his work lay among high explosives. And Ellen's

rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper

stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, "Ellen, it

beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy

girl about the house!" and Ellen exclaimed, "Och, drat the thing, it

must be upstairs!" and ran out of the room with her face turned away

from them.

They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises

overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on

the floor. "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly. She began

to look him over with a maternal eye. "For all you've been six months in

the North, you've not lost your tan," she said.

"Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America," he answered.

Their eyes met and they smiled. In effect she had said, "Well, you are a

fine fellow," and he had answered, "Yes, perhaps I am."

"I like a man to travel," she went on, tossing her head and looking

altogether fierce Ellen's mother. "I never go into the bank without

looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on

their high stools." She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat

him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the

mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a

sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him. "I hope

you don't think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all

alone. It's not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for

this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused. I'm not much of a

companion to her. I'm getting on, you see. She was my youngest."

"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only

child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.

"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was

born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and

I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as

the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot

of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he

was taken ill."

He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."

"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his

age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I

knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New

Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of

the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed

by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There

was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and

disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back

of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave

birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was

disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her

protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very

meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had

been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she

was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody

would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.

Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional

people who are old or not perfectly happy.

"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he

knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naïve and

touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as

he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now

that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming

into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.

"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex

for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that

most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent

people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother

was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"

It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on

a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin

dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed. Only the continued calm of Mrs.

Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through

the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial

human activity.

"Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger," said Mrs. Melville. "We

hardly hear it now. You see, they've turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs

on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they

make with their feet. It's not a nice place. 'Gentlemen a shilling,

ladies invited,' it says outside. Still, we don't complain, for the

noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent."

This was a masterpiece of circumstance. By nothing more than a thin wall

which shook to music was this little home divided from a thick-aired

place where ugly people lurched against each other lustfully; and yet it

had been made an impregnable fort of loveliness and decency by this

virtuous ageing woman, whose slight silliness was but a holy abstinence,

a refusal to side with common sense because that was so often concerned

in cruel decisions, by this girl who was so young that it seemed at the

sight of her as if time had turned back again and earth rolled unstained

by history, and so beautiful that it seemed as if henceforth eternity

could frame nothing but happiness. The smile of Ellen had made a faery

ring where heavy-footed dancers could not enter; her gravity had made a

sanctuary as safe as any church crowned with a belfry and casketing the

Host. And he, participating in the safety of the place, pitied the men

behind the shaking wall, and all men over the world who had committed

themselves to that search for pleasure which makes joy inaccessible.

They had chosen frustration for their destiny. Because they desired some

ecstasy that would lighten the leaden substance of life they turned to

drunkenness, which did no more than jumble reality, steep the earth in

aniline dyes, tinge the sunset with magenta. Because they desired love

they sought out women who, although dedicated to sex, were sexually

cancelled by repeated use, like postage-stamps on a much re-directed

letter, who efficiently went through the form of passion, yet presented

it so empty of all exaltation that their lovers left them feeling as if

they were victims of a practical joke.

And here, not half a dozen yards from some of these seekers, was one who

could bring to these desires a lovelier death than they would meet on

the dirty bed of gratification or the hard pallet of renunciation.

Because the untouched truth about her could give ecstasy one would not

lose the power of seeing things as they are, and she made one forget the

usual sexual story. Although she was formed for love and the intention

of being her lover was now a fundamental part of him, she was so busy

with her voice and body in playing quaint variations on the theme of

herself that he did not mind how long might be the journey to their

marriage. She was more interesting than any other person or thing in the

world. She was going to have more interesting experiences; because her

unique simplicity comprehended a wild impatience with lies she would

have a claim on reality that would give her unprecedented wisdom. Now he

could understand why saints in their narrow cells despise sinners as

dull stay-at-homes.

And when she burst into the room again he saw that all he had been

thinking about her was true. It might be that everybody else on earth

would see her as nothing but a red-haired girl in an ill-fitting blue

serge dress with an appalling tartan silk vest, but still it was true.

"Here you are," she said, "you put your name _there_." She bent over him

as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how

magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.

Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor

old lady was yawning behind her knitting. He rose and said good-bye,

wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how

he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that

he came for love. If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and

daughter how easy it would have been! The elder woman's eyes would have

crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her

daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they

contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle

hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have

stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty,

very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if

to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she

knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything. But here was

Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would

drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that

warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she

would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh

inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people

delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored

them because they were difficult.

"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the

courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw

that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the

evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an

honoured guest. They were dear people.

As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open

the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have

been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings,

which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to

picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the

coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a

tea-biscuit.

"You seem to admire Burns," he said.

"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of

the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."

"That's a proposition he never butted up against--"

"What?"

"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.

You're one of Time's revenges...."

She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with

pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully

wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some

disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to

stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a

queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some

nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness

beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it

could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had

second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that

something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.

"Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man

being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in

the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony

transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this

glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes

blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be

subject to death.

"Good-night," he said. He did not know why her breath had failed and why

she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was

doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were

beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on

till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful. "Good-night," he

said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path

simply that they might speak to each other again. "You must shut the

door. You're letting in the rain and cold."

"No," she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.

He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married

and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his

marriage.

CHAPTER III

I

When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from

a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry's College, and sat down

in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the

kitchen, "Ellen, I've got the grandest surprise for you!"

These fanciful women! "And what's that?" she cried back tolerantly,

though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees. She thought

she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had

sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing.

But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and

ask like a little anxious mouse, "You're sure you've not said anything,

dear? You're sure you've been a careful girl with your work, dear?" and

would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating

misfortune. "Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post

we must just manage." So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though

that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.

"Away into the dining-room and see what it is," said Mrs. Melville,

coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand. She had put on her brighter

shawl, the tartan one.

"You look as we'd been left a fortune," said Ellen.

"No fear of that. If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred

pounds that's all we can expect. But there's something fine waiting for

you. Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come. Now!"

She flung open the door.

"Roses!" breathed Ellen. "Mother--roses!"

On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled

with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long

held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection

joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars.

Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of

the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have

jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed

her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. The flowers

were beautiful in so many ways. They were beautiful just as roses,

because "roses" is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white

because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose

has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first

white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that

dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled,

attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in

stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a

faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.

They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against

the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.

They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers. They were an outburst

of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to

anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here

though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an

immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very

enjoyably if one had the money to buy things. It really was worth while

struggling to get on....

"Mother, where did they come from?"

"Ah!" said Mrs. Melville waggishly.

"Och, tell me! I don't imagine you went out and pawned the family

jewels. Och, do tell me! Come on!"

"A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist's, this morning. I could

have fallen down when I opened the door. And the wee brat of a boy tried

to convey to me that he wasn't used to coming to such a place. He wore a

look like a missionary in Darkest Africa. They were left for Miss

Melville, mind you. Not for your poor old mother. And they're from Mr.

Yaverland. Yon's his card sticking up against your grandmother on the

mantelpiece."

Ellen's hands, outspread over the roses, dropped to her side.

"I would have thought he had more sense," she said sulkily. "If he'd

money to burn he should have sent this lot to the infirmary."

"Och, Ellen, are you not pleased?"

"What's the man thinking of to fill us up with flowers as if we were an

Episcopal church on Easter Sunday?"

"Ellen, you've no notion of manners. Gentlemen often send flowers to

ladies they admire. When your Aunt Bessie and I were girls many's the

fine present of flowers we got from officers at the Castle."

"I've neither time nor taste for such things. It makes me feel like a

hospital. He'll be sending us new-laid eggs and lint bandages next. The

man's mad."

"Ellen, you're a queer girl," complained. Mrs. Melville. "If this

argy-bargying about votes for women makes you turn up your nose at bonny

flowers that a decent fellow sends you I'm sorry for you--it's just

tempting Providence to scorn good mercies like this. I'll away and take

the fish-pie out of the oven."

It was strange that as soon as her mother had left the room she began to

feel differently about the roses. Of course they were very beautiful;

and they were contenting in a quite magic way, for besides satisfying

her longing for pretty things, they seemed to have deprived of urgency

all her other longings, even including her desire for a vote, for

eminence of some severe sort, for an income of three hundred pounds a

year (which was the most she believed a person with a social conscience

could enjoy), for a perpetual ticket for the Paterson Concerts at the

MacEwan Hall, and for perfect self-possession. She felt as if these

things were already hers, or as if they were coming so certainly that

she need not fret about them any more than one frets about a parcel that

one knows has been posted, or concerning some desires, as if it did not

matter so much as she had thought whether she got them or not.

Especially that dream of being one of a company of men and women whose

bodies should be grave as elms with dignity and whose words should be

bright as butterflies with wit struck her as being foolish. It was as

idle as wanting to be born in the days of Queen Elizabeth. What she

really wanted was a friend. She had felt the need of one since Rachael

Wing went to London. Surely Richard Yaverland meant to be her friend,

since he sent flowers to her. But she wished the gift could have been

made secretly, and if he came to pay a visit she should be quite alone.

For no reason that she could formulate, the thought of even her mother

setting eyes on them together seemed a threat of disgrace. She wished

that they could be standing side by side at the fire in that five

minutes when it is sheer extravagance to light the gas but so dark that

one may stare as one cannot by day, so that she might look at what the

driving flamelight showed of his black, sea-roughened magnificence. At

her perfect memory of him she felt a rush of exhilaration which left her

confused and glad and benevolent.

"Mother, dear," she said, for Mrs. Melville had come back with the

fish-pie, and was bidding her with an offended briskness to sit forward

and eat her meal while it was hot, "they're the loveliest things. I

can't think what for I was so cross."

"Neither can I. There's so little bonny comes our way that I do think we

might be grateful when we get a treat."

"I'm sorry. I can't think what came over me."

"Never mind. But, you know, you're sometimes terribly like your father.

You must fight against it."

They sat down to supper, looking up from their food at the roses.

"Mother, the gas is awful bad for them. Carbonic acid is just murderous

to flowers."

"I was thinking that myself. It was well known that gas was bad for

flowers even when I was young, though we didn't talk about carbonic

acid. But if you don't see them by gaslight you'll never see them, for

it's dark by five. They must fall faster than they would have done."

"Och, no! I'd rather you had the pleasure of them by day, and let the

poor things last. I must content myself with a look at them at

breakfast."

"Nonsense! They're your flowers, lassie. But do you not think it would

do if we brought in the two candles and turned out the gas? It'll be a

bit dark, but it isn't as if there were many bones in the fish-pie."

And that is what they did. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for then

there was a bright soft light on the red and white petals, and a drapery

of darkness about the mean walls of the room, and a thickening of the

atmosphere which hid the archness on the older woman's face, so that the

girl dreamed untormented and without knowing that she dreamed.

"Ah, well!" sighed Mrs. Melville after a silence, with that air of irony

which she was careful to impart to her sad remarks, as if she wanted to

remove any impression that she respected the fate that had assailed her.

"I don't know how many years it is since I sat down with roses on the

table."

"I never have before," said Ellen.

II

It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the

declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park

Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the

careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had

meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when

the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every

time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood

red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew

more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he

wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that

he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused

consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present

course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in

open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There

was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his

love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man

commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research.

Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh

he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her

youth could hold.

But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter;

and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was

in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and

exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was

larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like

that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of

sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her

something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting

of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and

characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great

pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace

with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He

found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a

complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his

return in the New Year, which was a breach of her habitual pretence,

which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for

that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.

"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her

as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room,

which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver

fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map.

Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of

power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just

finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her

merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have

made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin

leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene

she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face

would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness

would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had

reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she

and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along

the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east

sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the

bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she

had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of

starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his

head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.

It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it

seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because

he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover

would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably

glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet

suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant

wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his

mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to

Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.

And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else

happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him

with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch

that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten

minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its

inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling

wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood

spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from

the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village

three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be

need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood

by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's

suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was

disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little

fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland

himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known

from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen

they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand

the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay

among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily

of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave

conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell

spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.

But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when

it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the

door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage

where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He

shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had

heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was

twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of

his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he

was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a

lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but

went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail

all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so

he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out

into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking,

lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.

She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she

stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows

were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as

well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the

marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without

intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the

death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac

and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the

bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen

panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their

coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not

spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those

books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft

voice.

For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and

dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled

his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It

must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the

hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that

this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she

had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew

followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet

three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued

scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his

arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He

held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to

the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But

I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face

away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to

talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a

thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so

far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded

the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly,

glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if

you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had

slept....

And she was going through a bad time like that now.

When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not

greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not

reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any

particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this

afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.

But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist

desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of

the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He

certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so

wonderful as he had remembered her.

But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to

solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the

Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the

white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast

of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the

summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by

his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to

Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up

to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous

thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her

immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly

conscientious woman would have gone on selling _Votes for Women_ for at

least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her

mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because

after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the _Scotsman's_

report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an

impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed

even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock

came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told

herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there

had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew

nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the

other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of

him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.

The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much

lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and

pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea,

though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want

any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation

to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or

cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but

always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill.

The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically

irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the

right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it

all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how

he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious

and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of

phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative

gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word

contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually

turned on the rest of the world....

But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by

candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her

mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less.

"But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That

was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious

and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an

excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of

course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll

keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop

you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."

