Ellen was very glad that Marion was going out for the whole of the
afternoon, for then she would be alone with Richard; and though they had
been out together all the morning, there had been that in the atmosphere
which made a third. The whole time it had been apparent that the coming
of this Roger, who must be an awful man, was upsetting him terribly.
When he had taken her out into the garden after breakfast he had looked
up into the vault of the morning and had put his hand to his head,
making a sound of envy, as if he felt a contrast between its crystal
quality and his own state of mind. He had liked standing with her at the
edge of the garden and setting names to the facets of the landscape,
which he plainly loved as he had never told her that he did. He really
cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be
afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned
out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not
lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way
among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the
golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts
and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black
gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped.
Something in the orchard below had waylaid his attention. Ellen looked
down the steep bank to see what it was, and saw Marion sitting in the
low crook of an apple-tree. She snatched at contemptuous notice of the
way that the tail of the woman's gown, which anyway was far too good for
any sensible person to wear just going about the house and garden in the
morning, was lying in a patch of undispersed frost; but fear re-entered
her heart. Marion was sitting quite still with her back to them, yet the
distant view of her held the same terrifying quality of excess as her
near presence.
There could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the
earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat,
stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.
Richard said: "No, she isn't crying. She isn't moving. I should feel a
fool if I went down and she didn't want me." And because his voice was
thin and husky like a nervous child's, and because he was answering a
question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid. This woman was
throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....
* * * * *
But these were only the things that one thought about life. As soon as
one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be. The world was not
really tragic. When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where
they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure,
and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even
now, since the water looked so smooth. He answered that winter boating
was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation
that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but
which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had
had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white
oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed
the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin
snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only
warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the
primrose moon on the right. She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to
take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take
her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in
the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.
Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he
turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious
abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world
that he refused to hurry, "Go and put on your hat and we'll start at
once." So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the
harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she
forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.
There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically
unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat
dwellings that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and
boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs
of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being
designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know
of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and
there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the
place which struck the same note of innocence.
The town council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the
esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a
bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with
cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen
thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too,
when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed
the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The
houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep
green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which no one sat,
and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its
base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take
the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air
had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish,
spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were
brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but
breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the
pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the
simple people who lived in the other part of the town.
She was amused by it all, and was sorry when they came to the
Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked
very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was
polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant
port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to
land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains,
spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled
beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the
boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before
had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men
who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on the
tradition of brave life, and it made her want to cry to see how
crowsfeet of pleasure came at the corners of their eyes when they looked
at Richard, and how they liked to slap his strong back with their rough
hands, which age was making delicate with filigree of veins and
wrinkles. And she could see, too, that they liked her. They looked at
her as if they thought she was pretty, and teased her about the
Votes-for-Women button she was wearing, but quite nicely.
When they were standing under the dark eaves of the boathouse, looking
up at the gleaming tawny sides of the motor-launch, one of the old men
pointed at the golden letters that spelt "Gwendolen" at the prow, and
said, "Well, Yaverland, I suppose you'll have forgotten who she is these
days." Another added: "He'd better, if he's going to marry a
Suffragette." And all broke into clear, frosty laughter. She cried out
in protest, and told them that Suffragettes were not really fierce at
all, and that the newspapers just told a lot of lies about them, and
that anyway it was only old-fashioned women who were jealous, and they
listened with smiling, benevolent deference, which she enjoyed until her
eyes lighted on Richard, and she saw that he was more absorbed in her
effect on his friends than in herself.
For a moment she felt as lonely as she had been before she knew him, and
she looked towards the boat and stared at the reflection of the group in
the polished side and wished that one of the dim, featureless shapes she
saw there had been her mother, or anyone who had had a part in her old
life in Edinburgh. She turned back to the men and brought the
conversation to an end with a little laughing shake of the head, giving
them the present of an aspect of her beauty to induce them to let her
mind go free. Again she felt something that her commonsense forbade to
be quite fear when he did not notice for a minute that she was wistfully
asking him to take her away. It was all right, of, course.
