He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the
door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare,
lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,"
so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared
to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more
hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard
line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the
threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and
hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor
darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight
coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it
seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the
white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous
stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but
their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.
She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed
nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor
she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had
looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked
like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern
countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where
she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles
away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat
outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their
relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without
warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.
She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the
shed?" she asked indifferently.
"No. It's outside the gate."
"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."
He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of
dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.
She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the
illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the
phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange
night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were
co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears
she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge
electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous
son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he
passed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It
was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores
lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit
to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and
kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.
She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search
of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of
light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been
anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have
gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from
him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her,
that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.
When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."
Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance
of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had
not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his
cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The
queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet
somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity
for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....
He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and
murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her
that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in
an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely
name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way
it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly
as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.
It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his
favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to
school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow
of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the
flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."
She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but
she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm
plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption.
These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that
the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's
hot!" she said, holding out the plate.
He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.
"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.
"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in
Scotland."
"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"
"As well as well can be."
"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."
"No, I've had none, none at all."
"That means not too many. Does it?"
They kissed, and he said tenderly yet harshly: "Roger hasn't been
bothering you?"
"Ah, the poor thing, don't speak of him like that," she said. "No, but
I've not heard from him for six weeks. Not even at Christmas. I'm a
little anxious. But it may be all right. You remember last Christmas
there was a time when he didn't write. I expect it'll be all right." But
with her eyes she abandoned herself to fear, so that he should soothe
her and stroke her hands with his, which were trembling in spite of
their strength because he was so glad to see her.
"Mother, darling, I have hated leaving you alone. But it was necessary.
I've done good work this winter." He made with one hand a stiff and
sweeping movement that expressed his peculiar kind of arrogance, which
stated that his was the victory, now and for ever, and yet took
therefrom no pride for himself. "I've pulled it off," he said jeeringly,
and smiled at her derisively but with tight lips, as if they must take
this thing lightly or some danger would spring. "Where I get my brains
from I don't know," he muttered teasingly, and put out his hand and
traced the interweaving strands in one of her plaits. "What hair you've
got!" he said. "I've never seen a woman with ..." He started violently
and was silent.
She cried out, "What is it?" But he answered, speaking clippedly, "Oh,
nothing, nothing...."
So evidently was he overcoming a moment of utter confusion that she
turned away and busied herself with the coffee.
Behind her his voice spoke falsely, uplifted in a feint of the surprised
recollection which at its first coming had struck him dumb the previous
moment. "And Ellen! I'm a nice sort of lover to be five minutes in the
house without asking for my Ellen! How is she? How have you been getting
on together?"
"Oh, your dear Ellen!" she cried fervently. But her heart went cold
within her. He was right. It was against nature that he should have
forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was
sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman
he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of
destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make
time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he
had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head,
thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable
look of a man who is truly in love. Well, if that were so, why could it
not be pure and easy joy for them both, as it was for other sons and
mothers when there were happy marriage afoot? Why must their life, even
in such parts of it as escaped the shadow of Peacey or Roger, be so
queer in climate? This time it was Richard's fault. She had been
willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people. Her
spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, "Go and eat your
eggs before they're cold." As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and
trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of
his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and,
cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.
"Why didn't you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?" she
demanded.
He answered mildly, "Didn't I?"
"No, you didn't," she told him curtly. "You said you thought her pretty.
Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch
little face!..."
She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the
uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the
smile on his lips. Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air
as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to
follow their diverse musics? But she could not quarrel with him for
long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was
given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame
her heart like the advance of an army. His flesh and hair seemed to
reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with
water. Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into
some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his
mouth vigilant. Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver.
Utterly melted, she cried out, "I am so glad you have come home."
He started, and came smiling out of his dream. "I am so glad to be
here," he said. They laughed across the table; the strong light showed
them the dear lines they knew on one another's faces. "That's why," he
cried brilliantly, "I've come at this ungodly hour. I had to be here. I
got into London at nine o'clock and I went and had some dinner at the
Station Hotel. But I felt wretched. Mother, I'm getting," he announced
with a naïve triumph, "awfully domestic. I got the hump the minute Ellen
left Edinburgh. I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and
got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here
by midnight if I hadn't had a smash at Upminster. No, I wasn't hurt. Not
a scrap. It was at the beginning of that garden suburb. God, it must be
beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe. I'm
glad we live in this old place. Well, a chap who'd bought some timber at
an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a
log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half
a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a
garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up.