He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had

given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their

stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in

their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the

fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented

them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering

murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at

all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed

that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very

pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the

wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers,

and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had

been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of

tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period

of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention,

which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.

But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift.

They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them

wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall

and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic

("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to

her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and

laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by

those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of

the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey

into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the

happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a

magical power to give each other the things they wanted.

But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed

perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the

frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.

"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."

"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"

She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last

instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if

anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy

and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh

evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of

malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr.

Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her,

things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark

thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."

"Ju--?"

"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that

Cæsar was much addicted to."

When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had

put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the

mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the

glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the

coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,

evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while

her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as

if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same

time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would

come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures

of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she

should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden

tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to

be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on

the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to

add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she

smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one

beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,

and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it

became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into

a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or

say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because

he perfectly knew what she did not.

One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of

shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed

to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to

each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an

exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that

his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But

there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it

killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was

inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an

exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light,

and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a

richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold

her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail

substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out

like comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to

crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set

out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of

course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world

was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the

table, and she seemed very real.

She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I

can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her

pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched

a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go

on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went

and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the

path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the

evening as if it were a refuge from him.

But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had

a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes

and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a

trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their

appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about

George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had

he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the

privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat _ss. Glory_ with

Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her

that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of

London, and not a few came from the special schools for the

feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper

that makes a good boxer.

So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was,

he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other

place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops

that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took

the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its

narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked

briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed

at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other

trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their

slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was

aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent

than going home to supper.

It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering

black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the

midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east

wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy

quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much

aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a

marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that

resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and

circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a

shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an

iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a

wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as

though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of

a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever

seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's

carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled

to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the

price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that

he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen,

and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such

occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy

texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness

in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was

plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual,

intellectual energy.

In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put

in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that

hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like

a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under

the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.

Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage,

for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it

seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his

white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however,

in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was

the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary

life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that

magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life. The old man

seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said,

"If that's the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately."

Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not

so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations. But after they

got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his

mind: "Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?"

"Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay."

They had come to the end of Ellen's shopping list and she was taking him

home through St. Patrick's Square. "Look at that lighted window, where

they've got a blue blind! That's where de Quincey stopped!" she said

excitedly, and he answered, "Oh, is it?... I say, why did the old chap

offer to give you change in halfpence?"

"Well, to-morrow's Sunday, you see."

"I'm afraid I don't. I'm stupid. Why do you want halfpence more on

Sunday than on any other day?"

"Why, for the plate. For the collection. In church. But we always put in

threepenny-bits. Mother's picked up a lot of English ways. What's taken

you?" She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her

that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly

English taunt that the Scotch are mean. "Och, you don't understand," she

began to stammer hastily. "I didn't mean that exactly."

And then a hot rage came on her. Why should she make excuses for her own

people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to

giggle? Wasn't he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences

in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness,

which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to "come it over"

her? She said acidly, "I'm glad you're amused. I suppose you don't do

such things in England?" and at his laughing answer, "I don't know; I've

never been to Church in England. But I shouldn't think so," her

neatly-brushed and braided temper came down. She came to a sudden stop.

They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of

tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had

none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate

with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs

she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping

from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of

her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side

lest he should drop any parcels.

He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that

it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his

mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as

she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were

held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that

English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers,

and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were

no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the

implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than

the English, had defended a larger country....

He woke up at that. He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for

though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry. She was

running away from him, but in a circle.

"Scotland bigger than England!" he jeered. "Think of the map! Bigger

than England!"

She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round

dismayed hole. But she was not to be beaten. "I was alluding to its

surface," she said coldly. "It being such an elevated country, there

must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking

hardly any space on the map. Consequently I was correct in saying that

Scotland is bigger than England." She drew breath to go on, but her lips

began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she

began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined

her. They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their

laughter, from which they did not wish to move. They were standing quite

still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other's faces,

trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the

strong moonlight. It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not

quite know what to do with it. They did not even know whether to be

grave or gay. It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue

and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its

merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.

But indeed they had no choice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I

didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person

all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."

"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an

expense."

He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur

the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last

manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face,

which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high

cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I

didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said

could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that

wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of

tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all

delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and

self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to

acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance,

accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a

boy.

And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that

Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of

wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she

should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of

course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and

turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these

desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would

look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward

tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the

ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that

she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be

able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would

prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men

are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or

persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which

he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of

everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body

to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in

spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though

that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly

disliked that obligation.

She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And

Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig.

Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands

yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs

hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The

water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."

"Take me there, Ellen."

"Would you like to come? Let's go next Saturday. I've got the whole day

off. Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I've been

doing. It'll be lovely. I've had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing

went to London. But would you truly care to come? It's just moors.

You'll not turn up your nose at it?"

"Anywhere I went with you I'd like."

She started and began to walk on. It was as if the sheet of tissue had

grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it. Although he

went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he

found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly

answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by

its collar. Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so

eagerly? And ought he to have called her by her Christian name? Of

course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to

do it. When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a

light in the dining-room window and said, "Mother's home before us."

She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her

life. For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed,

and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because

soon they would no longer be alone together. Perhaps something like fear

would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with

victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of

timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to

star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how

even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily

contriving their immediate marriage. For there was a steely quality

about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive

purpose.

It was apparent to him, when they went in, that Mrs. Melville understood

what was going on, for she threw him a glance which was not quite a wink

but which clearly suggested that had she been just a common body it was

conceivable that she might have winked. As soon as they were alone he

told her that he loved Ellen, that he wanted to marry her, that he had

plenty of money, that he was all right, that they must marry at once.

She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had

tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her

with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of

moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the

walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and

the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob

like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and plainly trusted him, but

at the same time she was pitifully alarmed. "Mercy me! you've not been

long.... Well, you've caught a Tartar and no mistake. Never say I didn't

warn you.... But you'll let the bairn bide for a wee bit longer! She's

but a bairn!"

It was as if she quite saw that a husband was necessary for Ellen, and

wanted her to have one, and at the same time believed that any husband

would inevitably bring her pain. He set it down as one of the despondent

misinterpretations of life that the old invent in the depression of

their physical malaise, and answered, reassuringly, insincerely, "Yes,

yes, I'll wait...." But why should they wait? They were going to be

radiantly and eternally happy. It might as well begin at once.

III

"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed

at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping

from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she

had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland

an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing

that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the

village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and

now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by

daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke

and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the

upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men

working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural

disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of

the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them,

laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do;

there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had

seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought

tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to

the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person

who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic

hues.

But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there

had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the

trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in

face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward

was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a

slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black

hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields,

set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road

dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate

frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of

clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines

against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride

and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of

mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its

immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it

was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and

it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he

had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood

showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather,

and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of

response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under

changing skies even as the seas.

Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting

towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the

coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly,

"Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity,

and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which,

when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs

and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind

was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of

wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a

track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously

between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old

lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her

bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes

had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a

new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed

on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted

everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country,

these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.

"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a

voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up

to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed

a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind

without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was

glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the

hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at

his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her

velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler

that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big

for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of

large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of

flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort

of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the

slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she

would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music

heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of

his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the

whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the

range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would

tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine

what manner of place it would be--whether there would be grass or

heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.

"Well, it's no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if

we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes," said Ellen. "We'd

best step forward. I'm glad you like the place. I love it. And this bit

of the road's bonny. When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the

ploughman's cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one

day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four. And if

you'll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as

bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians. The poor things

ran like the wind when they saw us. I wish we could have explained we

meant no harm, for I suppose it's the one time in the day when they

count on having the world to themselves."

"I've felt like that about a jaguar," he said. "Came on it suddenly, on

a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina. It had been tidying up a

monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy. Lord, the sick fright

in its eyes when it saw me. I'd have given anything to be able to stand

it a drink and offer to see it home."

"Och!" she murmured abashed. "Me talking about rabbits, and you

accustomed to jaguars. I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit

except to look down your nose at it. But we can't rise to jaguars in

Scotland. But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt."

"I've seen a red deer too," he said, "when I was motorcycling up to Ross

this summer." It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across

the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and

then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, "The sunset was

on it. It looked the colour of your hair."

"Well, if it did," she cried with sudden petulance, "pity me, that has

to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast's back. Och,

come along! Let's run. I like running. I'm cold. There's a bonny bridge

where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir. Let's run." And for a

hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then

stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath. "I don't like

this," she said half laughingly. "I've a poor envious nature. I'm used

to running everybody else off their feet, and here you're holding back

to keep with me. I feel I'm being an object of condescension. We'll

walk, if you please."

Yaverland said, "Oh, what nonsense! I was just thinking how rippingly

you ran."

"Havers!" she replied. "You were thinking nothing of the sort. You were

wondering what for I carried an iron-monger's shop in my pocket. But

yon rattling's just a tin with some coconuts I've in it that I made last

night and slipped in in case you'd like it, rubbing up against my

protractor."

"But why in Heaven's name," Yaverland asked, "do you carry a protractor

about with you?"

"Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch,

and I just keep a protractor handy."

Yaverland stopped. "Ellen," he said, "I haven't known you very long."

There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, "I

may call you Ellen, mayn't I? This modern comradeship between men and

women...." "Och, yes," beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic

catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her

pure enthusiasms for his own purposes. Sometimes he was conscious of a

detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not

respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but

he could not take back the insincerity. "As I say, I haven't known you

very long. But may I ask you a favour?"

"Surely," said Ellen.

"Turn out your pockets."

"But why?"

"I want to see what's in 'em."

"Well," said Ellen resignedly, "there are worse vices than

inquisitiveness. Both pockets?"

"We'll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor,

please."

"It's too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you'll have to

take them from me as I get them out. Well, there's the protractor, and

there's the coconut ice. Have a bit? Ah, well, I notice that

grown-up--that people older than me don't seem to care for sweeties

before their dinner. I wonder why. And there's a magnetic compass I

picked up on George the Fourth Bridge. There's a kind of pleasure in

finding the north, don't you think? And--fancy this being here! I

thought I'd lost it long ago. It's a wee garnet I found on the beach at

Elie. I was set up all the afternoon with finding a precious stone. I

would like fine to be a miner in the precious stone mines in Mexico. If

I was a boy I would go. And the rest's just papers. Here's notes on a

Geographical Society lecture on the geology of Yellowstone Park I went

to last spring. Very instructive it was. And here's a diagram I did when

I was working for the Bible examination on the Second Book of Kings--the

lines of the House of Israel and the House of Judah drawn to scale on

square paper, five years to a square and set parallel so that you can

see which buddy was ruling on the one throne when another buddy was on

the other. I came out fifth in all Scotland. And this is a poem I wrote.

It's not a good poem. The subject was excellent--reflections of an

absinthe-drinker condemned to death for the murder of his mistress--but

I couldn't give it the treatment it desairved. No, you will _nut_ see

it. I'll just tear it up. There. It'll do the whaups no harm scattering

over the moor, for they've no æsthetic sensibilities. But I shouldn't be

surprised if you had, though I've heard that the English don't care much

for art. I'm not much good at the poetry, but I have the grace to know

it, and so I've just given it up. I make my own blouses, though I know I

can't equal the professional product that's sold in the shops, because

it comes cheaper. But with the Carnegie library handing out the

professional product for nothing, I see no reason why I should write my

own poems. That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the

other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen

gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole

in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real

nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it

can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after

all."

"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.

"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No

wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the

English if they're all as easily amused as you."

"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like

a boy."

"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing

before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were

nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because

she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?

Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!

And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I

came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A

bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!

Is it not just fine?"

Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he

perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than

anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as

bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.

He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,

and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,

represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing

for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody

fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and

swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her

soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this

country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like

her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that

stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was

fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills

around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with

some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and

utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a

glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the

very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into

shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue

that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the

hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not

unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.

But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort

which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt,

some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it

could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden

from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and

jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy

might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible

lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating

of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat

under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the

thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see

if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the

south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and

said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."

To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone

spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.

There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn

floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an

invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.

But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than

anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy

and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight

squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her

balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky,

the stern grey stream, the amber grasses that shook perpetually in the

stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the

water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.

There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened

every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a

windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the

Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy

confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its

yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this

brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it

an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath

the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a

kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will

that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall

from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.

Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should

sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow

lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined

in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of

whitish grasses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the

unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake

perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It

suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed passion of malice. It was

like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in the log

bubbles slowly floated up through the dark water, wavered a little under

the glassy surface, and then popped up and made a dirty trail of spume.

That was like the way Mr. Philip sat in the dark corner beyond the

fireplace and showed by the way the whites of his eyes turned about that

something bad had come into his mind, and let a space of silence fall so

that one thought he was not going to say it after all, and then it would

come out suddenly, cool and as mean as mean could be and somehow

unanswerable.

With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver

birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless

on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of

malice. Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed

with the grassy rottenness beside the whitish grasses. It had had no

chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that

although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time

when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and

stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave

him the chance to make a fool of her. It was all right to be here on the

Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and

work under Mr. Philip. She could not go on like this. She would have to

kill herself. She would jump over the Dean Bridge. Mother would just

have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.

Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the

rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you

talk about? Aren't you still pals?"

Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's

gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on.

She's never written since the first month."

"Probably she's having hard luck."

"Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside

her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.

She's not a bit like me."

"But that's just what you look like."

"Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as

the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the

presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the

disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with

success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to

her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face

and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he

followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.

When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and

taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her

breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she

said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."

"Why don't you cut yours off then?"

"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she

answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun

that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all

right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere

nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little

child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while

yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl

was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from

womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He

would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right

angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds

marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her

scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman

smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from

a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning

herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult

love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by

some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and

they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.

He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before

her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary

austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he

recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she

still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss

her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when

she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands

roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as

children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was

a woman the passion between them was so strong that the delight of

touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to

support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that

they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and

invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was

what he had to say....

It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He

could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening

of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great

height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He

found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul

shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let

his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the passing moment

as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from

a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that

rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life

because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a

relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black

regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt

of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to

brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did

not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness

than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever

known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.

And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness,

the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race

among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.

She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of

women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon

her lips.

Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you,

she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think

that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in

the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless

moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South

America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her

mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was

too young.

There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was

with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long

way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the

whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two

servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes,

the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down

on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that

distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the

whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all

human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young

girl.

The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin

along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked

by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited

to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder

of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where

there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely

perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the

clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on

either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain

herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated

animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the

extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on

ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her

pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor,

her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so

greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight

over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he

wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course

he never had. There was no one in the world like her.

"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried

back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun

to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown

waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with

an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in

the hills where the Logan Burn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark

polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee

one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose--was it

not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into

his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"

"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here

than anywhere else in the world."

"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted,

uninterested in the loving things that he had said.

"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."

"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for

adventure, "I will go there some day...."

That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern

himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train

of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it

like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the

waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled

by a ready, embarrassed murmur from her.

"I can't...."

He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had

been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly:

"Why not? You've got nailed boots."

But she continued to stand stiffly on a rock by the edge of the red

pool, and stared over his head at the spray and repeated, "I can't."

He wondered from her blush if in his ignorance of girls he had done

something to offend her, and turned away; but she misunderstood that,

and cried fierily:

"Och, I'm not feared! I've done it twenty times. But I took a vow. Oh,"

she faltered, suddenly the youngest of all articulate things, "you'll

laugh at me!"

"I won't!" he answered fiercely and gripped one of her hands.

"It was like this," she said, looking round-eyed and dewily solemn like

a child in church. "Climbing up there used to be a great pleasure to me.

I used to come here a lot with Rachael Wing. And then I heard Victor

Grayson speak--oh, he is a wonderful man; he seemed hardly airthly; you

felt you had to make some sacrifice. I made a vow I'd never climb it

again till I had done something for the social revolution. And I've not

done a thing yet."

They exchanged a long, confiding look, a mutual pressure of their souls;

but before he could say something reverently sympathetic she had uttered

a sharp exclamation, and was looking past him at the waterfall, which a

sudden gust of wind had blown out from the rock like a lady's skirt. "If

we were climbing that now, yon spray would be on our faces, and I love

the prick of cold water!" she burst out. "Whatever for did I make that

daft-like vow? A lot of good it's like to do the social revolution! I

really am a fool sometimes!"

Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if

he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite

exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal

they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to

him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.

She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the

early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her

beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her

soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of

her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have

been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional

languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces

expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about

the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so

busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the

lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave

naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing

the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more

certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing

with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of

the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough

stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made

him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead

for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had

come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the

loch.

"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this

bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig.

The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a

gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a

good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies."

But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him,

though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black

wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile

long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of

desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art;

one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist

divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human,

grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so

thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked

like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this

there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that

it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of

hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing

that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no

ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its

graveyard.

"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on

Bell's Hill--do you see it?--told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising

up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most

interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit

of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in

Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"

He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own,

and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said,

"A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what

cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears

came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the

Scotch is your one accomplishment."

But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between

them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a

sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical

changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call

his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This

was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world

became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a

dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long

steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and purple leaves looked like

snips of painted tin; and the Glencorse Burn on the other side of the

field was overhung by bare trees of gold. Every window of the farmhouse

across the valley was a loophole of flame; and here it was evident, from

the passing of a multitude of figures about the farm buildings and a

babblement that drove in gusts across the valley, there was happening

some event that matched the prodigiousness of the strange appearance

lent it by the sunset.

"There's an awful argy-bargying at Little Vantage," said Ellen, "I

wonder what's going on."

When they crossed over the burn and turned into the road that led back

to the farmhouse they found the dykes plastered with intimations of a

sale of live stock. "Ah, it's a roup! Old Mr. Gumley must be dead, poor

soul!" And indeed the road was lined with farmers' gigs, paint and

brass-work blazing with the evening light till they looked like fiery

chariots that would presently lift to heaven. About the yard gate there

was a great press of hale farmers, gilt and ruddy from the sunset they

faced, and vomiting jests at each other out of their great bearded

mouths; and in the yard sheep with golden fleece and cattle as bright as

dragons ran hither and thither before the sticks of boys who looked like

demons with the orange glow on their faces, and who cursed and spat to

show they would some-day be men. Richard and Ellen had to stand back for

a moment while a horse was led out; and as it passed a paunchy farmer

jocularly struck it between the eyes and roared, "Ye're no for me, ye

auld mare, wi' your braw beginnings of the ringbone!" And there was so

much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much

patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the

incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster

who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest

sound of a whimper from Ellen.

"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.

"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening

sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was

something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was

so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from

which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is

like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. "A lot of beefy, red-faced angels

buying us up and taking us off to their own places without a word to us

of where we're to go to, and commenting most unfeelingly on all our

failings...."

"You funny person," he murmured, "you're tired. Probably hungry. Where's

that cottage you talked about where they'll give us tea?"

"Over yonder," she quavered, "but I'm not wanting any tea."

But just then a gig drew up beside them, driven by an old man and laden

with a couple of tin trunks and a cornucopia of a woman, who had

snatched the reins out of the old man's hands. "What's this? A roup at

Little Vantage! Feyther, what's happened?" The old man shook his head.

"Feyther, ye niver ken onything." She raised a megaphonic voice.

"Moggie! Moggie Gumley!" A fat young woman with a soap-shining face ran

out of the farmhouse. "Wha's calling me? Och, it's you, Mistress

Cairns!" "Ay, it's me. What's ta'en ye all here? I've been awa' for two

months keepin' hoose for ma brither Jock while his wife's been in the

Infirmary wi' her chumer. I didn't think I'd come back to find a roup at

Little Vantage." "So ye've not haird?" gasped the fat young woman

delightedly. "Feyther's deid o' his dropsy, and Alec and me's awa' to

Canady this day fortnight." She panted it out with so honest a joy in

the commotion, so innocent a disregard of the tragedy of death and

emigration, that Yaverland and Ellen had to turn away and laugh; and he

drew her across the road to the cottage.

The door was opened before they got there. "It's me, Mrs. Lawson!" said

Ellen. "Indeed, I kenned that!" replied the housewife. "I was keeking

out of the window when you came up the road, and I said to masel',

'There's Miss Melville, and she'll be wanting her tea,' so I awa' and

popped the kettle on. Bring your gentleman in. He's a new face, but he's

welcome. Ye'll pardon the parlour being a' of a reek wi' tobaccy, but

Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Borthwick cam' in and had a cup o' tea and a bit of

a crack. They were both bidding at the roup and some business thegither.

I think Mr. Laidlaw means to buy Cornhaven off Mr. Borthwick and give it

to his son John, wha's married on a Glasca girl, a shelpit wee thing wi'

a Glesca accent like skirling pipes played by a drunken piper." They

watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry

jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip,

their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the

superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them

they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the

mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires.

All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; and farmers

hawked out their last jests at one another, mounted their gigs and drove

home; and the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle pattered by, bleating

and lowing not so heartrendingly.

Ellen rose, went over to the mantelpiece and stroked the china dogs, and

sat down in an armchair by the fire. "This has been a lovely day," she

murmured. She joined her hands behind her head and crossed her knees and

smiled blindishly into the shadow; and his heart turned over in him. All

his life he would remember her just as she was then: the lovely attitude

of body that was at once angular and softly sensuous, like a

blossom-laden branch; the pure pearl colour of her skin, the pure bright

colours of her hair and eyes and mouth; the passionate and funny, shrewd

and credulous pattern of her features; and that dozing smile, that

looked as if her soul had ceased to run up and down enquiringly and was

resting awhile to enjoy the sweetness that was its own climate. He would

never forget her as she was looking then. She might turn away from him,

she might get old, she might die, but the memory of her as she was at

that moment would endure for ever in his heart, an eternally living

thing. He was aware, reluctantly enough, for he hated such mystical

knowledge, and would have given the world to see life as a plain round

of dicing and drinking and wenching, that real love was somehow a cruel

thing for women; that the hour when she became his wife would be as

illimitably tragic as it would be illimitably glorious. But love was

also very kind to women, since it enabled them to live always at their

loveliest in their lover's memories, there perpetually exempt from the

age and ugliness that even the bravest of them seemed pitifully to fear.

Yet, of course love was not so kind to every woman. No one remembered

his mother as he would remember Ellen. He began to ponder what his

mother must have been like when she was that age, and it marked a

certain difference between him and other men, that he was grudgingly

surprised that the girl he meant to marry was as beautiful as his

mother. Certainly, he reflected, with a bitter, gloating grief, Marion

Yaverland must have been beautiful enough to deserve a lodging in some

man's memory. She must have been brilliantly attractive in the obvious

physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit

must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he

suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that

other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which

showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark,

silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.

There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant

that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come

back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had

grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that

climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull,

and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her

hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then

spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and

cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality

flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had

not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her

lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who

stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good

repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on

the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the

unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their

cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from

her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble

that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost

strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands

over her face.

Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the

clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to

catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."

Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we

must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its

intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that

almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her

arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her

red hair. But when they got into the lane outside she hurried towards

the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath

sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run,

although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See,"

he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't

anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware

that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he

asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it

possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark?

He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she

had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit

that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of

matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her

ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of

discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for

the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of

self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no

witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened

with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them

between sleeping and waking.

It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely

impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal

ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.

It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things

which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer

sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy

shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He

perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way

she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her

hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver

with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her

hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of

fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated

with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in

women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's

life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of

worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee

contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt

for those other women.

The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and

lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats,

who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the

soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen.

"And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat

extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and

found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.

Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to

which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength

too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the _Gondomar_ had been

scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a

cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with

inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all

right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an

hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the

station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone

that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half

asleep."

The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take

a seat in it while he got the tickets. But she did not. Its carriages

were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those

burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want

to take that train. She would have liked to turn back with him through

the dark avenues into the Pentlands. The sunset, which had somehow been

as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before

the kind, sleepy darkness, undisturbed there in the valley by the

wee-est cottage light. It would be good to lie down for the night on the

heather of some ledge on the hillside where one could hear the Logan

Burn talking as it ran from the fall, and to look up and see Mr.

Yaverland sitting in that nice slouching way he had, a great black shape

against the stars. But that was a daft idea. She was annoyed for

thinking of anything so foolish, and when he came out and chid her for

standing about on the windy platform she found nothing on her lips but a

cross murmur.

That did not really matter, for one could not hurt grown-up people. They

were always happy. Everybody in the world was happy except her. Without

doubt he would think her quite mad if he knew that she was in the grip

of a depression that seemed to be wringing misery out of her body and

brain as one wrings water out of a bathing-dress, so when they got into

the train she turned away, muttered yawningly that she was very tired,

and buried her face in the crook of her arm so that he might think she

slept. It puzzled her that she felt so disappointed. What had she

expected to happen to-day that hadn't happened? Everything had been

lovely. Mr. Yaverland had talked most interestingly, and the hills had

been very beautiful. She was ashamed of all those tears that she shed

more frequently than one would have expected from an intending rival of

Pierpont Morgan, but these present tears filled her with terror because

they were so utterly irrational. Irrational, too, was the sudden picture

that flashed on her mind's eye of Mr. Philip sitting in the opposite

corner of the carriage, screwing up his dark face with mocking laughter.

"Mr. Philip is driving me mad," she thought to herself. "Some day soon

I'll find myself in Morningside Asylum, sticking flowers in my hair and

flattering myself I'm Queen Victoria. But I will not go mad. I am going

to get on. I am going to be great. But am I? I think I am not." Her face

made a wet contorted mask against her sleeve, and a swallowed sob was as

sharp in her throat as a fishbone; and there struck through her like an

impaling sword a certainty which she could not understand, but which was

surely a certificate that there was to be no more happiness, that even

if Mr. Philip ceased to persecute her she would still be hungry and

tormented.

Perhaps if she could go to some new country she would escape from this

misery. She saw a sky like stretched blue silk, stamped with the black

monograms of palms; a purple bay shaped like a shell and edged with a

white embroidery of surf. Surely such fair weather killed with sweetness

such coarse plants as her stupid gloom, as the foul weather here killed

with its coarseness all sweet-flowering southern plants. She turned to

Yaverland to ask him if he could help her to find work abroad, but she

became aware that she was in the grip of an unreasonable emotion that

prevented her from this. It was as horrible to her to see the coldly

logical apparatus of her mind churning out these irrational conclusions

as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in

drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery

would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed

disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery

unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the

way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level

save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that

he was standing over her, and her heart almost stopped. He said, "I

think we're just coming into Edinburgh." There was no reason why she

should feel chilled and desolate when he said that. She must be going

out of her mind.