When they had said good-bye to the happy old men and were walking along
the promenade, he asked: "What was the matter, darling? Didn't you like
them? They're really very good old sorts"; and understood perfectly when
she answered: "I know they are, but I don't want anybody but you." There
was indeed vehemence in his reply: "Yes, dear, we don't want anybody but
ourselves, do we?" Undoubtedly there was a change in the nature of the
attention he was giving her. Instead of concentrating in that steady
delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated
between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete
abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his
stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of
the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She
hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend,
whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished
home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and
disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and
soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life
explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the
luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where
Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness,
overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the
hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the
squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything
else in the glittering, brittle world around her.
Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under
Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within
herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were
always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their
absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white,
view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the
hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she
turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have
you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of
her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more
desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen
had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house
with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the
midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast
mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And
Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had
noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is
he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very
poor person, ma'am. His boots is right through, and his coat's half off
his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.
Shall I tell him to go away?"
But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.
She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a
minute."
Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each
other queerly.
She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook
haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably
haven't seen him since he was a boy."
"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at
the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and
unsuspicious."
Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face
suffused with the bloom of kind, sad passion, and lifted towards her
son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the
rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if
she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful,
closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some
hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated
her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard
of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had
stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the
kitchen.
"Richard!" breathed Ellen.
He went on eating.
"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does
she want it to be Roger?"
"God knows, God knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are
lots of things about her that I don't understand."
Some moments passed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she
said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."
"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He
stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly,
coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out
suddenly. "Who is it?"
"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a
ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's
Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman
but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away
because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and
now he's on the road. I must give him something, poor creature. Such a
nice wife he had--he says she's in Chelmsford workhouse. I'll send him
on to old Dawkins at Dane End; I'll get him to give the poor wretch a
few days' work."
Ellen disliked her as she left the room. She looked thick and ordinary,
and was apparently absorbed in the mildly gross satisfaction of a
well-to-do woman at being bountiful. Moreover, she had in some way hurt
Richard, for his face was dark when he came back to the table.
But an amazement struck Ellen as she thought over the scene. "Richard,"
she exclaimed excitedly, "is it not just wonderful that this man should
come to your mother for help after she'd put him to the door? I'm sure
she'd make a body feel just dirt if she was putting them to the door. It
would be a quiet affair, but awful uncomfortable. But she's such a good
woman that, even seeing her like that, he knew she was the one to come
to when he was really in trouble. Do you not think it's like that?"
"Oh yes," he almost groaned. "Even when she's at her worst you know that
she's still better than anyone else on this earth."
When Marion came back she sat down at the table without noticing what
seemed to Ellen his obvious dejection, and began to talk about this man
Milford, telling of the power he had over his beasts and how a prize
heifer that they then had, by the name of Susan Caraway, had fretted for
three weeks after he had left. She said that he gained this power over
animals not by any real love for them, for he was indifferent to them
except when he was actually touching them, and would always scamp his
work without regard for their comfort, but simply by some physical
magnetism, and pointed out that there it resembled the power some men
have over women. It surprised Ellen that she laughed as she said that,
and seemed to find pleasure in the thought of such a power. When the
meal was over she sat for a moment, gathering together the breadcrumbs
by her plate, and said pensively: "Yes, it might quite easily have been
Roger." Ellen wondered how it was that Richard had always spoken of his
mother as if she needed his protection, when her voice was so nearly
coarse with the sense of being able to outface all encounterable events,
and she felt a flash of contempt for his judgment. She wished, too, that
when Marion rose from, the table he had not followed her so closely
upstairs and hovered round her as she took up her stand on the
hearthrug, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her foot in the fender,
and kept his eyes on her face as she settled down in an armchair. It was
just making himself cheap, dangling after a woman who was perched up on
herself like a weathercock.
