The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be
almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a
creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted
with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white
under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched
illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey
houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round
steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did
not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only
as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky,
stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the
marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of
the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue
of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its
humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and
on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.
This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the
Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow
or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the
curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised
clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at
their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had
exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this
plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and
effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be
visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon;
and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling
on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything
happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation
of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed
people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the
present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she
was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred
to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she
smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This
is Kerith Island."
"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat."
And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I
must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's
fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should
everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where
Richard's going to work, though."
"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works
from our windows."
"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I
couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the
works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished
in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the
house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about
him. I suppose I will soon get over it."
"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."
The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now
across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to
the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little
hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse
turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse
gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green
escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose
again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the
purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a
brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform
of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill
grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by
four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the
fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink
corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was
built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a
footing.
Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an
elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with
a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white
like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and
receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken
hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of
the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there
fell an orchard.
"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and
look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could
see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the
sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion
indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the
things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I
can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from
here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of
coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always
where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which
fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller
boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled
island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a
farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.
Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been
driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for
to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of
cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked
bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine
rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a
fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with
their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped
behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened
cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares
set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its
furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky
that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which
dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look
brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be
imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to
lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to
suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie
at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud
galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company
beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen
saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as
Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there
was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed
scepticism concerning the value of all activities.
To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from
delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had
up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday
evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able
to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of,
and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with
pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even
when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they
stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from
her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an
argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly,
as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly.
She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There
had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down
platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back,
facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its
landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high
ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding,
where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath
esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.
It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet
the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of
nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that
was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the
great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged
in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the
light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its
brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own
strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between
deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the
stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to
the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark
line of the Kentish hills.
It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some
large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like
flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now
flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but
bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were
back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it
were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the
wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion
surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed
out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and,
walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud,
followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and
fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the
quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a
solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze
from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make
this a memorable star.
Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been
that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and
breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy
impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she
partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain
and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as
uncompromising as mud.
She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea,
saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I
could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard
could still."
Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the
sky?"
"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings
living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of
extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism,
an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked
appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her
impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill
luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike
for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the
station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on
which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was
saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard
was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of
him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to
conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than
the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than
a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not
offended.
She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which
Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level
crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the
fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the
barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant
posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up
the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken
prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the
direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But
surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in
Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was
written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the
jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too
slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the
housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines,
there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with
white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because
of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want
to recognise its beauty.
When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest
of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that
this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of
white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the
other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's
proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap
in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of
those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far
older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to
Canfleet--that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland--but it's all
gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a
disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between
low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen
a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be
measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike
her.
Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges
gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which
grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively
deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the
air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the
broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places
of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its
windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that
one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by
pressing their faces close against the glass.
"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her.
"I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But
it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the
house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time,
so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways
at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you
know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did
them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of
life, you become most carefully conservative!"
But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch,
and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said
hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this
Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to
please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion
greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning,
Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to
this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things
just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to
replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they
stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark
room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak
settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and
samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this
English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The
Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and
they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any
particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it
was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's
ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look!
It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and
they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide
windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your
room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it.
It's a room I'm fond of...."
They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched
door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on
cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted
green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she
said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when
I was a girl; but all the things are new--I got them down from London;
and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the
chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window
that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a
farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a
story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was
as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle
life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.
He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very
capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him
that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without
losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie
in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see
who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on
you."
She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched
the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little
white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate
grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and
looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had
pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because
to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been
sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out
into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring
cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the
yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its
further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the
billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained,
bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of
purple twigs at each end.
But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when
it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at
all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of
tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the
Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to
have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken
bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the
puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish
affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near
with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?--and them not born at four
o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and
yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the
roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as
usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran
forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among
the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow,
but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the
sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow,
turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that
the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his
long upper lip was twitching from side to side.
She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus!
Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen
and Grandmother was reading the _Prittlebay Gazette_ in the parlour, and
she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing.
Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon
her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs,
and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the
farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing
the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to
him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent
collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not
point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was
immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he
wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with
the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to
point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate
into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his
face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What
could it be that he wanted?
She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it,
pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass.
Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness
as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he
said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when
she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his
eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom
turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It
was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent
head followed by his forgotten dogs.
Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited
by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege
upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that
prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she
liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a
moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and
sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey
flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them
treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then
she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a
bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen
boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs,
the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that
night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come
home.
It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like
this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it
was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid
that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone
had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who
was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite
extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment.
The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power
than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him.
She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the
same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice
everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions
when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white
room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each
with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep,
bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the
long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with
their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in
sherry.
The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she
could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white
cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little
dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their
images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very
cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was
being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that
if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke
disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by
throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation
would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm"
to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement
exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon."
Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice
for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her
dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his
notice.
She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary,
letting our whole lives revolve round a man."
"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint
that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have
her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for
some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who
was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I
don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that
any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"
Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the
Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said
stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."
"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent
things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal
relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And
then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the
world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women
don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we
love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful
with."
Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had
failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by
Richard just as much as she loved him.
"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the
end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up
petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big
sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would
not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak
about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for
a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as
all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.
She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned
the meaning of life as one lived it.
So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked
discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with
drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great
armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but
was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of
that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression
was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial,
though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails
and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was
wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles
of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled
her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the
windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly
happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing
to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch,
and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining
all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all
this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in
the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland,
is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired
with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in
John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can
look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer
and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your
first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the
ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'"
"Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she
objected.
But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found
it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because
she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in
the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately
answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.
Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too
poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.
All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no
cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and
unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge
of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be
enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns
or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She
did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been
able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories
of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies
had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up
people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to
till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed
quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where
feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing
seas.
Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised
that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For
indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat
within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth
spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows
trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were
almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning
below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so
that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their
shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried
to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at
the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine
in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see
him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the
garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too
the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified
green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of
clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate
curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills
beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the
right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the
marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple
statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the
west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if
the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.
She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and
yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite
intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the
immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man
dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with
a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh
became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill
of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one
wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of
the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the
inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the
public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with
concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the
margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of
the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries
made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot
of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more
necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue
her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the
small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it
was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own
ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world
presented by this woman's face.
Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic
point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his
own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what
extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble
atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind
associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she
would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be
trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able
to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to
the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if
they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem
heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight
lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who
had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more
agonising than a common tear.
"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic
tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was
appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish
about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in
an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist
of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say
and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her
repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman
should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that
her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible
in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother
died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire
would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent
and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would
then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical
patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins,
she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as
inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and
would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and
complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of
excessive living.
Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order
characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly
that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the
aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.
"You look tired," said Marion timidly.
"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just
tiredness."
"You'd better go and lie down."
"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."
"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at
the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.
They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily.
Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all
was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains
do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in
the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting
on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like
that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in
front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her
looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her,
and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself
out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back
for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser
of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with
peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror.
The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail
of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing
Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to
the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see
why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of
her own life.