And he, since she had shown by the simplicity of her movements that she

was not afraid of him, was quite happy.

He could see the picture of himself sitting beside the sleeping child as

if it were printed in three colours on glossy paper. But he was a little

troubled lest she had walked too far, and as they went up the stone

steps from the station to Princes Street he bent over her and asked in a

tone of tenderness that he enjoyed using, "Are you tired?"

"Oh, very tired," said Ellen, drooping her head, and aping a fatigue

greater than anything she had ever felt in all her young life.

CHAPTER IV

I

Mr. Philip was crossing Princes Street when he saw them standing in the

white circle under the electric standard by the station steps. The

strong light fell on them like a criticism, and it seemed to him brazen

the way they stood there being so handsome that the passers-by turned

about to stare at them. Doubtless, since folks were such fools, they

were whispering that the two made a fine pair. Surely it was the vilest

indecency that there, under his very eyes, that great hulking chap from

Rio bent his head and spoke to Ellen, and she answered him?

"She's standing there making herself as conspicuous as if she were a

street girl!" he screamed to himself, and other shouts filled his ears,

and he became aware that a cursing driver had pulled up his horse a foot

away and that the loafers at the kerb were lifting jeering cries. He

charged it one more offence to Ellen's account that she had caused him

to make a fool of himself, and vowed he would never think of her again,

and ran among the people to see where she had gone. Yaverland was

leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now

nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did

not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and

a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet

treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised

with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this

was anybody but Ellen--Ellen, who was far different from every other

woman in the world and more desirable. She slowly turned, as if her

spirit had felt this rage at the fact of her running at her heels, and

wished to have it out with him. He gripped his stick and raised a hand

to hide his working mouth, and waited for the moment when she would see

his face, but it did not come.

The man Yaverland had put out his great ham of a hand and hailed a cab.

When Mr. Philip tried to stop a cab he usually had to run alongside it,

and often the driver was most impudent, but this swaggering bully

checked the thing on the instant, and handed in Ellen and drove off in

style as if he was a duke with his duchess in their own carriage. What

did they want in a cab anyway? He followed the black trundling square on

its spidery wheels as it turned round by the Register House to cross the

North Bridge, and imagined the fine carryings on they were doubtless

having in the dark in there. He called Ellen a name he had not thought

of before.

There was nothing to be done about it. He stood for a while at the

railing of that strange garden of concrete walks and raised parterres

and ventilating-shafts that lies at this end of Princes Street, built on

the roof of the sunk market. Its rectilinear aspect pleased him. It was

not romantic, the gates were locked, and one could be sure that there

were no lovers trysting there. Presently he moved along towards the West

End, keeping still on the side of the street where there were no men and

girls prancing about and grinning at each other like dirty apes under

the lights, but only empty gardens with locked gates. What had those two

been doing? They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very

long journey it must have been dark before they started. They had been

in the country alone together when it was quite dark. There came to him

memories of sounds he had once heard when walking through a twilit wood,

the crackling of twigs, a little happy cry of distress, and again the

crackling of twigs; he had been compelled by something, which was not

specially in him but was a part of the damned way life went, to stand

and listen, though he knew it was not decent. He saw before him Ellen's

face lying white on her spilt red hair, and it added to his anguish that

he could not see it clearly, but had to peer at this enraging vision

because he could not make out what her expression would be. He had seen

her look a thousand ways during these last few weeks when she had kept

on drawing his attention to her with her simpering girl's tricks, but he

could not imagine how she would look then. It seemed as if she were

defying his imagination as she defied him every day in the office, and

he turned his mind away from the matter in a frenzy, but began soon to

wonder what those two had been doing. They had come in by train. Unless

they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before

they started....

He knew he must not go on like this, and looked round him. He had passed

the classic portico of the Art Gallery and was walking now by the wilder

section of the gardens, where the street lights shone back from the

shining leaves of bushes and made them look like glazed paper, and with

their glare made the trees behind seem such flat canvas trees as they

set about the stage at theatres when there is need for a romantic glade

for a lovers' meeting. How often had Ellen met Yaverland?

He ran across the road. It would be better among the people. It was not

so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were. Everybody

in the world was happy except him. No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were

just bursting with merriment in that cab. Would they be at home yet? She

would be telling him all the office jokes. Well, she might, for all he

cared. He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip

Hop-o'-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn't give a straw for it. He

stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to

bottom of its window with strings of actresses' photographs, and stood

there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an

exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that

indicated the glittering facades of these charmers' smiles, the milky

smoothness of their bean-fed femininity. Ah, these were the really fine

women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin

slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne. Who

would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the

world?

But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so

beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she

insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who

had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience

that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such

as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller

than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He

hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and

began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his

mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness

of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of

contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and

what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social

contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still

until one had finished swearing at her.

But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that

Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would

have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she

had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in

Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among

the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one

can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside

the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found

it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so

ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage

of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen

without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one

did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at

one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He

had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side

of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she

took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an

iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.

Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not

been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office

fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and

a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had

fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men. She had been a

cruel beast. For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might

have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering

things so loud. Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to

those depths.

He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the

decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense

to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved

accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could

not come to harm. But that would not alter the fact that he had once

come to harm. As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw

that a "To Let" board had been put up since the morning. He wondered why

the Allardyces were leaving it. He had been at school with the boys. He

and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school

sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy. He

remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy

sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved

in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all

behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see

them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his

body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh,

giving him a cold, pure feeling. Well, he was not a boy any longer. The

Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that;

nothing would be the same again....

The solidity of his father's house, the hall into which he let himself,

with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting

of his mother's father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him

feel better. He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most

respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset

about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the

dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with

deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings. There was a very

handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights

and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on

the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table. "Mhm!" he sighed

contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the

whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.

The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He

put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was

immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red

hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He

met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak

to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so,

but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.

There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from

top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a

bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which

contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary,

which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a

manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.

Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a

stranded whale, reading the London _Law Journal_ and breathing

disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when

in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip

came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the

entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr.

Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking

this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He

sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather

than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only

sons. But he went at it.

"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."

Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the

faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"

"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just

seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from

Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."

"What for should they not?"

"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of

night."

"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn

over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet.

Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs

we shouldn't be long."

"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He

forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like

that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."

At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were

still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a

good girl, Philip," he said.

The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those

inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew,

where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and

unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any

mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial

tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were

his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.

There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his

urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the

onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If

she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her,

father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"

Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the

discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could

surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned

towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to

Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up

at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a

word."

It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father,

thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office

discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he

said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He

ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had

always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her

conduct....

II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk

was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was

sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and

staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance

entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue

overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and

the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk

hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at

anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in

Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she

had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew

she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still

knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be

looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting

Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the

desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella

Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like

the hand of a young man.

But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose

the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention

began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony,

the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay

athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when

I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every

room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a

caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it

like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan

is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my

own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I

keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with

a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the

progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright

head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his

thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not

like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both

very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be

sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she

was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I

had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh

that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin

who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a

suitable marriage."

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which

although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have

behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors

which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the

gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could

turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he

had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns'

love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to

passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had

persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the

high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny

warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening

years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety

darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in

moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been

to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been

to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could

reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her

who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady

young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all

his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.

But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away

when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to

marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered

how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head

and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she

forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to

make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after

all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed

himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a

time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she

had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark

eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though

tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her

cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such

modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a

capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If

she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would

have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had,

although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his

first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm,

and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But

Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.

His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses

that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been

the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking

over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had

risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear

her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest

pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though

quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl

must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that

proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her

sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things

were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had

been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be

young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and

know no after-life.

No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one

depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and

orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must

settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is

quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely

with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us.

But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He

rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs

with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.

And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were

going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had

waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when

Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had

gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any

way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited

her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She

had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say

good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the

dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look

that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face,

which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with

interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive

glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts,

and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some

imagination that had given him pleasure.

She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from

him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it

was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The

only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking

walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her

mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though

everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy

terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was

just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress

her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said

courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all

night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become

ringing proclamations of indifference.

Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that,

though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see

one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a

telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had

asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead.

Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet

very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely

action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil

to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an

infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by

which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which

he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her

hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as

if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so

that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would

draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think

so malignantly of one who had been so kind--so much kinder than anybody

else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she

knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that

Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago

she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she

saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex,

her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her

that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of

madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her

cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the

quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way

with derision, of Mr. Philip.

He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"

Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity

he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told

him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is

nobody ready to give me work."

He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"

She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale,

and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that

she should have to live in this world where everyone was either

inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers

that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them

at once."

For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and

at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an

ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate.

A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and

said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude,

but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his

hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands

from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had

need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were

doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could

just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But

it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"

Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway

under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the

strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied

that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you

please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to

speak to you this afternoon?"

"He usually does," replied Ellen.

"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial

an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth

puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held

in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily,

making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about

to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign

of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to

it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt

at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to

be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered

at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have

come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"

She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her

still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the

trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had

dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me?

Whoever's been complaining--and no doubt if your clients once began at

that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock

gun--it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm

practically infallible."

"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing.

"Perhaps we might call it your play."

He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick

whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn

near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making

wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in

darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown

indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his

features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything

about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head

because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with

all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville,

a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have

been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on

Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist

chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving

away. I won't tell you"--he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and

became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before

he speaks of evil--"what the client made of it all." And then he bent

again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in

an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous

sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but

which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and

she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a

satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she

continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this

misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her

crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.

But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had

spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the

serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her

tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her

face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled

surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably

precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that

if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out

of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to

a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was

defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to

destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it

was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble

and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same

persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and

planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his

efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count

that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety

was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me

to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk

the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my

time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as

if she was playing a jig.

He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously,

"The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now,

if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through

her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a

misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which

falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the

recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of

foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was

the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could

effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it

was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being

nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had

talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed

him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently

to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his

shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into

a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of

madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that

in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing.

For of course it could not be so.

Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my

wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as

men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of

craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no

mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned

page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that

it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always

gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she

had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of

Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in

her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,

which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting

any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt

in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the

side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic

lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding

bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a

lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the

client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes

Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it

was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and

another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and

flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,

the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with

waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and

tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy

like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for

his dealings with his wife's money....

But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one

thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.

"Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I

spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a

shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months

to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think

she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping

undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were

just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had

had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out,

though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because

the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a

quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to

her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with

her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her?

They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man

on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she

hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his

lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she

rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was

suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if

there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string

was snapping separately.

"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself

remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the

world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise.

"There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to

sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so

you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just

for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had

been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine,

which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly

unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series

of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the

dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way,

and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the

heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood

arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by

the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up

again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee

men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought

proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the

tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood

such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.

It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically

and mentally.

She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.

But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on,

masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of

that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in

strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with

extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running

red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every

way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than

she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast

for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.

Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate

adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges

and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would

take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women,

hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage,

who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try

to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she

perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.

When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would

have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the

mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house

on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a

furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private

system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a

key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in

one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With

perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the

garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as

monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with

weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick

his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor;

he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands

of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the

white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the

creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken

roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and

dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark

ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience.

Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....

All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or

had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step

was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not

look up from the table.

"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."

She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he

had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been

talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size

that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other

hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought

she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she

said mournfully.

"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put

in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly?

I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let

me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not

know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked

with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage

on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his

cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence.

"Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box

as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian

and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must

be sickening for something."

"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger

stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her

hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with

eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a

woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish

James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity

with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with

pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and

purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point

and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his

chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant

occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and

distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this

creditable pity.

"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."

She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."

"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could

also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into

the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love

may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing

under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets

describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy,

and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it

deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is

just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just

luck....

"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."

Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a

client."

He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away.

All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle

things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on

doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which

did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr.

Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the

long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The

girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of

life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus

assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed,

quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and

at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a

child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could

not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and

tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell

you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes

among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"

"Och, you make fun of me--!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger

stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not

bite it.

"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing

seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish

pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion,

until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and

got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this

delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little

of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that

fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a

wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that

particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has

no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."

Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure

as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say

that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad,

though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking

arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a

great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling.

"The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars

and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled

brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but

wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It

flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat

and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see

what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must

admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are

on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would

not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she

started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish

tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger

stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to

gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger

when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back

for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll

have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the

colour...."

While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers,

the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and

rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over

a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds.

When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of

soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick

to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being,

and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was

completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life

was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now

she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair,

which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the

weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable

women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the

same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her

coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that

people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions

that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to

have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.

To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you

women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with

the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a

fine piece in the _Scotsman_ this morning about one of your Suffragettes

standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would

think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing

slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra

ladylike, I'm sure."

"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith--"

"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he

sits for Fife."

"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady,

who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's _Votes for Women_.

She's a beautiful girl."

"I doubt it, Nelly."

"I'll bring the photo then!"

"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully,

watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married

if she is so beautiful?"

"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen,

admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I

heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder,

yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters

have to be carried out on stretchers."

"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James,

and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her

speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.

"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite

enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while

we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the

Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my

teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't

admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."