When she said, "I'm going to walk over to Friar's End. Old Butterworth
wants me to do some repairs which I don't feel inclined to do, so I want
to have a look at the place for myself," the announcement was so little
tinged by any sense of the persons she was addressing that she might as
well have held up a printed placard. Ellen thought he was a little
abject to answer, "So far as I can remember, Butterworth's rather a
rough specimen. Wouldn't you like us to come with you?" and almost
deserved that she did not hear. Such deafness argued complete
abstraction; and indeed, as she turned towards them and stood looking
out towards the river, her face again wore that incomprehensible
expression of secret and even furtive satisfaction. The sight of it
fell like a whip on Richard. He lowered his head and sat staring at the
floor. Ellen cried out to herself, "She's an aggravating woman if ever
there was one. It's every bit as bad as not saying what you feel, this
not saying what you look," and tried to pierce with her eyes the dreamy
surface of this gloating. But she could make nothing of it, and looked
back at Richard; and shuddered and drew her hands across her eyes when
she saw that he had lifted his head and was turning towards her a face
that had become the mirror of his mother's expression. He, too, was
wrapped in some exquisite and contraband contentment. She raised her
brows in enquiry, and mockingly he whispered back words which he knew
she could not hear.
"I think I'll go now," said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.
Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly: "Why
are you looking at me like that?" But he would not answer, and began to
laugh quietly. "Tell me!" she begged, but still he kept silence, and
seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but
would not disclose. It struck her as another example of Marion's
dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room
after she had left it and that it should blot out the son's habitual
splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly: "Oh, very well, be a
Cheshire cat if you feel called to it," and went and pretended to look
for a volume in the bookcase. It was annoying that he did not come after
her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat
until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front
door.
She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above
the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was
at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but
because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling,
she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the
smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored
world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to
ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again
in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little
bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God
could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right
too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our
time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the
living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put
about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the
outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.
She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly reassured.
For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it
borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved
in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts
commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the
broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only
frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve
and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to
find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed
them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her
wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body
close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was
astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and
felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to
him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her
on to his knee and began to kiss her.
But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain
expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process
which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had
a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of
course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over
and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told
herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind
of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of
love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest
kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were
impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she
found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare,
bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of
tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had
their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it
was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that
he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like
trees.
Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it
was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first
there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when
one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a
tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk,
and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces
where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the
birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the
grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches
that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were
their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together;
the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when
they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making
anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves
his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he
sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad
when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.
"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade
necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good
against your white, white skin."
"That's verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by," she told
him wisely, "for I couldn't go wearing a green necklace when I'm in
mourning."
"But you won't be in mourning much longer."
"Six months in full mourning, six months half. That's as it should be
for a mother."
"But what nonsense!" he exclaimed irascibly. "When you're a young little
thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes. It doesn't do your mother
any good, your going about in black."
"I know well it doesn't, but, remember, mother was old-fashioned Scotch,
and she was most particular about having things just so. Specially on
melancholy occasions. I remember she was most pernickety about her
blacks after my father's death. And though she's entered into eternal
life, we've no guarantee that that makes a body sensible all at once."
She saw on his face an expression which reminded her that he had been
careful never to acquiesce when she spoke of the possibility of a future
life, and she cried out: "You needn't look so clever. I'm sure she's
going on somewhere, and why you should grudge it to the poor woman I
don't know. And your mother thinks there's something after death, too.
She told me this morning in the garden that she was quite certain of it
when your father died. She said that all the trees round the house
seemed to know where he had gone."
"Oh, she said that, did she?" His arms released her. He stared into her
face. "She said that, did she?" he repeated in an absent, faintly
malevolent murmur; and clasped her in his arms again and kissed her so
cruelly that her lips began to bleed.
"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. "You're not loving me, you're just
taking exercise on me!"