The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown
and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down
because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his
business, I ask you?' he kept on saying. Mustn't it be queer to have
womenfolk with whom one doesn't feel identical?" They exchanged a
boastful look of happiness, the intensity of which, however, seemed the
last effort he found possible. For his lids drooped, and he supported
his head on his hand and took a deep drink, and said drowsily, "I'm glad
to be here."
She went and stood beside him and stroked his hair. "I should have come
to you at Aberfay," she grieved. "But I knew I couldn't stand the
winter, and I would only have been a nuisance to you if I had been ill
all the time. Did the woman feed you properly, dear?"
He said, without looking up, "I wouldn't have let you come. It was a
God-forsaken hole. I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for"--he
gave it out with an odd hesitancy, almost as if he were boyishly
shy--"Ellen. And I had to stand it, so that I could pull this thing
off."
She asked, "What thing, my dear?" though she was not so very greatly
interested. By daylight her ambition for him was fanatic and without
limit. But in this stolen hour, when no one knew that they were
together, she let herself feel something like levity about his doings.
It seemed enough, considering how glorious he was, that he should merely
be.
He began to eat again and told the story tersely between mouthfuls. "You
know the reason that I stayed up in Edinburgh after I'd sent off Ellen
was that I thought I had to show the directors what I'd been doing at
Aberfay next Thursday. They were to come on to me after they'd paid
their visit to the Clyde works. Well, they came yesterday instead. Sir
Vincent has to go to America sooner than he expected, so he wanted to
get it over. When they saw what I'd been trying for during the last six
months they got excited. As a matter of fact it is pretty good. I wish I
could tell you about it, but you know I can't. Also I had told McDermott
that Dynevors, the Birmingham people, had heard my contract was up in
March, and wanted to buy me. So they got frightened, and offered me a
new contract that they thought would keep me." He had finished his meal,
and he pushed away his plate and stretched himself, looking up at her
and smiling sleepily.
"Have you taken it?"
"Rather. It couldn't have been better."
"What is it?"
"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."
"How?"
He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm
too woolly-headed to tell you now."
"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a
rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are
you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared
nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest
he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.
He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to
reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm
glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been
working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my
footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest
director. I've got"--again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of
arrogance that was not vanity--"the best brain of them all. In ten years
I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly
everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the
next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being
fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind,
who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any
class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I
meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific
man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."
"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.
"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where
it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you.
You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the
example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself.
Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady
enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be
done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to
impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes--there's a
kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work,
when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what
one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have
kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have
pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.
"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into
British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking
so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one
go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's
important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world.
It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only
look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study
matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that
when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's
not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool
that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself
with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will
die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything
on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself,
such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.
"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification
for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose
that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was
to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as
little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it,
considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were
beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so
easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just
kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women
that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here
and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the
reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is
that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your
life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me,
and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember
licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself
teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married
woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by
your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of
her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been
magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such
thing as justice in heaven or earth--I tell you, mother, it's kept me
going to think of the sacrifice you made for me--"
"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with
you."
"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case
against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of
him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being
cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband--for some man to
adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all
been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist
more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything
about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this
while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done
for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful
you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"
Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with
grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I
never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I
mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance
music...."
"Oh, you poor darling!--and you would have danced so beautifully!" he
cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself
free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she
might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were
only moods. I never really wanted anything except to be with you!" But
her bliss in him had been too tightly strung by his sudden coming and by
his open speech of that concerning which they spoke as seldom as the
passionately religious speak of God, so for a little time she had to
weep. But presently she stretched out her hand and pressed back his
seeking mouth.
"Hush!" she said with a grave wildness. "We must not talk like this."
He lifted his face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found
her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly
he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on
his hand and staring at a blank wall.
She saw that she had hurt him. She drew close to him again, and murmured
lovingly, though still with defensive majesty: "Why should we talk of
it, my boy? It's all over now, and you're a made man. This contract
really does mean that, doesn't it?"
He answered, patting her hand to show that he submitted to her in
everything, "Oh, in the end it means illimitable power."
