washed up. Not much “wide and adaptable life” to take her thoughts
off herself. But on her journeys to and from the hospital she had more
than one odd little experience. One morning she noticed a poorly dressed
woman with a red and swollen face, flapping along Regent Street like a
wounded bird, and biting strangely at her hand. Hearing her groan, Noel
asked her what the matter was. The woman held out the hand. “Oh!”
she moaned, “I was scrubbin' the floor and I got this great needle
stuck through my 'and, and it's broke off, and I can't get it
out. Oh! Oh!” She bit at the needle-end, not quite visible, but almost
within reach of teeth, and suddenly went very white. In dismay, Noel put
an arm round her, and turned her into a fine chemist's shop. Several
ladies were in there, buying perfumes, and they looked with acerbity at
this disordered dirty female entering among them. Noel went up to a man
behind the counter. “Please give me something quick, for this poor
woman, I think she's going to faint. She's run a needle through her
hand, and can't get it out.” The man gave her “something quick,”
and Noel pushed past two of the dames back to where the woman was
sitting. She was still obstinately biting at her hand, and suddenly her
chin flew up, and there, between her teeth, was the needle. She took
it from them with her other hand, stuck it proudly in the front of her
dress, and out tumbled the words: “Oh! there—I've got it!”
When she had swallowed the draught, she looked round her, bewildered,
and said:
“Thank you kindly, miss!” and shuffled out. Noel paid for the
draught, and followed; and, behind her, the shining shop seemed to
exhale a perfumed breath of relief.
“You can't go back to work,” she said to the woman. “Where do
you live?”
“'Ornsey, miss.”
“You must take a 'bus and go straight home, and put your hand at
once into weak Condy's fluid and water. It's swelling. Here's five
shillings.”
“Yes, miss; thank you, miss, I'm sure. It's very kind of you. It
does ache cruel.”
“If it's not better this afternoon, you must go to a doctor.
Promise!”
“Oh, dear, yes. 'Ere's my 'bus. Thank you kindly, miss.”
Noel saw her borne away, still sucking at her dirty swollen hand. She
walked on in a glow of love for the poor woman, and hate for the ladies
in the chemist's shop, and forgot her own trouble till she had almost
reached the hospital.
Another November day, a Saturday, leaving early, she walked to Hyde
Park. The plane-trees were just at the height of their spotted beauty.
Few—very few-yellow leaves still hung; and the slender pretty trees
seemed rejoicing in their freedom from summer foliage. All their
delicate boughs and twigs were shaking and dancing in the wind; and
their rain-washed leopard-like bodies had a lithe un-English gaiety.
Noel passed down their line, and seated herself on a bench. Close by, an
artist was painting. His easel was only some three yards away from her,
and she could see the picture; a vista of the Park Lane houses through,
the gay plane-tree screen. He was a tall man, about forty, evidently
foreign, with a thin, long, oval, beardless face, high brow, large grey
eyes which looked as if he suffered from headaches and lived much within
himself. He cast many glances at her, and, pursuant of her new interest
in “life” she watched him discreetly; a little startled however,
when, taking off his broad-brimmed squash hat, he said in a broken
accent:
“Forgive me the liberty I take, mademoiselle, but would you so very
kindly allow me to make a sketch of you sitting there? I work very
quick. I beg you will let me. I am Belgian, and have no manners, you
see.” And he smiled.
“If you like,” said Noel.
“I thank you very much:”
He shifted his easel, and began to draw. She felt flattered, and a
little fluttered. He was so pale, and had a curious, half-fed look,
which moved her.
“Have you been long in England?” she said presently.
“Ever since the first months of the war.”
“Do you like it?”
“I was very homesick at first. But I live in my pictures; there are
wonderful things in London.”
“Why did you want to sketch me?”
The painter smiled again. “Mademoiselle, youth is so mysterious. Those
young trees I have been painting mean so much more than the old big
trees. Your eyes are seeing things that have not yet happened. There is
Fate in them, and a look of defending us others from seeing it. We
have not such faces in my country; we are simpler; we do not defend our
expressions. The English are very mysterious. We are like children to
them. Yet in some ways you are like children to us. You are not people
of the world at all. You English have been good to us, but you do not
like us.”
“And I suppose you do not like us, either?”
He smiled again, and she noticed how white his teeth were.
“Well, not very much. The English do things from duty, but their
hearts they keep to themselves. And their Art—well, that is really
amusing!”
