They went out of the house by the French window of the dining-room, and
crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in
which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out
to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild
orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an
orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This
is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is
let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was
always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."
"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following
was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not
answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not
spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was
so keen on science?"
But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were
patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need
adventure...."
"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved
half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire
to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard,
and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that
Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be
miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the
leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the
leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel
there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been
any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"
"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.
"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.
"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she
paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She
knew quite well.
It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet
at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea,
which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was
lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened
pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of
the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough
darkness without quality. Yet as they walked down the field-path to the
floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands,
was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a
country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more
intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt
as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than
it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had
come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though
he does no more than tell children tales of storms.
And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the
wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave
cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious
food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when
they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate
to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the
sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and
watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and
time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound
of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the
running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved
culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and
the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.
Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous
disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.
Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over
the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.
Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she
made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable
later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the
marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge,
buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the
lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it
was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.
Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live
there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to
travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.
"Who lives in that little house on the island?" she called out to
Marion.
"The one on the Saltings? No one. It has been empty for forty years. But
when I was a child George Luck still lived there. George Luck, the last
great wizard in England."
"A wizard forty years ago! Well, I suppose parts of England are very
backward. You've got such a miserable system of education. What sort of
magic did he do?"
"Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors' wives used to come
to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look
in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the
men were doing at the time." She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen.
"You see, other women before us have been reactionary."
"Reactionary?" repeated Ellen.
"They have let their lives revolve round men," said Marion teasingly,
and Ellen returned her laughter. They were both in high spirits because
of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing
bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and
air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in
love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current
participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that
makes man the most ridiculous of animals.
They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line,
again in the great green platter of the marshes. The sea-wall, which ran
in wide crimps a field's width away on the other side of the line, might
have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts
showing above it. The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the
sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they
moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which
it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually
that leisurely, wet cry.
"What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing.
"Those are the redshanks. They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he
will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little
streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet
there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks
queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes
here now except the men to see to the cattle. Even though the railway
runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and
shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New
Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the
morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired
to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
During the week the children are all at school or too young to go
further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these
people here, and they never come."
She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between
these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically
night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever
visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should
continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like
lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the
Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you
really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to
be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life
of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had
erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless
for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone
waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery
army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and
white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters
from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in
his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.
But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that
nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as
unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks
would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a
knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in
which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees
lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would
have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as
possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to
hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and
excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys'
doffing of their caps. There was something at once absurd and menacing
about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's
greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to
have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich
expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.
To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that
church up there?"
"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."
"But what's that white thing beside it?"
"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of
Richard's father."
"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined
not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in
the neighbourhood."
"Why?" asked Marion.
"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it
not?"
"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public
subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung
back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard
had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that
white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much
to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who
seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been
able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its
architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement
and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality
should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That
secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from
remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she
had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time
when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for
the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell
on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror
that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than
hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than
to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and
smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not
to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the
hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had
been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and
found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the
situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion
asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the
unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks
it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh."
There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she
tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable
with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a
bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out!
They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or
don't they grow up North?..."
They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the
neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely
inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a
geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and
even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like
orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard.
Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours
which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an
osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange
hair of the young plants.
"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult
to them."
Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a
look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of
letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should
go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah
Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and
made it squalid with tin huts.
"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to
laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and
had things thrown at them.
It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own
Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to
it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the
Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable
people...."
"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."
But to that Marion replied, grumblingly and indistinctly, that style was
the only test of value, and that the fools who put up that notice could
never do any good to anybody, and then her eyes roved to the path that
ran down the green shoulder of the escarpment on the other side of the
valley's neck. "Ah, here's Mrs. Winter. Ellen, you are going to come in
contact with the social life of Roothing. This is the vicar's wife."
"Is she our sort of pairson?" asked Ellen doubtfully.
"For the purpose of social intercourse we pretend that she is," answered
Marion without enthusiasm.
They met her on the plank bridge that crossed the stream by which the
osier beds were nourished, and Ellen liked her before they had come
within hailing distance because she was such a little nosegay of an old
lady. Though her colours were those of age they were bright as flowers.