"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his

eyes on her face.

"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she

answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her

arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had

begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking

of Yaverland.

She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with

a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with

which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off

her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise,

and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and

began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly

justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it

until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It

is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an

unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is

performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by

dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words

sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance

and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was

not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this

fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his

mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual

in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and

watch his typist dancing.

But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away

her breath.

She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass,

and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful

lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is

always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as

soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the

window-seat and smiled back at the old man.

"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as

the great Dr. Johnson says."

But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make

time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was

just a rude old thing."

"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."

"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked

with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and

indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in

your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion

drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs.

Thrale when the poor body married again."

"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a

substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."

"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way

they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And

hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if

they were blunt wise ones--that's not sense. And if it were, what's the

good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on

your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you

dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it.

One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There

are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get

romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on

the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people--masked

Touaregs--"

"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a

pairfect salad of foreign pairts."

It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both

sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and

etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I

should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal

spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go

there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and

went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de

Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house

where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.

"And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the

big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens,

and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats.

I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?--if I would wear dead

things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be

nice, however rich I was--ways that don't affect me very much, so that

they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I

always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and

jaguars. And--"

"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your

heart to a keeper at the Zoo."

"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you

needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he

steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the

crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was

working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some

other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He

is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come

natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said

nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."

"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling

stones gather no moss, I've heard."

Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of

money. He can beat you even at your own game."

Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking

round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it

contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And

what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."

"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.

He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his

stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not

do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.

"He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."

She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."

Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched.

The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the

day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if

they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned

unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked

sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away

from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the

prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any

appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling

intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a

conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was

morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain,

that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For

Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed

possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion

in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two

establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so

satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to

take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things

he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going

to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their

good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece

of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him

to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity

of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness

which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside

the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives

himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked

back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the

little helpless working-girl.

He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and

offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give

you pleasure when I bought them."

One would always get her that way.

Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove.

"Oh, Mr. James!"

"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've

been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"

"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."

"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am

too free with my tongue."

"Oh, Mr. James!"

"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go

your own way--"

"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at

the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as

sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the

spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you

are very beautiful."

She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"

"Aye," he said, "beautiful."

For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand

on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were

focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity

that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a

little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.

"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.

"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National

Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing?

I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an

actress. Tell me, which am I like?"

"You're like both. That's where you score."

She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"

"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."

She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she

were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if,

indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.

"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.

"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on

straight?"

"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've

never looked at yourself before."

She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up

and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.

"Are you not beautiful?" he said.

"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and

stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done

something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In

evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux

Camélias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan--a big fan of

ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost

gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that

is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I

suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the

plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I

not?"

"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James,

"and her you'd better with your tongue."

"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't

matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like

Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's

merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I

am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure

I'll do?"

"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.

She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual

mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh

dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay.

"What nonsense we're talking! Do--for what? It's all pairfectly

ridiculous--as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so

physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too

quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit,

abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but

abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the

mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit

buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She

stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she

were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than

they had ever been before, because she was holding them with

consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her

frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in

silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with

a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that

there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat

of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and

then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding

herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were

clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.

"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half

from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to

this interesting suffering of hers.

Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on

her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's

very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"

Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're

talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice

sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"

She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief.

"Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell

back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking,

shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head

fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she

pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this

office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had

November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She

pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if

she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"

"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.

She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had

boasted about something that could not come true, that would be

horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only

the young can feel.

Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had

to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating

silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."

At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot

at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy,

and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her

chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her

hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression.

She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a

schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had

married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her

manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was

trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her

mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She

caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this

pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the

window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if

the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a

negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the

bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of

wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what

it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid

on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she

must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark.

Surely it's time I was away home?"

There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past

four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James

cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a

bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so

terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing

his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella

Kingan suffered thus?

"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the

hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and

tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried,

she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things

always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as

she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not

alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.

Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the

blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in

this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac

words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their

brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose,

that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting

strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the

bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.

At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed

with hate. He had brought all this upon her.

And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring

endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as

to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the _tempo

rubato_ and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no

more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the

wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....

She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his

presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent

accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie?

Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."

"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the

doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all

right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was

not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well

be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and

forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!"

she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm

doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"

He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"

"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into

the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door

of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran

down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.

III

More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been

crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she

had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights

in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a

cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture

does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and

called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called

that her mother had that morning said something about spending the

afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again,

"Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out

angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at

the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was

perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to

her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the

caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff

tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking

queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she

had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to

the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the

breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and

carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in

digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her

heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible

derider.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped.

"Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up

the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human

beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get

myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the

Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a

time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk

and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing

at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she

had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the

larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam

her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had

always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being

chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it

liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being

glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an

exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that

flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a

violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was

silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common

and precious too.

She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken

with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the

touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that

she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not

grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully,

putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my

strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what

they've lost...."

The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her

buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she

knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only

because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to

leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures

of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp

brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no

more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and

moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the

plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of

departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was

the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could

imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name

were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.

Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather

than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she

meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare

plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when

they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running

up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River

Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark

glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green

fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss

that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep

river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory

tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat

and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river,

overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel,

weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached

ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff

movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired

merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of

its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows

leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were

somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to

notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one

need! Ah, but it was now.

If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be

impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall

across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers

because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of

the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought

of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so

rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled

with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart.

She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight,

that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world

and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this

moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster

the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put

on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and

greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks.

She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....

Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it

was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived

there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate

opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and

apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed

deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door

and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet;

her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if

there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.

His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was,

and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither

greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down

into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her

eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels

standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver

rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as

they had always looked on any night.

"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand

closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of

the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.

"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love

you."

Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.

"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till,

feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're

getting wet! Darling, let us go in."

When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark,

and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze

he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of

escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But

he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and

drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his

hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat

across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call

me little? I am not little!"

He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his

fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and

yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and

terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not

know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have

countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich

colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going

to be of some high kind of glory.

He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love

me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she

listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he

pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel

of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of

women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to

make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists;

they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills

or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and

pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face

wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was

beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his

passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the

sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me,"

was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She

held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find

that she too was whispering.

"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to

love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle

tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She

loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to

see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she

loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts

the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had

confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep

way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told

you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without

touching you. Please ... please...."

Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on

her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had

ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never

thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when,

between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was

going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her)

as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit

water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on

marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer,

soft as the south wind....

But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard,

interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her

mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever

after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more

subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms

still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the

strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage,

of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things.

Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another

on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would

always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not

quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it

was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was

so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of

his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish

that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a

little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an

ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.

A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become

linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed

under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose

convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and

depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose

unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was

as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung

herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her

happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there

little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had

always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became

more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became

less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of

lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of

his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity:

"Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."

They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The

clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little

room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.

Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.

"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball

of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've

ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself

about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he

was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down

through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you

... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his

fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily

and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood

between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking

the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy café table; men bent forward on

their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men

who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their

graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a

horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the

filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which

it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely

necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk

at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous

heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.

"Ellen--you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that

comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that

doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed

you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And

yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to

say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could

beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to

watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's

all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved,

that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped

dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as

your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I

am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."

He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first

night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart

pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.

"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic.

I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love

God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them

to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has

no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear

prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and

women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like

it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which

he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But

there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love

changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves

up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some

woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary

women. _Vin Ordinaire._ Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female

stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the

spell--you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are

the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for

just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."

He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so

great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that

nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he

feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity,

since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this

richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it

made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for

lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it

had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to

look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of

his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his

inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to

make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against

fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick

sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more

lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so

little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself

nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic

change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his

life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same

revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though

within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no

reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover;

but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of

disloyalty to some fair standard.

He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as

an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been

blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a

severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an

accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped

unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth

and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as

if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to

justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which

showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of

those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful

interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely

things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to

him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a

thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her

again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me!

I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested

love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a

lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the

sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"

She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her

gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you

think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're

not miserable, are you?"

"Sometimes. I have been lately."

"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong--and

victorious! But why?"

"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."

"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of

organisation," she gravely told him.

"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken

particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to

the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there,

and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you

go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do,

although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of

having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what

it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of

one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes

one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come

again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on

to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he

had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were

thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The

sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers.

You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that

in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you

that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a

garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what

you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their

branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they

grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very

edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look

past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you.

Dearest, when can we get married?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a

wife?"

He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep

two."

She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't

divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston

say so."

He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I

could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of

things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"

"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...."

She looked down, weighing grave things.

"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I

will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to

make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let

you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and

whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."

She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her

lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.

"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure

about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got.

Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole

worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls,

stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of

disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect

surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was

not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with

precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with

the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of

organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for

his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman

fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who

had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before

the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her

quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at

last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory

that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were

stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of

her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he

went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money.

Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great

commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one

considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure

science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied

science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got

her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that

sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex

at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."

She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?"

she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why

isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"

"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of

being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money.

I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the

conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's

game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge--the same kind

of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a

person by being with them all the time and loving them very much.

Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the

pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But,

dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to

marry me."

"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am

marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will

know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if

you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."

"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't

you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am!

Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if

he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were

still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of

which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any

case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you,

how little I deserve you."

"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd

been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself

to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his

eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer,

living in a house with you, won't it?"

He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling

her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was

outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had

hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to

him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the

light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so

real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as

terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a

helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again--for he knew she

did not like him to say it!--such a little thing. He remembered, with a

sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had

sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the

human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how

he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated

Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for

the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men

sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the

way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some

special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that

lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.

He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi'

our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to

see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was

evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a

world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest

you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon

day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed

succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.

Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality,

felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met

her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in

the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old

men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white.

"What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow

to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish

James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry.

"Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew

well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll

have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had

thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on

perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland

sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the

narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.

It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its

days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as

some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had

arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid

fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks,

Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house--he rolled his tongue round

the loneliness repellently--had neither sent the cheque on to her nor

asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called

Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of

property"--it was evident that he admired such--saw a prospect of

getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing

well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was,"

and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and

alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an

eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.

"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day,

looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable

unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find

out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was

abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and

geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing

standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what--she

called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!--I kenned there was not her like

under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her

on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been

amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing

aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her

mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court

on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which

she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that

keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like

to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?"

Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her

fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate

about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here,

as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable

air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry

laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a

nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its

troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."

Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad

concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie

alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been

overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man.

Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion

that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He

had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it

stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her

disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could

pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could

step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he

savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the

sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must

be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money?

Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking

of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had

risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike

because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've

been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by

the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching

his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity.

Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his

back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the

world.

Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her

delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought

of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her

live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its

primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more

experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine

white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny

had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to

miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be

played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a

rôle. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very

clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His

heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have

been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of

concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this

before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he

wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of

eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that

his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life

to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out

loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow

wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in

gratitude, and found her looking at him.

"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking

that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking

down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."

The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to

take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh

goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him

from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on

her bosom. "I want--I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be

good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a

religion.

They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee

and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one

foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then

she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands

behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr.

Gladstone!

Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird,

appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen!

And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr.

Yaverland into the parlour!"

"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a

guilty little girl.

Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an

instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never

do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to

marry me."

Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice

at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at

the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on

the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he

noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful

to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her

life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must

live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent

allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.

Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far

as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."

Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet

about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because

now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!

"Let me marry her soon," he said.

She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had

said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."

"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.

She became tragic.

"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house

at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you.

Obviously you can't stand this climate."

She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together

having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well.

I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into

memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always

practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man

than anyone has allowed."

They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its

honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly,

"Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went

out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."

"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland--maircy me, what shall I call

you now?"

"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."

"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one

would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing!

Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I

wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take

Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."

"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly.

It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R--Richard, will you take her

into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not

hear?"

"Ellen dear!"

"Away now!"

"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the

best tablecloth after the mending--and there's nothing but cod-roes, and

you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away,

dear--you'll make Richard feel awkward--"

Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she

knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.

IV

He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to

her three times.

_"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute

of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the

sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red

hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds,

and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the

most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every

moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a

waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now

I do--that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima,

you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you;

we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd

light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your

beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my

lovely red-haired Ellen...."_

And she had written to him twice....

_"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what

you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the

library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping

her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as

hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically

nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Shelley and Byron. But

their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please

come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did

you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling

there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of

life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not

believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there

must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one

another. Do please come soon...."_

Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and illustrated papers for

the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.

Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought

Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three

dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he

saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind

deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out

to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw

extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women

living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the

lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.

Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that

Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and

unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the

door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an

amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant

hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of

the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a

fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons

convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase

creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out

at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her

face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in

lank, curved strands about her shoulders.

She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a

crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.

They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."

"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I

knocked that it was diphtheria she had."

"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with

wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd

again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to

think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in

her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed

her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick

away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the

staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses.

"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."

"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."

"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.

Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."

"That be damned."

"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled

into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered

in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"

Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than

any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her

so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked

so wee!"

"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her

so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his

maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him,

and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of

the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no

sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family

now. You might have let me do that!"