“I don't know much about Art,” Noel murmured.
“It is the world to me,” said the painter, and was silent, drawing
with increased pace and passion.
“It is so difficult to get subjects,” he remarked abruptly. “I
cannot afford to pay models, and they are not fond of me painting out of
doors. If I had always a subject like you! You—you have a grief, have
you not?”
At that startling little question, Noel looked up, frowning.
“Everybody has, now.”
The painter grasped his chin; his eyes had suddenly become tragical.
“Yes,” he said, “everybody. Tragedy is daily bread. I have lost my
family; they are in Belgium. How they live I do not know.”
“I'm sorry; very sorry, too, if we aren't nice to you, here. We
ought to be.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “What would you have? We are different.
That is unpardonable. An artist is always lonely, too; he has a skin
fewer than other people, and he sees things that they do not. People do
not like you to be different. If ever in your life you act differently
from others, you will find it so, mademoiselle.”
Noel felt herself flushing. Was he reading her secret? His eyes had such
a peculiar, secondsighted look.
“Have you nearly finished?” she asked.
“No, mademoiselle; I could go on for hours; but I do not wish to keep
you. It is cold for you, sitting there.”
Noel got up. “May I look?”
“Certainly.”
She did not quite recognise herself—who does?—but she saw a face
which affected her oddly, of a girl looking at something which was, and
yet was not, in front of her.
“My name is Lavendie,” the painter said; “my wife and I live
here,” and he gave her a card.
Noel could not help answering: “My name is Noel Pierson; I live with
my father; here's the address”—she found her case, and fished out
a card. “My father is a clergyman; would you care to come and see him?
He loves music and painting.”
“It would be a great pleasure; and perhaps I might be allowed to paint
you. Alas! I have no studio.”
Noel drew back. “I'm afraid that I work in a hospital all day,
and—and I don't want to be painted, thank you. But, Daddy would like
to meet you, I'm sure.”
The painter bowed again; she saw that he was hurt.
“Of course I can see that you're a very fine painter,” she said
quickly; “only—only—I don't want to, you see. Perhaps you'd
like to paint Daddy; he's got a most interesting face.”
The painter smiled. “He is your father, mademoiselle. May I ask you
one question? Why do you not want to be painted?”
“Because—because I don't, I'm afraid.” She held out her hand.
The painter bowed over it. “Au revoir, mademoiselle.”
“Thank you,” said Noel; “it was awfully interesting.” And she
walked away. The sky had become full of clouds round the westerly sun;
and the foreign crinkled tracery of the plane-tree branches against
that French-grey, golden-edged mass, was very lovely. Beauty, and the
troubles of others, soothed her. She felt sorry for the painter, but his
eyes saw too much! And his words: “If ever you act differently from
others,” made her feel him uncanny. Was it true that people always
disliked and condemned those who acted differently? If her old
school-fellows now knew what was before her, how would they treat her?
In her father's study hung a little reproduction of a tiny picture in
the Louvre, a “Rape of Europa,” by an unknown painter—a humorous
delicate thing, of an enraptured; fair-haired girl mounted on a prancing
white bull, crossing a shallow stream, while on the bank all her white
girl-companions were gathered, turning half-sour, half-envious faces
away from that too-fearful spectacle, while one of them tried with timid
desperation to mount astride of a sitting cow, and follow. The face of
the girl on the bull had once been compared by someone with her own.
She thought of this picture now, and saw her school fellows-a throng
of shocked and wondering girls. Suppose one of them had been in her
position! 'Should I have been turning my face away, like the rest?
I wouldn't no, I wouldn't,' she thought; 'I should have
understood!' But she knew there was a kind of false emphasis in
her thought. Instinctively she felt the painter right. One who acted
differently from others, was lost.
She told her father of the encounter, adding:
“I expect he'll come, Daddy.”
Pierson answered dreamily: “Poor fellow, I shall be glad to see him if
he does.”
“And you'll sit to him, won't you?”
“My dear—I?”
“He's lonely, you know, and people aren't nice to him. Isn't
it hateful that people should hurt others, because they're foreign or
different?”
She saw his eyes open with mild surprise, and went on: “I know you
think people are charitable, Daddy, but they aren't, of course.”
“That's not exactly charitable, Nollie.”
“You know they're not. I think sin often just means doing things
differently. It's not real sin when it only hurts yourself; but that
doesn't prevent people condemning you, does it?”