Her hair was white, but it shone like travellers' joy, and her peering
old eyes were blue as speedwell, and her shrivelled cheeks were pink as
apple-blossom. She bobbed when she walked like a ripe apple on its stem,
and her voice when she called out to them was such a happy fluting as
might come from some bird with a safe nest. "Why, it's Mrs. Yaverland. I
heard that you'd gone up to town."
"I came back this morning. This is Miss Melville, whom I went to meet.
She is going to marry Richard very soon." Marion did not, Ellen noticed
with exasperation, make any adequate response to this generous little
trill of greeting. The best she seemed able to do was to speak slowly,
as if to disclaim any desire to hurry on.
"Oh, how do you do? I am pleased I met you on the very first day." The
old lady smiled into Ellen's eyes and shook her hand as if she meant to
lay at her disposal all this amiability that had been reared by tranquil
years on the leeward side of life. "This will be a surprise for
Roothing. We all thought Mr. Yaverland would never look at any woman but
his mother. Such a son he is!" Ellen was annoyed that Marion smiled only
vaguely in answer to this mention of her astonishing good fortune in
being Richard's mother. "I hope Mr. Winter will have the pleasure of
marrying you."
"I'm afraid not," said Ellen with concern. "I'm Presbyterian, and
Episcopalianism does not attract me."
"Oh dear! Oh dear! That's a pity," said the old lady, with a pretty
flight of hilarity. "Still, I hope you'll ask us to the wedding. I've
known Richard since he was a week old. Haven't I, Mrs. Yaverland? He
was the loveliest baby I've ever seen, and later on I think the
handsomest boy. Nobody ever looked at my Billy or George when Richard
was about. And now--well, I needn't tell you, young lady, what he's like
now. I'm glad I've met you. I've just been up at Mrs. More's."
"Who is Mrs. More?" asked Marion heavily.
"The new people who have the small-holding at Coltsfoot the Brights had
before. I think he used to be a clerk, and came into a little money and
bought the holding, and now they're finding it very difficult to get
along."
"This small-holding business ought to be stopped."
"Why?" asked Ellen peevishly. Marion seemed to reject everything, and
she was sure that she had seen small-holdings recommended in Labour
Party literature. "I thought it was sound."
"Not here. Speculators buy up big farms and cut them into small-holdings
and sell them to townspeople, who starve on them or sell them at a loss.
The land's wasted for good, and all because it can't be farmed again
once it's been cut up. To all intents and purposes it's wiped off the
map. It's a scandal."
"It is a shame," agreed the old lady. "I often say that something ought
to be done. Well, the poor woman's lost her baby."
"Bad business," said Marion.
"Such a pretty little girl. Six months. I've been up seeing them putting
her in the coffin. The mother was so upset. I was with her all day
yesterday."
"I've seen the place," said Marion. "As ugly as one of the Hallelujah
Army shanties. What this bit of country's coming to! And Coltsfoot was a
good farm when I was a girl."
"It isn't very nice now certainly. You see, now that the other people
have failed and gone away, it's difficult for them to get loads taken
down as there isn't a proper road. Before, they did it co-operatively
among themselves. But this winter they say they've been without coal
quite often, and the baby's been ill all the time. I think Mrs. More's
been terribly lonely. Poor little woman, she's got no friends here. All
her people live in the Midlands, she tells me. I don't think they can
afford a holiday, so the next few months will be hard for her, I'm
afraid."
"Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the
garden. Annoying to think that that used to be good wheat-land."
"They've never liked the place. They were terrified of losing the child
because of the damp from the moment it came. She's quite broken by it
all, poor thing."
Marion began to draw on the ground with the point of her stick.
"Ah, well, you'll be wanting to get on," said the old lady. "Now, do
bring your future daughter-in-law to tea with us some day. I've got a
daughter-in-law staying with me now. I should like you to meet Rose. She
plays the violin very nicely. And we have a garden we're rather proud
of, though of course this is the wrong time of the year to see it. Yet
I'm sure things are looking very nice just now. Just look at it! Could
anything," she asked, looking round with happy eyes, "be prettier than
this? Look at the sunlight travelling over that hill!" She cast a shy
glance at Marion, who was continuing to watch the point of her stick,
and bravery came into her soft gay glance. "It's passing over the
earth," she said tremulously but distinctly, "like the kindness of God."