"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you

see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's

no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have

been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was

her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme

poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury

but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the

beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've

told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six

weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all

the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful

tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call

on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her

mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the

slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and

gathered her closely to him.

"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.

"You look very beautiful."

"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."

"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck

with a large horn button anything but decent."

"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm

past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother

her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning

for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for

my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like,

though doubtless it would do me good to know."

"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back

the first thing in the morning."

"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness.

("Ye've got--ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me

feel all--all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me

up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully

before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appetite even when the

Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work

against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just

Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you!

There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that

mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her

terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was

sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years

ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot

think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The

doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry.

She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You

go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the

kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have

heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."

"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of

Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go

off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."

"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come

with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like

a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal

Family."

"But why must you go out?"

"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they

give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and

every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health

Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill,

friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,'

'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be

amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for

worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."

"But, my God, can't you telephone?"

"No, of course not. They can't do that in these institutions. They'd

have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But

it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I

never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the

old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful

thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although

she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!"

She passed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging

down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the

table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with

milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that

was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great

grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing

and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress

in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just

wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she

never got one. Illustrated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing

intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a

great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages,

clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I

expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."

Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in

her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't

I go and look at this board?"

"No. I want to go myself."

"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some

place in Princes Street."

"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying

good-night to Mother."

They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on

to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.

She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and

stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring

noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just

lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently

she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must

go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing

in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird

might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with

gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose

you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you

can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to

turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not

handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped

her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going

to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there,

shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.

"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."

"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's

easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But

mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his

letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets

old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be

able to keep it up?"

She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her

parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh

Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of

deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the

persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious

gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It

was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.

He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things

much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll

be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet

there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for

you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I

have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ...

I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...

something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it

communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.

They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.

He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that

to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she

was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and

trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found

pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind

region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth

in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such

fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.

At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they

made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it

travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of

Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of

coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since

there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their

minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church

like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is

doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than

precious stones.

So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women

are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern

women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of

languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North

was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their

bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such

sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him

for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so

sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme

passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would

provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he

had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen

during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been,

he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising

things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen

would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he

realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and

therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by

telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for

he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which

pain surely could not live.

"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it

you were thinking of saying?"

He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell

you about myself."

She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her

heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will

know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything

disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted

that till you met me you were a bad character."

"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother

and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it,

and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor

little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old

story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with.

We've got our own lives to lead, thank God!"

She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted,

and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something

that you ought to tell me!"

He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm

illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, God,

it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She

probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his

deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence

there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him

want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't

married to each other...."

"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's

silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand

gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the

others twit you with it?"

Oh, God, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when

they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."

"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is

always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."

He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage

meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable

they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman

in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she

herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to

cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to

have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that

everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards

it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If

she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that

solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred

saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which

was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking

of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not

married to my father...."

But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch

of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel

of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of

physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before

hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either

not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had

reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers,

and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a

merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and

undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might

have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so

wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There

appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps

the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which

represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff

and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a

little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She

wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth

and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what

is she like?"

"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she

was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity

as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday

papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that.

Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as

tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea

of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was

saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite

uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might

have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at

once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of

himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the

Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell

her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he

could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned

his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt

himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar

reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to

his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not

marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least,

on her side it was love! On his ... on _his_...."

"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was

trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow

it's making it happen all over again...."

This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was

using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when

he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for

the argument of phantom passions in her room, and she opened her eyes

suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him

grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand,

but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly,

I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the

ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that

stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was

not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found

fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of

course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion

became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel

of his Ellen.

"Forgive me," he murmured.

"Of course I forgive you."

"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"

"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."

"That's a brave undertaking!"

They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've

always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing

I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest

collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used

to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her

tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge.

Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth

when it is nearly all bookshops?"

She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her

breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she

slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they

were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with

drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this

street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed

with windows broken or hung with rags.

"Isn't this the High Street?"

"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a

fine Saturday morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the

Highlanders drilling."

"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"

"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most

likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only

taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He

said I would be just a fule to worry."

He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops

that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm.

"You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this

awful part."

"Is this it?"

"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her

number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon

in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"

After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your

mother's number was?"

"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that

white dog!"

His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"

V

A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the

sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and

they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced

over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her

being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her

mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone

arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness

through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel

drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a

piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the

gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to

Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the

residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good

omens.

When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with

ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told

herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining

their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one,

that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of

an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that

her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had

seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away

from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen

behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud

consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the

same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the

danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for

the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and

of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that

fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the

words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was

that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds

employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a

position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a

nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she

perceived that he was going to do something which he should have

delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and

his office to these two strangers.

As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm

in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that

the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the

little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was

definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits

made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth,

were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that

followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the

pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on

lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they

passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass

and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran

into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind,

private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone;

down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of

different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making

among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.

This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and

some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people

should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and

the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who

carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could

be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:

"You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on

the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'

happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty

without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted

itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more

that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the

speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in

the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her

mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably

well and wearing the moiré blouse that she had given her for her

birthday.

"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door

that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place

of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk,

and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a

prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not

see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and

turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she

still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being

rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the

four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through

the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind

but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their

appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking

at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they

saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout

absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that

displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now

convinced her that mother was dying.

There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose

vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat

and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall

and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and

looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there

was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin

body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door

to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad,

comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and

gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly

come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet

struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from

their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work

if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to

be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh

to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to

that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its

being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and

the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising

doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the

end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one

moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which

dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful

light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour

of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman

parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.

It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where

mother was lying.

She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the

better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She

wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary

movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the

extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.

"Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."

The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in

a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence

and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical

terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary

language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary

dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run

a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go

into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see

her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was

hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large

window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs,

and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a

richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several

sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known

neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather

enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she

would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her

popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable

but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and

minimally furnished as this room.

Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of

stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the

screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron

bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen

but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to

have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of

the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was

for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two

glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever

been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and

about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth,

there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the

slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked

for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end

of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that

sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense

glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some

inmost branch of a large tree.

"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"

From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to

make her lips meet, and speak.

"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be

with you. You needn't speak."

But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so

remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths

commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She

whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."

Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes

towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.

At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his

lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not,

and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and

knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He

said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be

poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and

under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.

Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she

dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no

attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be

together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with

Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon

her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It

struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and

inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come

to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the

stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in

fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose

wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great

glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.

There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though

attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the

exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had

greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy

pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!"

She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about

life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning

the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother

dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they

had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother

dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made

a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that

she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's,

patted it.

All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and

spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint

pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using

it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure

would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want

all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all

yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed

from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and

thither at the call of speculation, told them consoling things. The

mother's flesh, touching the daughter's, remembered a faint pulse felt

long ago and marvelled at this splendid sequel, and lost fear. Since the

past held such a miracle the future mattered nothing. Existence had

justified itself. The watchers were surprised to hear her sigh of

rapture. The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in

the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to

embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first

best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.

There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of

giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup

of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange

because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that

she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to

first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had

played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the

_Student's Song Book_, and they had had several glasses of Stone's

Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly

berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a

wonderful faculty for bursts of gaiety, pure in tone like a blackbird's

song, which brought out whatever gladness might be latent in any person

or occasion. As twelve chimed out they had stood in front of the

chimneypiece mirror and raised their glasses above their heads, singing,

"Auld Lang Syne" in time with the dancers on the other side of the wall,

who were making such a night of it that several times the house had

seemed likely to fall in.

When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses,

Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I

was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at

yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had

held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome

mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his

honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got

another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms

like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered

by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow,

uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy

with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been

greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all

have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember

ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much

admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing

...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly

twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of

an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which,

since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads

if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the

hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are

about work that springs from æsthetic principles different from their

own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of

laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked

at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was

somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had

been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the

night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.

She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's

face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any

gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little

tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin

time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling

every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.

It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth

thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and

on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if

she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone

yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into

a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her

lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow

teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the

tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and

the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to

kiss, even though one loved her so much.

Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very

beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom

Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited

girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women

in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was

sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl

in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French

artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at

Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a

portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New

York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for

though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more

out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing

at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt

I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to

his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing

that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it

down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed

Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the

tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink

roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had

often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and

say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh

at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."

It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those

strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred

Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan

collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working

with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was

intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius,

and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred

Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the

shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a

diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and

her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her

skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and

setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how

more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and

confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile

of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound

strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way

that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick

silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of

allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.

Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring

face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard

again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but

immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long

grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had

had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt

was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some

relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a

professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred

to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to

New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman

jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased,

deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she

had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed

that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed

that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She

remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had

gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror

and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a

woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice

arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs

singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").

Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding

the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done

to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was

unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the

eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be

tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed

that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had

simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that

she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.

This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature

behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had

thought there were three fixed species of people--the young, the

middle-aged, and the old--and she had never before realised that young

people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this

arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this

humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind

passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer

the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly

when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as

if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm

against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping

streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news

that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her

knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.

She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in

and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and

staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen

perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her

mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with

speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach

into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that

was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother,

because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.

Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is

to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way

the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never

have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at

her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the

recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and

had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had

found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom,

with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown

her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she

had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph

Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your

father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure

Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her

head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was

horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the

nurse proof of proper feelings.

She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with

her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her

face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor

and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that

the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not

look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by

diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the

mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she

looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient

performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like,

all through life--a good child. She had always walked as if someone in

authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her

toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had

become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she

had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a

road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been

lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were

innocent.

"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and

there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted

feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared

occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly

at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny

darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little

rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial

bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go anywhere for a

good sunset!"

There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had

watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring

torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that

slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers

that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers'

weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation.

The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in

a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and

above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had

winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled

about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key

of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady

awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had

stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from

their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and

fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of

bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a

sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her

own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"

For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen

remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night,

though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green

glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on

its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not

suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village

that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no

pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal

with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was

untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the

way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of

beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in

Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed

with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their

quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that

be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.

But when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery

ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is

a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people

smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and

when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at

the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of

pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in

pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been

rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and

could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any

bright scrap of that beauty she adored.

Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth

with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her,

and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle

on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a

handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into

the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was

not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops,

trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very

poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had

stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love:

indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have

taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were

harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder

and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she

felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from

companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and

pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to

linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the

free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of

love.

She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the

Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin

projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look

wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By

neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of

negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to

send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before

lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of

little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until

they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last

saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not

quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in

disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this

neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said

to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning

them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.

How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as

anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to

Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had

broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the

picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?

Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical

presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with

concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow

forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow,

repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ...

and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of

telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which

he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the

sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious

charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all

other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation

on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection

of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke,

too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which

he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore

uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with

his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he

looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always

overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner

for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her

hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then

bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly

administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece

of female imbecility.

Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she

guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she

whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you

quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and

showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had

burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands

with a fierce, jubilant pressure.

How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool.

That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she

could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish,

but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast

imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that

was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give

its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she

take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real

wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She

had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than

most professed romantics do.

Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to

Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses

and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house.

He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised

him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at

losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but

I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella."

At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are

such a wee darling!"

And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all

Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things?

It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though

it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than

them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she

undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good--even divinely good. Life

had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that

it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant

demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child,

and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her

hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love

that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than

that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a

little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings

arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often

too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest

possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking

of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a

miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!"

she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother

got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles?

Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her.

It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round

hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman

was being allowed to die without having been happy.

"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the

universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find

that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she

cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until

the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed

the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold

hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and

when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen,

whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just

enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.

Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his

eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.

"Richard, she's going!"

He could find no consolation to give her but a close, unvoluptuous

embrace. They stood silent, looking at the fire. "Is it not strange,"

she whispered, "that people really die?"

Richard did not in the least participate in this feeling. He merely

looked at her with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone

should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer

to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not

tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him,

though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might

see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he

merely bent to kiss her.

"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had

disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."

But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister

of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of

anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he

should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a

spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen

mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it

was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never

scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it?

What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen,

and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was

so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."

The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said

gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."

She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said

wistfully.

"Quite sure."

"May I kiss her?"

"Please don't. It isn't safe."

"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you

ready?"

As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to

that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the

upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all

you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went

to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"

"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying

place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of

death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in

electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a

beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and

dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.

Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across

the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in

sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate

the plot of the universe. This was a catchment area that drained the

whole city of terror; and how small it was! Certainly terror was among

the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking

they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being

children of this age, and conscious of humanity's grievance, they

thought of Him without love. But it was one of the least frequent and

the most impermanent of His moods. All the people one does not know seem

to be quite happy. Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally

closed the story of Mrs. Melville's life, and had to the end shown her

no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future. It might

well be that no other life would ever be so grievous. Therefore it was

with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were

provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out

through the iron gates.

The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation. Before

them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded

tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the

hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs;

and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse

stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white

overalls worked among bare trees. Through this grim landscape they

stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived

without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going

to be so glorious.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

Now that they had taken the tickets at Willesden, Ellen felt doubtful of

the whole enterprise. It was very possible that Richard's mother would

not want her. In fact, she had been sure that Richard's mother did not

want her ever since they left Crewe. There a fat, pasty young man had

got in and taken the seat opposite her, and had sat with his pale grey

eyes dwelling on the flying landscape with a slightly sick, devotional

expression, while his lips moved and his plump hands played with a small

cross inscribed "All for Jesus" which hung from his watch-chain.

