|LIFE is still greater than machines. Machines accomplish marvels and
very wonderfully continue to accomplish them, but life refuses the
mechanical. It was man, and not nature, who invented the wheel, and life
does not revolve upon an axle. Life will not repeat itself: and it can
excel itself.
They had not thought, when they came back to Marbeck at the turn of the
year, that Marbeck could be better than before. They came hoping, they
said, to recapture the old emotions, and brought Anne with them to show
her their fairyland. They did not recapture the old emotions, because
they were young emotions, a ferment like youth itself, and things were
settled now. They seemed to look back from their equable security to
a wild infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of
love. Of course they looked back happily, from a place where things were
happy and serene to one where things were happy and impetuous.
The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly
to fact and had mellowed in reality.
For Anne, it was a pretty place, but “lonesome,” and, amazingly to them,
she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly.
They had extolled Anne, they had not thought it credible that she should
fail at anything, and it ruffled them disturbingly to find her fail at
this. They had planned eagerly and, indeed, generously to bring her with
them to Marbeck--generously, because they wanted to be alone, and even
Anne, owe her what they did and be she what she might, was an intruder.
But they wanted her to share with them their wonderland. Marbeck was
theirs, theirs intimately and alone, their holy place, and they could
think of nothing finer, nothing which came more nearly to her deserts of
them, than to initiate her to their secret worship.
They made her free of Marbeck, relived their week for her as much as for
themselves, showed her where this and that dear folly happened, took
her to view-points whence she could see the tops of hills they climbed,
using the landscape as the ground-plan of an ecstasy which they invited
her to share, and were discomposed to find that Anne, plainly straining
enthusiasm in their behalf, could only say of Marbeck, their Marbeck,
“I’m sure it’s very nice.”
She damned with faint praise their enchanted valley in whose every
tree they took by now as fierce a joy as if they had created it, and
in despair they dragged her, as a last hope, to the very Holy of their
holies, the top of Hartle Pike. If she failed them there, if she did
not see the beauty and the grace, the penetrating significance and the
absolute sanctity of Hartle Pike, then her greatness was lopsided,
resulting, like a show chrysanthemum, from the atrophy of other
possibilities.
It was a great day for the fells, when a frozen surface crushed
elastically underfoot and kept one dryshod anywhere, and they walked
in frosty, sun-kissed air, keenly exhilarating yet spicily warm. Snow
capped the greater heights and seemed to clarify an atmosphere already
clear, but the dales were free of snow and never more fit for walking
than now when their boggy surface was dried up and roughened to the
tread by crisp, granulated particles of frost.
Anne granted to herself that if one must take a holiday, this generous
activity made nearly a venial matter of it. To climb these slopes was
almost as satisfying to her body as to wash a long flight of steps, and
she reached the top feeling as pleasantly tired as if she had done half
a day’s charring.
Still, she hadn’t charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed
charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her.
She itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do
except to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she
liked, at any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She
began, for the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness
towards dirt. In the midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant
cleanliness, she hankered for a little humanizing soot. She could have
loved her life-long enemy, and he did not appear... it was not a bit
like Manchester.
Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky
cloud of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the
Lakeland Coast--a message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt
in this great waste of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and
the thing she had to do.
Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and
when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other’s.
They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour
of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other’s joy.
Then Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a
rapt intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched
her.
“Where’s yon?” she asked, “yon smoke?”
His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne’s
failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She
had not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else.
And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged
themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed
to him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her
attention, nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly
finished off. Of course they had stupid legal business to come, but that
was well ahead and, in any case, was not to worry them.
She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made
the trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.”
He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in
Peter Struggles’ house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating
interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how
Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and
passionate appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was
despairingly sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past
and supplicated for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck
faith, and how she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him
she must leave a house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult
of this man’s presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage,
who had carried Ada to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada
seemed quite happy there, “nursing her grievance like a child,” and
was looking for a house. He had found something mystifying about the
intervention of Mrs. Grandage: good nature fortified by a bad conscience
was his attempt to explain her attitude, but what emerged clearly
from the letters she wrote to Peter was that Ada had no intention of
returning to Manchester: and when he thought of Southport, he realized
its quintessential rightness as her home. He had not shirked his job; he
had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his job; and he was not
allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport seemed the aptest
place for her. “Only,” as Mrs. Grandage wrote, “she mast have money.”