To give him pleasure she exchanged with him a brilliant and triumphant
glance, though at this moment she felt that her love for him concerned
itself less with ambition than she had ever supposed. Incredulously she
whispered to her harsh, sceptical mind that it almost seemed as if its
sphere were not among temporal things. But it gave her a real rapture to
perceive in his eyes the elder brother of the expression that had always
dwelt there in his childish days when he announced to her his
cricket-scores and his prizes; even so, she had thought then, the
adjutant of a banished leader might hand him down arrows to shoot on the
city that had exiled him. And indeed the success of their conspiracy had
been marvellous. In old times they had looked out of this house under
lowered and defiant brows, knowing there was none without who knew of
them who did not despise them. But now they could smile tenderly and
derisively out into this hushed moonlight that received the uncountable
and fatuously peaceful breaths of the sleepers who had been their
enemies and were to be their slaves. It was strange that at this of all
instants she should for the space of a heartbeat lose her sense of the
uniqueness of her fate and be confounded by amazement at the common lot
in which they two and the vanquished sleepers alike partook. Was it
possible that this could be? That this plethora of beings that coated
the careless turning earth like grains of dust on a sleeping top were
born--mysterious act!--and mated--act so much more mysterious than it
seemed!--and died--act which was the essence of mystery! She was dizzied
with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught
hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to
her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less
broad body. She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking
about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as
unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest. Penitently she dropped a kiss
on his forehead and muttered, "Richard, you're a good son. You've made
up for everything I've been through many times over...."
"Then stay up with me a little," he said. "Don't let's go to bed yet."
He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the
hearth till it faced the grate. "Sit down, dear, and I'll make you a
fire. Dear, do sit down. This is the last night we shall have
together." She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew
to be in him a mask of intense desire. He busied himself with the fire
and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he
had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her
lap and seemed to sleep.
But he did not. Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep
of his eyelashes. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered; and discovered
happily, "Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen." She waited serenely,
while the clock ticked.
Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being
here...."
She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough
that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.
But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to
my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm
mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case--because they've got the works
on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I
shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a
place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll
be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to
our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising
his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him,
though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before.
"It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what
it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar
thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go,
hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I
were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place
where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that,
mother?"
She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened
here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a
reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling.
"Yes, I love it."
They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He
grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if
he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like
the house?"
She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.
"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.
For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward
and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked
unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"
He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six
hours with her without seeing that I must? She--she's a lamp with a
double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little
soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the
same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from
hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned
again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty
faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at
him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he
repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making
for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live."
And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his
lips would not--that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen,
there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made
him leaden and uneager.
"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured,
and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than
your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying
to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to
find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune
in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."
He made no response. The words were strangled in her throat, and she
fell to tapping her foot rhythmically against the fender. Her eyes were
moist; this was so different from the talk she had expected.
Presently his shoulders twitched. "Don't do that, mother dear," he said
impatiently.
"I'm sorry, darling," she answered wearily. She threw herself back in
her chair and clenched her fists. Desperation fevered her, and she began
to speak vindictively. "Of course it was a great relief to me when I saw
the kind of girl Ellen is, considering how up till now you've sidled
past women of any sort of character as if you'd heard that men got sent
to prison for loving any but fools."
He laughed uneasily.
"Yes," she went on; "you always seemed to be looking carefully for
anything you could find that was as insipid as a water-melon. You can't,
you know, possibly count your love-affairs as amongst your successes."
She jerked her head back, her lips retracted in a kind of grin.
"Mariquita de Rojas!" she jeered.
He started, though not much. "I never knew you knew about that," he said
mildly.
"Of course I did." She quivered with exaggerated humiliation. "To see my
son spending himself on something so nearly nothing. And then the way
you moped and raged at her when she threw you over. Seeing the poor
woman was a fool, how else could you expect her to behave but like a
fool? It was undignified of you to put the burden of being the woman you
loved on a poor thing like her--like overworking a servant girl." She
perceived that she was hot and shaking, and that she was within an ace
of betraying the secret that there sometimes rose in her heart a thirst
to beat and hurt every woman that he had ever loved. Words would pour
out that would expose her disgusting desire to strike and scratch if she
did not substitute others. So she found herself crying in a voice that
was thinner than hers: "And a married woman! To see you doing wrong!"