A silence fell. "The wee thing has courage," thought Ellen to herself.
"It's plain to see what's happened. Marion's often sneered at her
religion, and she's just letting her see that she doesn't mind. I like
people who believe in something. Of course it might Le something more
useful than Christianity, but if she believes it...."
Marion lifted her head, stared at the hillside, and said, "Yes. And
look. It is followed by the shadow, like His indifference."
Tears came into the old lady's eyes. "Good-bye. We must settle on an
afternoon for tea. I'll send somebody round with a note. Good-bye." She
pushed past them, a grieved and ruffled little figure, a peony-spot of
shock on each cheek, and then she looked back at Ellen. "We'll all look
forward to seeing you, my dear," she called kindly; but feared, Ellen
saw, to meet the hard eyes of this terrible woman, who was staring
after her with a look of hostility that, directed on this little
affirmation of love and amiability, was as barbarous as some ponderous
snare laid for a small, precious bird.
"Let's get on," said Marion.
They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of
the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice.
To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing. It
should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds,
and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher
level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green
pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a
crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle. But the
quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in
fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick
dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an
angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.
They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran
askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes,
rusted and prohibitive and futile.
"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of
fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of
raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence
to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End
trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go
straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and
lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as
Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the
day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the
enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter,
Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the
thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land
going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings
and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I
wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead
leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the
manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she
pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said
apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the
two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose
bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the
others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had
not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair
exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there
between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I
won't come. I'm tired...."
She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself,
"She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half
because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by
losing my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly
blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking
of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had
parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought,
be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there
could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having
to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in
a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike
any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be
tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A
woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that
work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and
so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened
and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really
dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this
Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it
would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now
this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a
living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman
who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a
baby's coffin.
And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and
undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for
an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy
wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained
timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last
fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long
succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire
system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was
never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the
gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was
always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day
there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything
but weak-eyed, plain people.
The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it
had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which
is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the
tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window
at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls
and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would
not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.
Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are
bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the
end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.
The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had
frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement,
would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of
pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's
lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there
would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"
She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before
she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to
remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she
wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean
living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out,
leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass
bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation,
while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth
grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a
meal.
Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor
souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that
all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by
passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was
feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud
at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an
errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting
strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the
woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming
up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to
speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and
they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded
without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore
having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed
with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She
could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom
she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for
Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to
be happy.
Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.
Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not
be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with
Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had
seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed
in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there had always been
something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a
sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by
sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as
dignified as befitted one who came as an ambassador from life itself,
and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair
outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of
courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarrassment. She
was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck
through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be
his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and
Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.
There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by
the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had
left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees
that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge
that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone
far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had
felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly
and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she
had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to
the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a
queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of
the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said,
"Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an
inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she
followed him down the hillside that nobody since the world began had
ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner,
and she became scarlet with shame.
When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared
nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like
air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen
it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had
pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to
up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to
him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he
answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk
to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could
come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that
seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how
the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I
suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who
does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on
in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now.
Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."
At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in
which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away,
wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about
to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its
cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over
her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked
at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting
along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an
inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a
disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year
later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he
had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He
murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had
looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey
eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It
was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of
passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.
With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a
courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days
with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed
it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of
seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair
dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time
that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action.
She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion
would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had
looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they
would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But
they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good
with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow
the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would
pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all
his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black....
She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all
other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt
about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that
there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him
that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite
well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more
beautifully than she had ever been.
She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if
Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself
to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she
could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.
Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base
passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational
hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It
would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and
besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as
little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now
nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping
broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"
She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the
flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower
towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the
hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl
was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the
tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had
formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations
by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion
had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first
moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the
bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down
on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of
the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among
such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it
was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that
she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird,
and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's
spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind
became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh
and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had
been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary
importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible
presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it
could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself
loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had
fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she
must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act
of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that
made her cry out with joy.
Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was
intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should
intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with
being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The
girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower
as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under
faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about
the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added
to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for
the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course
the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of
Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer
mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She
took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was
sinister.