He let her go, but not, she knew from the smile on his face, from any
kindness, but rather that he might better observe her distress and gloat
over it. She moved away from the heat of the fire and from that other
heat which had so strangely been engendered by these contacts which
always before engendered light, and went to the window and laid her
forehead against the cold glass. The day had changed and lost its smile,
for the sky was hidden by a dirty quilt of rain-charged clouds and the
frost had seeped into the marshes and left them dark, acid winter green,
yet she longed to walk out there in that unsunned and water-logged
country, opening her coat to the cold wind brought by the grey, invading
tides, making little cold pools where she dug her heels into the sodden
ground, getting rid of her sense of inflammation, and being quite alone.
That she should want not to be with Richard, and that she should not be
perfectly pleased with what pleased him, seemed to her monstrous
disloyalty, and she turned and smiled at him. But there was really
something wrong with this room and this hour, for as she looked at him
she felt frightened and ashamed, as if he were drunk, though she knew
that he was sober; and indeed his face was flushed and his eyes wet and
winking, as if smoke had blown in them. For some reason that she could
not understand he reminded her of Mr. Philip.
She cried out imploringly. "Take me down to the marshes, Richard!"
He shook his head and laughed at some private joke. She felt desolate,
like a child at school whom other children shut out from their secrets,
and drooped her head; and heard him say presently: "We are going out
this afternoon, but not on the marshes."
"Where?"
He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would
not answer. She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a
game of it to cover her near approach to tears. Then he told her, not
because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed
to put him in a good humour. "We're going to the registrar, my dear, to
fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks' time."
The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing
at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.
He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more
suitable to a smaller man. Oh, he was terribly different to-day! His
eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were
narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full. She screamed "Oh, no!
Oh, no!" without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was
crying out.
He laughed and pulled her down on his knees. He was laughing more than
she had ever known him laugh before. "Why, don't you want to, you little
thing?"
Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some
reason. But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet,
unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.
She said feebly, as one who asks for water: "Please, please take me down
to the sea-wall."
His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness. "But why don't you
want to come and see about our marriage? Are you frightened, dear?"
Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as
he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and
said: "Nellie, ma wee lassie, dis onything ail ye?" and yet left her
with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of
curiosity and not because he really cared for her. She was dizzied.
Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard. She muttered: "Yes, a
little."
He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with
a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine. "Frightened of me, my darling?"
She pulled herself off his knee. "I don't know, I don't know."
"Why? Why?"
She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the
flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to
Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The
immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and
twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly
because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr.
Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had
hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects
was not so great as she would have hoped. She could bear it no longer,
and screamed out: "Oh! Oh! That's how Mr. Philip looked!"
It took him a minute to remember who she meant. Then his face shadowed.
"Don't remind me of him, for God's sake!" he said through his teeth. "Go
and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar."
She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her
trembling. He was very like Mr. Philip. Softly she said: "You sounded
awful, as if you were telling me."
"I was."
She began to want to cry. "I'll not do anything that I'm told."
He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat. It struck her as a
mark of debasement that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their
minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made
some wordless sound. He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard
him before: "Go and put on your things."
"Away yourself to the registrar," she cried more loudly still, "and tell
him he'll never marry you to me."
The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled
something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.
She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was;
and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards
a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden
feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peacock it in heaven, had
come to show his wings to earth. On the other side, turned to the colour
of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that
Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were
remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many
concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman. The
woman was not young and wore a man's cloth cap and a full, long, filthy
skirt. They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard
apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures
across the gap. At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces
close together, and vomited coarse cries at one another; and she had
looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at
the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than
terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some
boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners. Then she
had been sixteen. Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting
across a space. Could it be that vileness was not a state which one
could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human,
one must pass? If that were so, life was too horrible. She cried out
through his vehemence: "No, I'm not going to marry you."
"Don't be stupid. You're being exactly like all other women, silly and
capricious. Go and put your things on."
"I will not. I'm going away."
"Don't talk nonsense! Where are you going?"
"Back to Edinburgh." She made a hard line of her trembling mouth. "My
mind's made up."