The moment she said it she was ashamed and drew an expunging hand across
her lips. And as she had feared, he threw over his shoulder a glance
that humorously recognised the truths which she had insincerely
suppressed: that while she desired to hurt the woman whom he had loved,
she would gladly have murdered any woman who had refused to love him,
whether married or single; and that she had never cared what he had done
so long as he did not lose his physical and moral fastidiousness, and
did not lust after flesh that, having rotted its nerves with delight
unsanctioned by the spirit, knew corruption before death, and so long as
he had not pretended to any woman that he wanted her soul when he wanted
her body.
Seeing the tears in her eyes, he said kindly: "Well, I never thought
Mariquita's marriage counted for much. Do you remember how you took her
in one night when old de Rojas hid in a cloisonne vase on the verandah
for cover and potted at the stars with his gun?" But in his voice she
read wonder that for the first time in his life he should have found his
honest mother forging a moral attitude.
It was dreadful that, on this of all nights, and so soon after a special
illumination of their relationship, she should have set him making
allowances for her to cover up her insincerity. She stammered miserably:
"Well, Ellen's a dear, dear girl," and twisted her fingers in her lap,
and cried out in a fresh access of fever: "It's strange: this is a cold
night, and yet I feel hot and heavy and sticky as I did in Italy when
the sirocco blew."
He slid his hand into hers again and altered his position so that he
could smile up into her face. "Yes, she's a dear girl," he agreed
comfortingly.
"Then marry her soon!" she begged. "You're thirty. It's time you had a
life of your own. You must make the ties that will last when I am dead.
Marry her soon."
"Yes," he said. "I will marry her soon."
"At once!" she urged. "You can be married in three weeks, you know, if
you set things going immediately. You'll see about it to-morrow, won't
you?"
He said nothing, but stroked her hand.
"You will do that?" she almost shrieked.
He moistened his dry lips. "I hadn't thought ... quite so soon...."
"Why not? Why not?"
"She is so very young," he mumbled, and turned away his face.
"Why, Richard, Richard!" she exclaimed softly. "God knows I'm not in
love with old-fashioned ideas. I've only to put up my hand behind my ear
to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down
Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas
are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this
idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What
you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old
enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you
miscall--that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed
in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her
inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of
the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to
each other, like other mothers and sons?
He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right,
mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false
brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in
town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything
really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got
lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with
her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult
to get."
"Ah, jewellery," she said.
"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented,
unconscious of her irony.
Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen,
that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and
would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you,
they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to
give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for
certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The
heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are
no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well
with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was
not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her
son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise
ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the
house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling
under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be
lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still
suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's
misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but
lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who
sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So
it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft
as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself. It had seemed to
Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the
moon's faith in them. Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights
were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion
had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to
hunger for something hardly to be attained by man. Perhaps his son, if
he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had
forgotten. She said eagerly: "Richard, before you go to bed, let us go
out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island."
"No," he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap. She began to
rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation.
There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that
there was no hope, things never went well on this earth. Then he
exclaimed suddenly, "Marion."
"Yes?"
She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of
Ellen's magic which he loved and desired to share with her. But he
muttered, "That box on the dresser. Up there on the top shelf."
She followed his eyes in amazement. "The scarlet one in the corner? That
belongs to cook. I think it's her workbox. What about it?"
He stared at it with a drowsy smile. "You had a cloak that colour when I
was a child," he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.
"Why, so I had," she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, "How
he loves me! He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good
ale that he could drink. He speaks like a sweetheart...." And then
caught her breath. "But that," she wept on, "is how he ought to speak of
Ellen, not of me." A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into
her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong,
competent hands, and said to herself uneasily: "I wish life could be
settled by doing things and not by thinking...." But the conviction had,
by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind. She cried out to
herself in anguish: "Of course! Of course! He cannot love Ellen because
he loves me too much! He has nothing left to love her with!" A tide of
exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement
within her of the pride that leads to death. For if Richard went on
loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never
thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do. The girl
would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its
heart hurt as dear little Ellen. And there would be no future. She would
have no grandchildren. When she died he would be so lonely.... And it
was her own fault. All her life long she had let him see how she wanted
love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry's failure; and so he
had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his
own needs. "What can I do to put this right?" she asked herself. "What
can I do?"
She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap. "Mother,
what's the matter?"
"The matter?"