That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it
came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely
right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing
business in its early days.
Dubby was in Effie’s room, “which is where,” he said, “your brother has
a right to be.”
“You keep that up,” she smiled.
“Is the poor dog to get none?” he asked.
“He is to have whatever he wants,” she said.
“--that’s going,” he completed her sentence.
“Yes,” said Effie, not smiling now, and kissed him very simply to seal
his brotherhood.
He stood silent for a moment, then, with a jerk of his head he, so to
speak, cut his loss and turned to her with the frank confidence of their
settled relationship. “Now we can talk,” he said. “Tell me about old
Sam. What are you going to do with him? And with his business?”
She evaded his first question. “The business? Oh, he’ll sell that.”
“Then let me buy.”
“You! Oh!”
“Why not?”
“You know what I think of it.”
“I’m only the dog, my dear. Do you know any Greek? There’s a connection
between being a dog and being a cynic. In certain circumstances, I’d
have thought with you to the crack of doom, but your brother’s a cynic.”
“I see,” said Effie sadly. “But he will always be my brother, Dubby.”
“Thanks, Effie,” he said. “That will keep me on the sweeter side of
currishness. But a dog wants meat. You’ll tell Sam I’m to have the first
refusal of that business. I’ll scrape a syndicate together in a week.”
So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near
Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to
tell Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously
small, she had refused to be impressed.
“It’s not the means of life that matters, Sam. It’s living: it’s the
quality of life: it’s what we do with life,” she said, and Ada got the
means.
“She’ll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool,” said Dubby, when
he heard.
“Why Liverpool?” asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought
Sam’s question stupid.
“By the way, Sam,” Dubby said, “have you and Effie any plans?”
“No,” said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother’s curiosity was not
to be stifled like that, and Sam’s face told her, too, how he had
hung on her reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not
dropped his calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of
plans because she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam,
she thought, deserved a little punishment for thinking otherwise. “I
suppose,” she went on, “we shall stay in Manchester and face the music.”
“Oh!” said Sam blankly.
“Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge,” she teased.
“But it can’t hurt me now I’m out of politics,” he said, confessing by
his tone that it would hurt him very much.
“It will please him, though,” she said.
“I’d... I’d thought of going to America,” he ventured.
“America!” scoffed Dubby. “_O sancta simplicitas!_ America’s not El
Dorado, Sam. El Dorado’s been found. I’d even say it’s been found out.”
“There are big things in America,” Sam defended his idea.
“As a matter of fact, Dubby,” said Effie, silencing him, “we shall go to
Marbeek for a little while. It’s a good place to begin from.”
With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek;
they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard
and fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the
first time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness.
Perhaps she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but,
if so, Anne helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to
Marbeek now, not to end, but to begin, and to begin together.
Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn’t, for the
life of him, make out why Anne was not content.
He half explained the valley’s failure to enchant her when he perceived
that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be
looking? And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible
for anyone to pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the
one smoke-clouded spot?
“Mother,” he cried in downright exasperation, “aren’t you happy here?”,
“I’d be happier in Manchester,” she said. “Yon smoke’s too far away to
taste. Aye, I think I’ll leave you here and go to-day.”
“But you’re not going back to Madge’s--to the work in other people’s
houses, I mean. That’s surely over now.”
“Maybe.”
“Mother, you’ve done with work.”
She eyed him grimly. “Not till I’m dead, my lad,” she said.
“Why won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of?”
“I’m thinking,” she said, “of yon slut in Peter Struggles’ kitchen. I’ll
have her out of that tomorrow.”