He made a sound that expressed pure exasperation untouched with
tenderness, and his eyes darted about her face in avaricious
appraisement of this property that was trying to detach itself from him
with a display of free will that might not be tolerated in property. She
could see him resolving to take it lightly, and thought to herself:
"Maybe it's just as well that it's to be broken off, for I doubt I'm too
clever for marriage. I would read him like a book and, considering
what's in him"--a convulsion of rage shook her--"he'd be annoyed at
that."
He had been saying with deliberate flippancy: "Oh, you silly little
Ellen," but at that convulsion a change came over him. Delight
transfigured him. He jerked his head back as she had done, as if he
would like to continue the violent rhythm of her movement through his
own body, and blood and laughter rushed back to his face. Taking a step
towards her, he called softly: "Oh, my Ellen, don't let us quarrel! Come
here."
But she remembered then how that scene at the base of the golden stone
had ended. The pair had swung apart and had staggered their several
ways, shrieking over their shoulders; and had suddenly pivoted round and
stood looking at each other in silence. Then they had run together and
joined in a rocking embrace, a rubbing of their bodies, and had put
their mouths to each other's faces so munchingly that it had looked as
if they must turn aside some time and spit out the cores of their
kisses. She would have no such reconciliation. "I won't! I tell you I
hate you!" she cried, and escaped his arm.
Rage came into his face without displacing his intention to make love to
her. That was against nature, unless nature was utterly perverse! She
could not bear it. She struck him across the mouth and ran out of the
room.
There was a moment of confusion on the landing when she could not tell
which of the white doors on the right and left led into her bedroom. The
first one she opened showed her a table piled with heavy books; a vast
wardrobe with glass doors showing a line of dresses coloured like autumn
and of fabrics so exquisite that they might be imagined sentient; under
a shelf beneath it a long straight line, regular as the border plants in
a parterre, of glossy wooden shoe-trees rising out of rather large shoes
made from many kinds of leather and velvets and satins; and in the
carpets and the hangings a profound and vibrant blue. Accusingly she
exclaimed into the emptiness, "Marion!" and darted into her own room
just as Richard burst out into the passage. She flung herself on the bed
and lay quite still while he knocked on the door. Twice he called her
name. Nothing in her desired to answer. That was both relief and the
loss of all. Three times again he knocked, and there penetrated through
the panels one of those wordless noises that had been disgusting her all
the afternoon. After a moment's silence she heard him go downstairs. She
leaped up and dragged her trunk from a corner into the middle of the
room, but instead of beginning to pack she fell on her knees and wept on
to the comfortingly cool and smooth black surface.
"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I
thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll
just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and
looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them
terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my
face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into
her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and
found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely
guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be
dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be
dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a
necessary and noble journey towards economic and spiritual independence
it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh,
which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her
mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight.
What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real
way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be
crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer
pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it
and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried
about the town.
Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed
and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained
and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her
life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man
whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to
disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in
the glass which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate
the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It
struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from
her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was
overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened
to her in it.
She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping,
but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that
her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a
vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have
foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the
galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many
fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who
died God's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one
of them.
She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that
it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of glass
which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a
dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the
victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of
this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and
wept and wept, until she fell asleep.
It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she
remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past
few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a
light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that
it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want
to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet
terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those
superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and
waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps
that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more--they
were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was
the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep
and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing
heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he
was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he
was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you
poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"
But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt
down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face
from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent
of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words
and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.
"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute--oh, such a
brute. Do, do forgive me."
"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."
"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.
"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly,
and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and
the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my
love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"
He broke into anguished laughter. "No, you wee little thing!" He
strained her to him and faltered vehemently: "You generous dear! When
I've insulted and bullied you and shouted at you, you ask me if you've
hurt me! I wish you had. It would have given me some of the punishment I
deserve. Oh, keep me, you wonderful, strong, forgiving dear! Keep me
from being a hound, keep me from forgetting--whatever it is we've found
out. You've seen what I'm like when I've forgotten it. Oh, love me! Love
me!"
"I will, I will!"
They clung together and spent themselves in reconciling kisses.