“I don't know what you mean, Nollie.”
Noel bit her lips, and murmured: “Are you sure we're really
Christians, Daddy?”
The question was so startling, from his own daughter, that Pierson took
refuge in an attempt at wit. “I should like notice of that question,
Nollie, as they say in Parliament.”
“That means you don't.”
Pierson flushed. “We're fallible enough; but, don't get such ideas
into your head, my child. There's a lot of rebellious talk and writing
in these days....”
Noel clasped her hands behind her head. “I think,” she said, looking
straight before her, and speaking to the air, “that Christianity is
what you do, not what you think or say. And I don't believe people
can be Christians when they act like others—I mean, when they join
together to judge and hurt people.”
Pierson rose and paced the room. “You have not seen enough of life to
talk like that,” he said. But Noel went on:
“One of the men in her hospital told Gratian about the treatment of
conscientious objectors—it was horrible. Why do they treat them like
that, just because they disagree? Captain Fort says it's fear which
makes people bullies. But how can it be fear when they're hundreds to
one? He says man has domesticated his animals but has never succeeded in
domesticating himself. Man must be a wild beast, you know, or the world
couldn't be so awfully brutal. I don't see much difference between
being brutal for good reasons, and being brutal for bad ones.”
Pierson looked down at her with a troubled smile. There was something
fantastic to him in this sudden philosophising by one whom he had
watched grow up from a tiny thing. Out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings—sometimes! But then the young generation was always
something of a sealed book to him; his sensitive shyness, and, still
more, his cloth, placed a sort of invisible barrier between him and the
hearts of others, especially the young. There were so many things of
which he was compelled to disapprove, or which at least he couldn't
discuss. And they knew it too well. Until these last few months he had
never realised that his own daughters had remained as undiscovered by
him as the interior of Brazil. And now that he perceived this, he was
bewildered, yet could not imagine how to get on terms with them.
And he stood looking at Noel, intensely puzzled, suspecting nothing of
the hard fact which was altering her—vaguely jealous, anxious, pained.
And when she had gone up to bed, he roamed up and down the room a long
time, thinking. He longed for a friend to confide in, and consult; but
he knew no one. He shrank from them all, as too downright, bluff, and
active; too worldly and unaesthetic; or too stiff and narrow. Amongst
the younger men in his profession he was often aware of faces which
attracted him, but one could not confide deep personal questions to men
half one's age. But of his own generation, or his elders, he knew not
one to whom he could have gone.
VIII
Leila was deep in her new draught of life. When she fell in love it had
always been over head and ears, and so far her passion had always burnt
itself out before that of her partner. This had been, of course, a great
advantage to her. Not that Leila had ever expected her passions to burn
themselves out. When she fell in love she had always thought it was for
always. This time she was sure it was, surer than she had ever been.
Jimmy Fort seemed to her the man she had been looking for all her life.
He was not so good-looking as either Farie or Lynch, but beside him
these others seemed to her now almost ridiculous. Indeed they did not
figure at all, they shrank, they withered, they were husks, together
with the others for whom she had known passing weaknesses. There was
only one man in the world for her now, and would be for evermore. She
did not idealise him either, it was more serious than that; she was
thrilled by his voice, and his touch, she dreamed of him, longed for him
when he was not with her. She worried, too, for she was perfectly
aware that he was not half as fond of her as she was of him. Such a new
experience puzzled her, kept her instincts painfully on the alert. It
was perhaps just this uncertainty about his affection which made him
seem more precious than any of the others. But there was ever the other
reason, too-consciousness that Time was after her, and this her last
grand passion. She watched him as a mother-cat watches her kitten,
without seeming to, of course, for she had much experience. She had
begun to have a curious secret jealousy of Noel though why she could not
have said. It was perhaps merely incidental to her age, or sprang from
that vague resemblance between her and one who outrivalled even what she
had been as a girl; or from the occasional allusions Fort made to
what he called “that little fairy princess.” Something intangible,
instinctive, gave her that jealousy. Until the death of her young
cousin's lover she had felt safe, for she knew that Jimmy Fort would
not hanker after another man's property; had he not proved that in
old days, with herself, by running away from her? And she had often
regretted having told him of Cyril Morland's death. One day she
determined to repair that error. It was at the Zoo, where they often
went on Sunday afternoons. They were standing before a creature called
the meercat, which reminded them both of old days on the veldt. Without
turning her head she said, as if to the little animal: “Do you know
that your fairy princess, as you call her, is going to have what is
known as a war-baby?”