"You were looking at me like a judge who's passing sentence."
"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who
sentences the children for the sins of the father."
His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father.
"Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."
It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could
free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any
more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit
groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.
It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she
were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.
She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was
strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at
each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a
hammer on her own delicate reluctances.
"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I
ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before
he died."
He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.
"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent
because of the beating of her heart.
Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."
"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the
afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of
course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house,
which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father
standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was
happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't
got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which
he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia
and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their
names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled
from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them,
so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.
Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went
on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in,
if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite
close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped
himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got
to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come
and see you.'"
Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The
snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left
you to for years."
"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I
took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me
all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a
dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly
frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him
saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world,
will it be as jolly as this?'"
"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"
"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said
that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise
what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had
been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."
"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a
woman, what would you have said?"
"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for
one's husband. One expects much more."
"Why?"
"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his
eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a
house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we
talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to
him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been
worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But
men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a
mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a
son's a happier thing than a daughter--there's something a little sad
about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do
with this business of having children--and men like that do so love
happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the
lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the
couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke
up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four,
and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you
and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked
if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you
would."
"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"
"Yes. It was Punch."
She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had
loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that
he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up
old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.
She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know
that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."
"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque
Hall."
The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had,
so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went
on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.
And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead."
For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she
raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that
there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling
it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't
you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long
before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a
part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each
other--and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't
matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making
something--something--" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for
some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot,
and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is
so!" she cried defiantly.
The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and
envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.
He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to
bed," he said.
"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.
Uneasily he stood and watched her.
"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.
"The Registrar?"
"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one
does."
"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in
the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there
only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"
"Yes," he said. "Good-night."
When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the
table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought
grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to
her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door. She
flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there
would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything.
She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the
passage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the
memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive
and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken
of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve,
and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad
complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and
crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were
there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered
her.
Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite
with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it
seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on
her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had
read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said
that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant
cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was
somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause
of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was
no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked
with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits
that were all that was to be seen of the girl.
"Ellen," she said.
The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved
her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should
have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.
"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."
Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled
like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.
"I know. We've got the vote."
"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."
The girl sat up. "When did he come?"
"Last night."
"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"
"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."
Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've
nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said
shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she
noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet
high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too
modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my
dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets
lose their value when they are disclosed...."
She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a
glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.
Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity,
for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she
felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but
to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end
of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a
silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the
floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining
green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored
the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees
and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like
the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the
chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred
smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls,
in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured
itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She
nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.
Ellen ran across the lawn to her, beetle-black in her mourning, but
capering as foals do.
"I'll not have my breakfast till he does," she announced. "Is there
anything I can do for him?"
"Nothing, my dear, I'm afraid. But look at the view. Isn't it lovely?"
The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, it's bonny. And it's neat. It's redded
itself up for Richard's coming."
"'Redded itself up'? What does that mean?"
"Don't you use the word here? English seems to be a terribly poor
language. Redding up means making everything tidy and neat, so that
you're ready for anything."
That was what one must do: red oneself up. It was true that it was no
use doing that for Richard any more, and that there was no one else in
the world for whom she wished to be ready. But she must be schooled by
the spectacle of the earth, for here it was shining fair, and yet it had
nothing to expect; it was but the icing of a cake destined for some
sun's swallowing.
"Is Richard a good riser?" asked Ellen, adopting a severe,
servant-engaging tone to disguise the truth that she was trembling with
desire to see her lover.
"Usually, but he may be late to-day since he went to bed such a short
time ago. He evidently isn't up yet, for his blind's still down. That's
his room on the left."
But as they gazed the blind went up, and they saw him turning away from
the window.
"Oh, why didn't he look at us!" cried Ellen. "Why didn't he look at us?"
"Because he is thinking of nothing but how soon he can get down to
breakfast and meet you," said Marion; but being aware of the quality of
her blood, which was his, she knew that he had not seen his women and
the glittering world because he had risen blind with sullenness.
"Will he be long, do you think?" she pondered. "Not that I'd want him to
miss his bath." She broke into a kind of Highland fling, looking down on
the blue and silver estuary and chanting, "Lovely, lovely," but desisted
suddenly and asked: "Mrs. Yaverland, do you think there's a future
life?"