He glanced at Effie, and then looked again. He fancied he had surprised
a little smile on Effie’s face and looked twice to make sure. And when
he looked he found that Effie was looking back at him in the wise,
humorous way that he had come to know so well. “Don’t you see?” was what
she seemed to say.
And he did see. He saw that it was not Manchester, but a man in
Manchester; not the woman in Peter Struggles’ kitchen, but the man
in Peter’s parlour who interrupted his mother’s vision of the Marbeck
hills. She lost their beauty in a greater beauty of her own.
“And don’t be incredulous,” said Effie’s eyes.
She turned to Anne. “We’ll go down to the Inn at once,” she said, “and
you shall catch the train this afternoon.”
A quick look passed from Anne to Effie, from which they both excluded
Sam. It almost seemed that Anne was asking Effie for support, and that
Effie understood and nodded imperceptibly. And if Anne had seriously
doubted, her doubts were dissipated by a look which told her that, where
she was concerned, Effie believed in the feasibility of anything.
Nothing at Marbeck became Anne Branstone like her leaving it. “Why,
mother, how young you look!” he cried when she came downstairs to the
trap.
“It’s just as well,” said Anne, meeting Effie’s eye over his shoulder.
Then, after she had gone, and so pat upon her going as to be hardly
decent, life flamed for them ungrudgingly. There was something quite
impudently callous about the haste of it, as if life pulled a face
behind the older generation and turned lightheartedly to burn more
ardently for them. But Anne, and they knew it, would not have thanked
them to be sorry for her. She had gone to Peter Struggles, who needed
her.
They could not now resume the half amphibious life of their autumn days,
but the air itself from the snow-clad fells had all the stimulation of
a bath. It cleansed and healed by touch and heightened their well-being
till they moved in radiant exhilaration, now clamant at the joy of it,
now dumb before its wonder.
Happy themselves, they were the cause of happiness in others, not
self-contained in joy, but effervescing to the old black-beamed kitchen
of the Marbeck Inn.
They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at
an hotel without paying for it--and abrogated them. In the autumn
they had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and
affected all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good
listeners were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds,
dropping from heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling
this attentive audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that
strayed as wide afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged
the flocks they ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the
legends of John Peel and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to
make these dalesmen happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow,
rambling narrative--a long chain strung with pearls of racy episode--or
an hour of Effie at the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by
knowing no ballads, but having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the
latest music-hall songs stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in
the smoke room, they were knowing wags, in the kitchen they were
themselves, talking shop, and therefore interesting. Effie and Sam
preferred them in the kitchen, telling their slowly-moving tales, to
seeing them in their smoke-room mood, imitating badly a thing not worth
the imitating. But, in either room, they helped them to be happy.
Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the
kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace
brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water
of its gathering ground was frozen hard.
They stood there on the bridge while the moon rose over Hartle Pike
and scattered silver on the snow. Great shadows leaped to instant birth
below the Pike whose comely top was one black silhouette against the
brightened sky, and the beauty of the valley, seen by day with an almost
Alpine harshness, mellowed in the moonlight to a subtle luminosity.
Behind them were the lights of the friendly Inn; near by the low church
tower saluted God amongst the pines, and all around them spread the
lustrous radiance of the moon-flushed Dale.
For the hundredth time he restrained his impulse to repeat his words,
“We’ll build a tabernacle here,” and Effie read his thought.
“We’re making the good beginning here,” she said. “We’re practising and
I think we grow.”
“We grow in happiness,” he said, which he thought good argument for
staying at Marbeck.
“Yes. We grow in happiness. We shall have outgrown Marbeck soon. We
shall have grown a sturdy happiness that can withstand the towns. It
might withstand Manchester and I think it will. To love, to work, to
look for other people’s strength and not for other people’s weaknesses:
that is to be happy, Sam. And happiness counts more than all. It roots
and then it spreads. It spreads. Infection isn’t only of disease,
infection is of happiness and youth. There’s too much age, too many men
and women in the world who have forgotten love. We have to build, and
build on happiness.” They gazed at the unguessed future through the
silent night. God knows that there was work ahead for them to do!
THE END