The sound of his “What!” gave her quite a stab. It was so utterly
horrified.
She said stubbornly: “She came and told me all about it. The boy is
dead, as you know. Yes, terrible, isn't it?” And she looked at him.
His face was almost comic, so wrinkled up with incredulity.
“That lovely child! But it's impossible!”
“The impossible is sometimes true, Jimmy.”
“I refuse to believe it.”
“I tell you it is so,” she said angrily.
“What a ghastly shame!”
“It was her own doing; she said so, herself.”
“And her father—the padre! My God!”
Leila was suddenly smitten with a horrible doubt. She had thought it
would disgust him, cure him of any little tendency to romanticise that
child; and now she perceived that it was rousing in him, instead, a
dangerous compassion. She could have bitten her tongue out for having
spoken. When he got on the high horse of some championship, he was not
to be trusted, she had found that out; was even finding it out bitterly
in her own relations with him, constantly aware that half her hold on
him, at least, lay in his sense of chivalry, aware that he knew her
lurking dread of being flung on the beach, by age. Only ten minutes
ago he had uttered a tirade before the cage of a monkey which seemed
unhappy. And now she had roused that dangerous side of him in favour of
Noel. What an idiot she had been!
“Don't look like that, Jimmy. I'm sorry I told you.”
His hand did not answer her pressure in the least, but he muttered:
“Well, I do think that's the limit. What's to be done for her?”
Leila answered softly: “Nothing, I'm afraid. Do you love me?” And
she pressed his hand hard.
“Of course.”
But Leila thought: 'If I were that meercat he'd have taken more
notice of my paw!' Her heart began suddenly to ache, and she walked on
to the next cage with head up, and her mouth hard set.
Jimmy Fort walked away from Camelot Mansions that evening in extreme
discomfort of mind. Leila had been so queer that he had taken leave
immediately after supper. She had refused to talk about Noel; had even
seemed angry when he had tried to. How extraordinary some women were!
Did they think that a man could hear of a thing like that about such
a dainty young creature without being upset! It was the most perfectly
damnable news! What on earth would she do—poor little fairy princess!
Down had come her house of cards with a vengeance! The whole of her
life—the whole of her life! With her bringing-up and her father and
all—it seemed inconceivable that she could ever survive it. And Leila
had been almost callous about the monstrous business. Women were hard to
each other! Bad enough, these things, when it was a simple working girl,
but this dainty, sheltered, beautiful child! No, it was altogether
too strong—too painful! And following an impulse which he could not
resist, he made his way to the old Square. But having reached the house,
he nearly went away again. While he stood hesitating with his hand on
the bell, a girl and a soldier passed, appearing as if by magic out
of the moonlit November mist, blurred and solid shapes embraced, then
vanished into it again, leaving the sound of footsteps. Fort jerked the
bell. He was shown into what seemed, to one coming out of that mist, to
be a brilliant, crowded room, though in truth there were but two lamps
and five people in it. They were sitting round the fire, talking, and
paused when he came in. When he had shaken hands with Pierson and
been introduced to “my daughter Gratian” and a man in khaki “my
son-in-law George Laird,” to a tall thin-faced, foreign-looking man in
a black stock and seemingly no collar, he went up to Noel, who had risen
from a chair before the fire. 'No!' he thought, 'I've dreamed
it, or Leila has lied!' She was so perfectly the self-possessed,
dainty maiden he remembered. Even the feel of her hand was the same-warm
and confident; and sinking into a chair, he said: “Please go on, and
let me chip in.”
“We were quarrelling about the Universe, Captain Fort,” said the man
in khaki; “delighted to have your help. I was just saying that
this particular world has no particular importance, no more than a
newspaper-seller would accord to it if it were completely destroyed
tomorrow—''.rrible catastrophe, total destruction of the
world—six o'clock edition-pyper!' I say that it will become again
the nebula out of which it was formed, and by friction with other
nebula re-form into a fresh shape and so on ad infinitum—but I can't
explain why. My wife wonders if it exists at all except in the human
mind—but she can't explain what the human mind is. My father-in-law
thinks that it is God's hobby—but he can't explain who or what God
is. Nollie is silent. And Monsieur Lavendie hasn't yet told us what he
thinks. What do you think, monsieur?” The thin-faced, big-eyed man put
up his hand to his high, veined brow as if he had a headache, reddened,
and began to speak in French, which Fort followed with difficulty.