Marion said lazily, "I shouldn't have thought you need to think out that
problem yet awhile."
"Oh, I'm not worrying for myself. But on a fine day like this I just
hate to think my mother's not getting the benefit of it somewhere. And
seeing your age, I thought you might have begun to give the matter
consideration."
Marion resolved to treasure that remark for repetition to Richard; and
was dashed to remember that it was probable in future they would not
share their jokes. "Well, I don't think there's any evidence for it at
all," she said aloud; "but I don't think that proves that there isn't
one. I don't think we would be allowed to know if there was one, for I'm
sure that if most people knew for certain there was going to be another
world they wouldn't make the best of this." But she saw, from the way
that Ellen continued to stare down at her toes, that that abstract
comfort had not been of any service, so she parted with yet another
secret. "But I do know that when Richard's father died all the trees
round the house seemed to know where he had gone."
Ellen raised wet but happier eyes. "Why, I felt like that when they
brought mother's coffin out of the Fever Hospital. Only then it was the
hills in the distance that knew--the Pentland Hills. But do you really
think that was true?"
"I knew it was then," said Marion. "If I am less certain now it is only
because I have forgotten."
They nodded wisely. "After all, there must be something."
"Yes, there must be something...."
Ellen began to dance again. Marion turned aside and tried to lose the
profound malaise that the reticent feel when they have given up a secret
in thinking how well worth while it had been, since Ellen was such a
dear, young, loving thing. She found consolation in this frost-polished
morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her
abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance
over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of
rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine
jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world
had neglected nothing in its redding up.
At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go
in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"
"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. From now onwards he's
yours, not mine."
Ellen ran in and Richard came to the window to meet her. As he drew her
over the threshold by both hands he called down the garden, "Good
morning, mother." But Marion had perceived that from the moment of
seeing her his face had worn the dark colour of estrangement. She turned
and walked blindly away, not noticing that Mabel had come out to bring
her the morning post, and was following at her heels, till the girl
coughed.
There were four letters. She opened them with avidity, for they were
certificates that there were other things in life as well as Richard
with which she could occupy herself. Two were bills, the first from her
dressmakers and the other from the dealer who had sold her some coloured
glass a few weeks before; and there was a dividend warrant for her to
sign and send to her bankers. Sweeping about the lawn as on a stage, she
resolved to buy clothes that would make her look like other untormented
women, and more hangings and pictures and vases to make her house look
gay. Then she observed that the fourth envelope was addressed in the
handwriting of the son whom she could not love.
She looked towards the house and saw the son whom she loved, but he did
not see her. Ellen's red head was close to his shoulder.
It was horrible handwriting outside and inside the envelope: a weak
running of ink that sagged downwards in the second half of every line
and added feeble flourishes to every capital that gave the whole an air
of insincerity. It had the disgusting appearance of a begging letter,
and indeed that was what it was. It begged for love, for condonation of
the writer's loathsomeness. She held it far off as she read:
"DEAR MOTHER,
"You will be wondering why I had not written to you. You will know soon
that something you would not have expected has happened to me. I am not
sure how you will take it. But I will be with you in two days, and then
you will see for yourself. I hope you will not harden your heart against
me, dear mother.
"Your loving son,
"ROGER."
There was no address, but the postmark was Chelmsford. No doubt he had
written in the cells. For the letter could have no other meaning but
that the disgrace she had foreseen had at last arrived.
She could not bear to be out there alone on that wide lawn, in the
bright light, in the intense cold. She ran to the window, and not daring
to look in lest they should be very close together, she called,
"Richard, Roger is coming."
There was a noise of a chair being pushed back, and Richard stood over
her, asking: "When? Has he written?"
She held out the letter.
There was the rustling of paper crushed in the hand, and she looked up
into his burning and compassionate eyes. Her head dropped back on her
throat; she grew weak with happiness. He was her own once more, if she
would but disclose in what great fear and misery she stood. But in the
room behind there sounded the chink of china. Little Ellen was bending
over the table, putting the tea-cosy over Richard's egg.
Marion said levelly: "Well, I shall be glad of Roger's company while
you're occupied with Ellen." She added reprovingly, as if she were
speaking to a child: "You mustn't be jealous of the poor thing. I saw
last night that you can be jealous...."
His eyes blazed at the indecency. He stepped back from the window.