Presently he had settled down to rest with his hands folded on his lap,

but had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his

waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the

air. "Mother will laugh when I tell her about that," she said to

herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead

six weeks.

This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the

blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her

stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers

henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender

intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her

inflexibly honest æsthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's

letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever,

because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word

written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white

paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But

their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come

like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not

wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject

of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was

really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who

was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them

merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were

strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old

people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running

Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her

as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise

his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in

favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it

to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to

have been economically independent all the days of her life.

It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical

ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way

they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack

and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that

they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of

Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career

became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which

had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with

illegitimacy. She prefigured her swarthy and obese.

She got out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told

to do. The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through

which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and

tarnished darkness. She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed

and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along

the ground, and who seemed to be seeking so urgently for cabs and

porters because their meagre lives had convinced them that here was

never enough of anything to go round. If she and her mother had ever

come to London on the trip they had always planned, she would have been

swinging off now to look for a taxi, just like a man; and when she came

back her mother would have said, "Why, Ellen, I never would have thought

you could have got one so quickly." Well, that would not happen now.

She would have grieved over it; but a train far down the line pulled out

of the station and disclosed a knot of red and green signal lights that

warmed the eye and thence the heart as jewels do, and at that she was as

happy as if she were turning over private jewels that she could wear on

her body and secrete in her own casket. She was absorbed in the sight

when she heard a checked soft exclamation, and turning about had the

illusion that she looked into Richard's eyes.

"I am Richard's mother. You are Richard's wife?"

Ellen repeated, "I am Richard's wife," feeling distressed that she had

said it, since they were not yet married, but aware that to correct it

would be trivial.

It was strange to look down instead of up at those dark eyes, those

brows which lay straight black bars save for that slight piratical

twist, with no intervening arch between them and the dusky eyelids. It

was strange to hear Richard's voice coming from a figure blurred with

soft, rich, feminine clothes. It was strange to see her passing through

just such a moment of impeded tenderness as Richard often underwent.

Plainly she wanted to kiss Ellen, but was prevented by an intense

physical reserve, and did not want to shake hands, since that was

inadequate, and this conflict gave her for a minute a stiff queerness of

attitude. She compromised by taking Ellen's left hand in her own left

hand, and giving it what was evidently a sincere, but not spontaneous

pressure. Then, turning away, she asked, "What about your luggage?"

"I've just this suitcase. I sent the rest in advance. Do you not think

that's the most sensible way?" said Ellen, in a tone intended to convey

that she was not above taking advice from an older woman.

Mrs. Yaverland made a vague, purring noise, which seemed to imply that

she found material consideration too puzzling for discussion, and

commanded the porter with one of those slow, imperative gestures that

Richard made when he wanted people to do things. Walking down the

platform, Ellen wondered why Richard always called her a little thing.

His mother was far smaller than she was, and broad-shouldered too, which

made her look dumpy. Her resemblance to Richard became marked again

when they got into the taxi, and she dealt with the porter and the

driver with just such quiet murmured commands and dippings into pockets

of loose change as Richard on these occasions, but Ellen did not find it

in the least endearing. She was angry that Richard was like that, not

because he was himself, but because he was this woman's son. When Mrs.

Yaverland asked in that beautiful voice which was annoyingly qualified

by terseness as her letters had been, "And how's Richard?" she replied

consequentially, with the air of a person describing his garden to a

person who has not one. But Mrs. Yaverland was too distracting to allow

her to pursue this line with any satisfaction. For she listened with

murmurs that were surely contented; and, having drawn off her very

thick, very soft leather gloves, she began to polish her nails, which

were already brighter than any Ellen had ever seen, against the palms of

her hands, staring meanwhile out of absent eyes at the sapphire London

night about them, which Ellen was feeling far too upset to enjoy.

There was a tormenting incongruity about this woman: those lacquered

nails shown on hands that were broad and strong like a man's; and the

head that rose from the specifically dark fur was massive and vigilant

and serene, like the head of a great man. Moreover, she was not in the

least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up

the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest

to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry

them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where

one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had

felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever

happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from

the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs

which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running

slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which

makes people perform dramas. And everything about her threatened that

her performances would be too strange.

She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a

brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her

in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not

Edinburgh. The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the

yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into

shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.

They had stopped outside a florist's, in whose dismantled window a girl

in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of

chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls

almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a

Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open

street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding

herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of

being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an

occasion of public rejoicing.

Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind

plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy _brise-bises_ that were as a

ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a

divine shamelessness. It couldn't happen up there. There were simply not

the people to do it. It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged

men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, "Catch me

bringing you here again, Elspeth. It's a nice thing to have your dinner

with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you

take," and because young men would as constantly have turned to young

women with the gasp, "I'm sure I saw father passing," it would have been

a failure. But here it was a success. The sight was like loud, frivolous

music. And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up

to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white

squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy

and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of

gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense

than the North.

She wanted to sit there quietly, savouring the scene. But Mrs. Yaverland

said in her terse voice: "I've taken rooms at the Hapsburg for to-night.

I thought you'd like it. I do myself, because it's near the river. You

know, we're near the river at Roothing." Ellen could not longer turn her

attention to the spectacle for wondering why Mrs. Yaverland should

speak of the Thames as if it were an interesting and important relative.

It could not possibly be that Mrs. Yaverland felt about the river as she

felt about the Pentlands, for elderly people did not feel things like

that. They liked a day's outing, but they always sat against the

breakwater with the newspaper and the sandwich-basket while one went

exploring; at least, mother always did. Trying to insert some sense into

the conversation, she asked politely, "Do you do much boating?" and was

again baffled by the mutter, "No, it's too far away." Well, if it was

too far away it could not be near. She was tired by the long day's

travel.

But the hotel, when they alighted, pleased her. The vast entrance hall,

with its prodigality of tender rosy light, the people belonging to the

very best families who sat about in monstrously large armchairs set at

vast intervals on the lawny carpets, were not in the least embarrassed

by the publicity of their position and shone physically with well-being

and the expectation of pleasure; the grandiose marble corridors, the

splendid version of a lift, and the number of storeys that flashed past

them, all very much the same, but justifying their monotony by their

stateliness, like modern blank verse, made her remember solemnly her

inner conviction that she would some day find herself amid surroundings

of luxury.

The necessity of looking as if she were used to and even wearied by this

sort of thing weighed heavily on her, for she felt that it was almost

dishonour not to express the solemn joy this magnificence was giving

her. So she stood in the fine room to which Mrs. Yaverland took her, and

after having resolved that the minute she was left alone she would touch

the magnificent crimson velvet roses that stood out in high relief all

over the wallpaper, she felt that she could not graciously withhold

praise from this which was to be her own special share of the splendour.

She moved shyly towards Mrs. Yaverland, who had gone to the window and

was looking down in the night, and said shyly, "This is a very fine

room," but, she knew, too softly to reach such markedly inattentive

ears. She stood there awkwardly, feeling herself suspended till this

woman should take notice of her. If her mother had been with her they

would have had a room with two beds, and would have talked before they

went to sleep of the day and its wonderful ending in this grand place.

She sighed. Mrs. Yaverland turned round.

"Come and look at your view," she said, and raised the sash so that they

could lean out.

Beneath there was a deep drop of the windless, scentless darkness that

night brings to modern cities; then a narrow trench of unlit gardens

obscured by the threadbare texture of leafless tree-tops, then a broad

luminous channel of roadway, lined with trees whose natural substance

was so changed by the unnatural light that they looked like toy trees

made of some brittle composition, and traversed by tramcars glowing

orange and twanging white sparks from invisible wires with their

invisible arms; at its further edge a long procession of lights stood

with a certain pomp along a dark margin, beyond which were black flowing

waters. To the left, from behind tall cliffs of masonry pierced with

innumerable windows that were not lit, yet gleamed like the eyes of a

blind dog, there jutted out the last spans of a bridge, set thickly with

large lights whose images bobbed on the current beneath like vast yellow

water-flowers. On another bridge to the right a train was casting down

on the stream a redness that was fire rather than light. On the opposite

bank of the river, at the base of black towers, barges softly dark like

melancholy lay on the different harsher darkness of the water, and

showed, so sparsely that they looked the richer, a few ruby and emerald

lights. Above, stars crackled frostily, close to earth, as stars do in

winter.

"That is the river," said Mrs. Yaverland.

She said it as if she desired to be out of this warmth, standing over

there by the dark parapet marked by the line of lamps close to the

flowing waters; as if she would have liked all the beautiful bright

lights to be extinguished, so that there would be nothing left but the

dark waters.

Ellen went and sat down on the bed. There was a standard lamp beside it,

whose light, curbed to a small rosy cloud by a silken shade like a

fairy's frock, seemed much the best thing for her eyes in the room. She

was sad that in this new life in England, which had seemed so promising,

one still had to turn for comfort from persons to things. She was aware

that wildness such as this, such preferences for walking abroad in the

chill night rather than sitting in warm rooms, for sterile swift water

rather than the solid earth that bears the crops and supports the

cities, are the processes of poetry working in the soul. But it did not

please her in an older woman. She felt that Mrs. Melville, who would

have been trotting about crying out at the magnificence of the room,

would have been behaving not only more conveniently, but more decently,

than this woman who was now crossing the room and not bringing peace

with her. Her open coat slipped backwards on her shoulders so that it

stood out on each side like a cloak worn by a romantic actor striding

across the stage to the play's climax. The ultimate meaning of her

expression could be no other than insolence, for it gave sign of some

preoccupation so strong that the only force which could hold her back

from speaking of it could be contempt for her hearer. Her face was

shadowed with a suggestion of strong feeling, which was as unsuitable on

cheeks so worn as paint would have been.

Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down

on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a

movement towards intimacy, and said, "I hope you're not very tired."

When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the

words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful

to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either

affected or hypocritical. For if that wildness were sincere, and not

some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English

were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she

was doing up Ellen's black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and

condescension.

It was a pity that she was so very like Richard. When they had gone

downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the

plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she

crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way

in her resentful recognition of that likeness. She was not, of course,

so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call "very

striking-looking." Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at

once so appropriate and so common. She did not allow herself to

translate it from commonness and admit that it is a phrase that common

people use when they want to say a woman's face is the point of

departure for a fair journey of the imagination. It was true that a

certain rough imperfection was as definitely a part of her quality as

perfection was of his, and that there ran from her nose to her mouth

certain heavy lines that could never at any age befall his flesh with

its bias towards beauty. But everything that so wonderfully made its

appearance a reference to romance was here also: that dark skin in which

it seemed as if the customary pigment had been blended with mystery;

that extravagance of certain features, the largeness of the eye, the

luxury of lashes; that manner at once languid and alert, which might

have been acquired by residence in some country where molten excess of

fine weather was corrected by gales of adventure. But though so close in

blood and in seeming to the most beloved, this woman could not be loved.

She could not possibly be liked. But this was an irrational emotion, and

Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that

would justify it.

It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were

brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders

that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared

not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift,

automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a

polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. It was evidently a

habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose,

for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it,

although the brows were still sleek. She did it, Ellen told herself with

a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the

afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead

and strums on her knee. It was the only expression the occasion allowed

for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the

inordinate beauty of her clothes. They were, she said to herself, using

a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a

woman of that age. They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental. The

very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to

the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the

effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she

was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that

effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so

conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to

accept her middle age. And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her

colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light

like amber. Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the

various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she

wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever

about clothes. They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase

that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a

pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last

refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their

own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat

seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff

of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and

yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was

sensually heavy with its own richness.

And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows.

Really, it was terrible that Richard's mother should be so deep in crime

as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of

public meetings. She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women

are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power,

content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing

and adorning of it. She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to

produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest,

hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life.

And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and

saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate:

"You won't like anchovies; those things they're helping you to now."

Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion,

and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had

betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and

then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp

bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion

did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes?

When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she

answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please."

She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or

white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip

had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking

almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners

had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear

travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her

lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again

till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door.

Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes

to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."

The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been

substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with

observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was

disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her

eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought

she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things

with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a

dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the

darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant

physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the

palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when

she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images

seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in

bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had

always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her

in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands;

pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being

carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed

deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended

over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered;

bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy

gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks

and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights

with the colour of romance. It would have roused her fatigued

imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand.

She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure,

and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the

expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear,

though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.

She coughed to attract attention, and then sighed. "It's terrible," she

declared, taking good care that her voice should travel across the

table, "to see all these people being happy like this when there are

millions in want."

Marion set down her wine-glass with a movement that, though her hands

were clever, seemed clumsy, so indifferent was she to the thing she

handled and the place she put it in, and looked round the restaurant

with eyes that were very like Richard's, though they shone from

bloodshot whites and were not so bright as his, nor so kind; nor so

capable, Ellen felt sure, of losing all brilliance and becoming

contemplative, passionate darkness. She said in her rapid, inarticulate

murmur, "They don't strike me as being particularly happy."

Ellen was taken aback, and said in the tones of a popular preacher,

"Then what are they doing here--feasting?"

"I suppose they're here because it's on the map and so are they," she

answered almost querulously. "They'd go anywhere else if one told them

it was where they ought to be. Good children, most people. Anxious to do

the right thing. Don't you think?"