"It was my fault, too," she whispered. "I was awful hard on you. And
maybe I took you up too quick."
"No, it was all my fault," he answered softly. "I was worried and I lost
my head."
"Worried? What are you worried about, my darling? You never told me
that."
"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. It's not a definite worry. It's to
do"--his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of
the room--"with my mother."
If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft. "Your
mother?" she repeated.
"Yes," he said petulantly. It struck her that there was something
infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might
feel against its nurse. "She's been the centre of my whole life. And now
... I don't know whether she cares for me at all. I don't believe she
ever cared for anybody but my father. It's puzzling."
His eyes were fixed on the shadows. He had quite forgotten her. She
leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling
of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.
He dropped a kiss on it and went on: "So, you see, I fell back on you
for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me. It's
funny the change it makes in everything. I became--so conventional. When
you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn't follow you because
I was conscious that I oughtn't to come into your room. Afterwards,
when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by
you, I didn't care a damn for any rule." Their lips met again. She had
to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about
anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a
woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more
fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for
you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...
that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The
corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like
my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot
her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came
back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.
"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know
why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.
Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that
time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you
might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in
the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your
living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially
happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those
lustful old swine."
She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she
had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and
what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she
had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she
was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as
if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them lustful?"
In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could
see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them
proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you
if he'd been young."
Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it
meant, but accepted it.
A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and
began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that
means?"
She shook her head.
"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."
In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured: "Sometimes. A little."
He was trembling. "You poor thing. You poor little thing. Yet I can't
tell you."
She clapped her hands over her ears. "Ah, no. I couldn't bear to listen
if you did." They sank into a trembling silence. Her black eyes, fixed
on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white
evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying
under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which
seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other
sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in
them proofs that the core of life was darkness. There came on her
suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when
she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard. She
remembered it with a singular lack of dismay. There ran through her on
the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new
experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid
annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had
fallen down about her shoulders. They stood easily together in the light
of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head,
he looking down on the disordered glory.
"But what's that for?" he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the
middle of the floor.
Her eyes filled with tears. "I was packing to go back to Edinburgh."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said solemnly. "I came near to imperilling a
perfect thing." He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss
her, but she started away from him.
"Oh, maircy! What cold hands!" she exclaimed.
"I've been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle. It was
freezing. And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and
shaking with rage."
"You poor silly thing!" she cried lovingly. "Give me yon bits of ice!"
She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.
For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great
for him to bear, and he whispered: "This is all it is! This is all it
is!"
"What do you mean?" she murmured.
"What you fear ... is just like this. You will comfort my whole body as
you are comforting my hands...."
She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her
face, and she answered loudly, plangently: "Then I shall not be afraid!"
They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy: "I will marry
you any day you like." When he answered, "No, no, I will wait," she
jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I
want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they
travelled far into a new sphere of love.
It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from
her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express
train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her
that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.
But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder
out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and
pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear.
She swung round to see what it was.
A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.
Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that
the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what
was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with
her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that
these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet
interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut
unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass
buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the
woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored
skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were
ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."
The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting
clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the
shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they
should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured
the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect
harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in
disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.
She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into
their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection
and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover
what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.
There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united
several qualities that one would not have thought could be found
together. She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet
worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at
the shoulders as if she were fragile. But the man was odd enough. He was
pale and had a very long neck, and wore an expression of extreme
foolishness. From the frown with which he was accompanying his gaping
stare it was evident that his mind was so vague and wandering that he
found it difficult to concentrate it; she was reminded of an inexpert
person she had once seen trying to put a white rabbit into a bag. She
looked again at the girl, with that contempt she felt, now that she had
Richard, for all women who let themselves mate with unworthy men, and
found that her dark eyes were fixed sullenly, almost hungrily, on
Richard. She laid her hand on Richard's arm and cried: "If it's not
impudence, it's the next thing to it, staring like that into a pairson's
room! They're collecting, I suppose. Away and give them a penny."
"No," said Richard. "They are not collecting. That is Roger."