Ellen was unprepared for anything but agreement or reactionary argument

from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched

in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her

emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very

horrid. Her young mouth was convulsed. And then she reminded herself

that it could not be horrid, for all grown-up people like it, and that

there had never been any occasion when it was more necessary for her to

be grown-up, so she continued to drink. Even after several mouthfuls she

did not like it, but she was then interrupted by a soft exclamation from

Mrs. Yaverland.

"My dear, this wine is abominable. Don't you find it terribly sour?"

"Well, I was thinking so," said Ellen, "but I didn't like to say."

"It's dreadful. It must be corked."

"Yes, I think it must," said Ellen knowingly.

She called a waiter. "Would you like to try some other wine? I don't

think I will. This has put me off for the night. No? Good. Two lemon

squashes, one very sweet."

That was a good idea of Mrs. Yaverland's. The lemon squash was lovely

when it came, and Ellen had time to drink it while they were eating the

chicken, so that there was no competitive flavour to spoil the ice

pudding. While they were waiting for that Mrs. Yaverland smoothed her

eyebrows once again, and gave her nails one more perfunctory polish, and

opened her mouth to speak, but caught her breath and shut it again; and

said, after a moment's silence, "I hope I've ordered the right sort of

pudding. It's so hard to remember all these irrelevant French names. I

wanted you to have the one with crystallised cherries. Richard used to

be very fond of it." She looked round the restaurant more lovingly. "He

liked this place when he was a boy. We used to come here once or twice

every holiday and go to a theatre afterwards."

But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that: when he opened his

mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly,

"Darling, I do love you." He had done it the very night before, in

Grand-Aunt Jeannie's parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to

tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his

father before he was born. "It was not her fault. My father didn't stand

by her. He was all right about money. But when he heard about the child,

he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the

Colonies. And he didn't come back. So she lost her nerve"; and that he

had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a

success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland. She was dying

to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to

admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had

probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but

because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly,

"Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?"

The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full

of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason

delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered. "How you see through

me, dear!" she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate,

charged with an astringent form of love. "All that I wanted to say was

simply that I am so very glad you have come. Perhaps for reasons that

you'll consider tiresome of me. But Richard has been so much away, and

even when he's at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the

time, that I've often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house,

who'd talk to me occasionally and be a companion. Perhaps you'll think

it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much

older. But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.

You're eighteen, aren't you?"

"Eighteen past," Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain

compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen. But

her birthday had been a fortnight ago.

"And I was nineteen when Richard was born. So you see to me a girl of

eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling

everything. So I hope you won't mind if I treat you as an equal." She

raised her wineglass and looked over its brim at the girl's proud,

solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour,

bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other

woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the

wineglass down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden

tone. "I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it

or not. I knew you'd like it. You see, you get very evasive if you've

ever been in a position like mine. You have to make servants like you so

that they won't give notice when they hear the village gossip, because

you must have a well-run house for your child. You have to make people

like you so that they will let the children play with yours. So one gets

into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without

particularly worrying whether it's sincere. But this I find I really

mean."

As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who

had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to

something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well,

I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant,"

she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as

likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to

say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one

another."

Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as

queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the

girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give

Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty

which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his

unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether

Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And

for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a

courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a

present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their

distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for

her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced

voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."

"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about

herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me

when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was

afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that

I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"

"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint

of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her

son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at:

that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."

"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the

table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think

you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've

been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been

hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on

Richard and you."

The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!"

she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that

when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest

directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my

nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and

stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to

attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving

badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"

"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us

cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're

surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that

he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"

Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to

fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid

women."

Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion

that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her,

and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other

women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.

"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"

There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of

archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves

me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect,

the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women

who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he

can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went

to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who

were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds

with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the

soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that

their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I

will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd

infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was

not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he

takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But

I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much

against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the

world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but

they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there

cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are

hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and

fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like

a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any

character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.

Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she

had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free

speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in

late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none

of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason....

I'll tell you some time...."

The girl was hurt. Marion bit her lip while she watched her crossly pick

up her spoon and eat her ice pudding as if it was a duty. "This is like

old times," she essayed feebly. "I've so often watched Richard eat it.

He went through various stages with this pudding. When he was quite

small he used to leave the crystallised cherries to the very last,

because they were nicest, arranged in a row along the rim of his plate,

openly and shamelessly. When he went to school he began to be afraid

that people would think that babyish if they noticed it, and he used to

leave them among the ice, though somehow they always did get left to

the last. Then later on he began to side with public opinion himself,

and think that perhaps there was something soft and unmanly about caring

so much for anything to eat, so he used to gobble them first of all,

trying not to taste them very much. Then there came an awful holiday

when he wouldn't have any at all. That was just before he insisted on

going to sea. But then he came back--and ever since he's had it every

time we come here, and now he always leaves the cherries to the last."

She was now immersed in the story she told; she was seeing again the

slow magical increase of the small thing she had brought into the world,

and the variations through which it passed in the different seasons of

its youth, changing from brown candid gracefulness to a time of sulky

clumsiness and perpetually abraded knees, and back again to gracefulness

and willingness to share all laughter, yet ever remaining the small

thing she had brought into the world. With eyes cast down, trying to

dissemble her pride, lest the gods should envy, she added harshly, "He

was quite interesting ... but I suppose all boys go through these

phases.... I've had no other experiences...."

Ellen was longing to hear what Richard was like when he was a boy, but

she had been stung by that insolent, smiling murmur, and she could do

nothing with any statement made by this woman but snarl at her. "No

other experience?" she questioned peevishly. "I thought Richard said he

had a half-brother."

There was no longer any pride in Marion's eyes to dissemble. She stared

at Ellen, and said heavily, as one who speaks concerning the violation

of a secret, "Did Richard tell you that?" Before the girl had time to

answer cruelly, "Yes, he tells me everything," she had remembered

certain things which made her stiffen in her chair and keep her chin up

and use her eyes as if there still flashed in them the pride which had

utterly vanished. "Oh, yes," she asserted, in that forced voice, but

very loudly and deliberately. "I have another son. He's a good boy. His

name is Roger Peacey. You must meet him one day. I hope you will like

him." She paused and recollected why they were speaking of this other

son, and continued, "But, you see, I had nothing to do with him when he

was a boy."

This struck Ellen as very strange. She went on eating her ice pudding,

but she cogitated on this matter. Why had this second son been brought

up away from his mother? Surely that hardly ever happened except when

there had been a divorce, and a husband whose wife had run away with

another man was awarded by the courts "the custody of the child." Had

she not talked of this son in the over-bluff tone in which people talk

of those to whom they have done a wrong? She was possessed of the fierce

monogamous passion which accompanies first and unachieved love, that

loathing of all who are not content with the single sacramental draught

which is the blood of God, but go heating the body with unblessed

fermented wines; and she glared sharply under her brows at this woman,

who after losing Richard's father married another man and then, as it

appeared, had loved yet another man, as she might at someone whom she

suspected of being drunk. It was true that Richard adored her, but then

no doubt this kind of woman knew well how to deceive men. Softly she

made to herself the Scottish manifestation of incredulity, "Mhm...." And

Marion, for thirty years vigilant for sounds of scorn, heard and

perfectly understood.

She remained, however, massively and unattractively immobile. There came

to her neither word nor expression to remove the girl's dubiety. Since

she had heard such sounds of scorn over so lengthy a period they no

longer came to her as trumpet calls to action, but rather as imperatives

to silence, for above all things she desired that evil things should

come to an end, and she had learned that an ugly speech ricochetting

from the hard wall of a just answer may fly further and do worse. She

knew it was necessary that she should dispel Ellen's suspicion, because

they must work together to make a serene home for Richard, and she

desired to do so for her son's sake, because she herself was possessed

by the far fiercer monogamous passion of achieved and final love, which

is disillusioned concerning mystical draughts, but knows that to take

the bread of the beloved and cast it to the dogs is sin. She had

acquired that knowledge, which is the only valuable kind of chastity

worth having, that night when she had been forced to commit that

profanation. Shading her eyes while there rushed over her the

recollection of a pallid face looking yellow as it bent over the lamp,

she reflected that even if she conquered this life-long indisposition to

reply, the story was too monstrous to be told. It would not be believed.

This girl would look at her under her brows and make that Scotch noise

again and think her a liar as well as loose. So she sat silent, letting

Ellen dislike her.

She said at length, "Let's go and have coffee in the lounge."

"I'm sure we don't need it," murmured Ellen, as a tribute to the

magnificence of the meal.

Crossing the room was a terrible business. She hoped people were not

staring at her because she was with a woman whom they could perhaps see

had once been bad. No doubt there were signs by which experienced people

could tell. Richard's presence seemed all at once to have set behind the

rim of the earth.

They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked

down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people,

none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their

fray with appetite. They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like

Richard. She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that

there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze

of Richard's eyes, set in Richard's mother's face. Doubt left her. Here

was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance. Here was the

quality of life she loved. She found herself saying eagerly, that she

might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such

strong words as he used: "Yes, Marion?"

"Ellen, when will you marry Richard?"

"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We

think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."

"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being

kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."

Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an

altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I

feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.

The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied,

one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing

at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which

sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale

clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a

lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will

not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon,

so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her

white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had

stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across

the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she

could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like

doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his

towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely,

"No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.

Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves

that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by

the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but

her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to

desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she

exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"

Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would

not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my

life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you

willed with. Let me have mine."

But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy

people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay

hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she

said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced

herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her

that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering

vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to

be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.

I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I

die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of

me--quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I

still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.

You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you

what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to

shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my

throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years

that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But

the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He

lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I

want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will

give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for

him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you

see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the

restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast

mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these

appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips,

to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her

reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and

stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent

and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are

for their sons."

She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that

Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand

across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so

evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl

was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.

"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much

more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I

knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so

very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take

him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew

he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us

both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So

I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's

twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see

to it that now he is here he is happy."

Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared

into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some

practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered

about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does

having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when

Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading,

for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it

always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre

and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the

Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life,

since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever

beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that

she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now

she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now

she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman

who had given her Richard.

Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her

mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under

the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with

sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd

of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving

by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had

relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have

rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of

Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death

she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering

suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by

anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for

the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest

recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had

occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her

sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.

It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving

her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and

gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her

till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with

his long first kiss.

She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and

Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar,

instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look

at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and

give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you

mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at

Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,"

and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was

never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember

that Hendry escaped the family misfortune--mind you, I know it's no a

fault--of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the

dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane

where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of

lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the

pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding

of a theory.

But those were the fair-weather uses of love. It was in the foul weather

she would have missed him most. If this woman had not given her Richard

she would have walked home from the hospital alone and wept by the

unmade bed whose pillow was still dented by mother's head; she would

have had to go to the cemetery with only Mr. Mactavish James and Uncle

John Watson from Glasgow, who would have said "Hush!" when she waved her

hand at the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and cried,

"Good-bye, my wee lamb!" Life was so terrible it would not be

supportable without love. She laid her hand on Marion's where it lay on

the table, and stuttered, "Oh, it was brave of you!"

The intimate contact was faintly disgusting to the other. She answered

impatiently, "Not brave at all; I loved him so much that I would have

done anything rather than lose him."

"You loved him--even then?"

"In a sense they are as much to one then as they ever are."

"Ah...." Ellen continued to pat the other woman's hand and looked up

wonderingly into her eyes, and was dismayed to see there that this

fondling meant nothing to her. She was not ungrateful, but for such

things her austerity had no use. All that she wanted was that assurance

for which she had already asked. Ellen was proud, and she was a little

hurt that the way in which she had proposed to pay the debt of gratitude

was not acceptable, so she held up her hand and said coolly, "I'll marry

your son when you like, Mrs. Yaverland."

The other said nothing more than "Thank you." Realising that she had

said it even more than usually indifferently, she put out her hand

towards Ellen in imitation of the girl's own movement, but did it with

so marked a lack of spontaneity that it must, as she instantly

perceived, give an impression of insincerity. "How I fail!" she thought,

but not too sadly, for at any rate she had got her son what he wanted. A

man came and stood a little way behind her, looking here and there for

someone whom he expected to find in the assembly, and she turned sharply

to see if it were Richard; for always when he was away, if the shadows

fell across her path or there came a knock at the door, she hoped that

it was him.

"I am stupid about him," she admitted, settling down in her chair, "but

if he had come it would have been lovely. What would he think if he came

now and found us two whom he loves most sitting here silent, almost

sulky, because we have fixed the time of his marriage? He would not

understand, of course. When a man is in love marriage loses all

importance. He thinks that he could wait for ever. He never realises, as

women do, that it is not love that matters but what we do with it. Why

do I say as women do? Only women like me who have through making all

possible mistakes found out the truth by the process of elimination.

This girl is as unprovident as Richard is. So unprovident that I am

afraid she is angry with me for insisting that she should put her

capital of passion to good uses." And indeed Ellen was sitting there

very stiffly, turning her hands together and looking down on them as if

she despised them for their cantrips. She wished her marriage had not

been decided quite like this. Of course she wanted to be married,

because, whatever the marriage-laws were like, there was no other way by

which she and Richard could tell everybody what they were to each other.

But she had wanted the ceremony as secret as possible, as little

overlooked by any other human being, and she fancifully desired it to

take place in some high mountain chapel where there was no congregation