“For me the Universe is a limitless artist, monsieur, who from
all time and to all time is ever expressing himself in differing
forms—always trying to make a masterpiece, and generally failing. For
me this world, and all the worlds, are like ourselves, and the flowers
and trees—little separate works of art, more or less perfect, whose
little lives run their course, and are spilled or powdered back into
this Creative Artist, whence issue ever fresh attempts at art. I agree
with Monsieur Laird, if I understand him right; but I agree also with
Madame Laird, if I understand her. You see, I think mind and matter are
one, or perhaps there is no such thing as either mind or matter,
only growth and decay and growth again, for ever and ever; but
always conscious growth—an artist expressing himself in millions of
ever-changing forms; decay and death as we call them, being but rest and
sleep, the ebbing of the tide, which must ever come between two rising
tides, or the night which comes between two days. But the next day is
never the same as the day before, nor the tide as the last tide; so the
little shapes of the world and of ourselves, these works of art by the
Eternal Artist, are never renewed in the same form, are never twice
alike, but always fresh-fresh worlds, fresh individuals, fresh flowers,
fresh everything. I do not see anything depressing in that. To me it
would be depressing to think that I would go on living after death, or
live again in a new body, myself yet not myself. How stale that would
be! When I finish a picture it is inconceivable to me that this
picture should ever become another picture, or that one can divide the
expression from the mind-stuff it has expressed. The Great Artist who is
the whole of Everything, is ever in fresh effort to achieve new things.
He is as a fountain who throws up new drops, no two ever alike, which
fall back into the water, flow into the pipe, and so are thrown up again
in fresh-shaped drops. But I cannot explain why there should be this
Eternal Energy, ever expressing itself in fresh individual shapes, this
Eternal Working Artist, instead of nothing at all—just empty dark for
always; except indeed that it must be one thing or the other, either all
or nothing; and it happens to be this and not that, the all and not the
nothing.”
He stopped speaking, and his big eyes, which had fixed themselves on
Fort's face, seemed to the latter not to be seeing him at all, but
to rest on something beyond. The man in khaki, who had risen and was
standing with his hand on his wife's shoulder, said:
“Bravo, monsieur; Jolly well put from the artist's point of view.
The idea is pretty, anyway; but is there any need for an idea at all?
Things are; and we have just to take them.” Fort had the impression
of something dark and writhing; the thin black form of his host, who had
risen and come close to the fire.
“I cannot admit,” he was saying, “the identity of the Creator with
the created. God exists outside ourselves. Nor can I admit that there
is no defnite purpose and fulfilment. All is shaped to His great ends. I
think we are too given to spiritual pride. The world has lost reverence;
I regret it, I bitterly regret it.”
“I rejoice at it,” said the man in khaki. “Now, Captain Fort, your
turn to bat!”
Fort, who had been looking at Noel, gave himself a shake, and said: “I
think what monsieur calls expression, I call fighting. I suspect the
Universe of being simply a long fight, a sum of conquests and defeats.
Conquests leading to defeats, defeats to conquests. I want to win while
I'm alive, and because I want to win, I want to live on after death.
Death is a defeat. I don't want to admit it. While I have that
instinct, I don't think I shall really die; when I lose it, I think I
shall.” He was conscious of Noel's face turning towards him, but had
the feeling that she wasn't really listening. “I suspect that what
we call spirit is just the fighting instinct; that what we call matter
is the mood of lying down. Whether, as Mr. Pierson says, God is outside
us, or, as monsieur thinks, we are all part of God, I don't know,
I'm sure.”
“Ah! There we are!” said the man in khaki. “We all speak after our
temperaments, and none of us know. The religions of the world are just
the poetic expressions of certain strongly marked temperaments. Monsieur
was a poet just now, and his is the only temperament which has never yet
been rammed down the world's throat in the form of religion. Go out
and proclaim your views from the housetops, monsieur, and see what
happens.”
The painter shook his head with a smile which seemed to Fort very bright
on the surface, and very sad underneath.
“Non, monsieur,” he said; “the artist does not wish to impose his
temperament. Difference of temperament is the very essence of his joy,
and his belief in life. Without difference there would be no life for
him. 'Tout casse, tout lasse,' but change goes on for ever: We
artists reverence change, monsieur; we reverence the newness of each
morning, of each night, of each person, of each expression of energy.
Nothing is final for us; we are eager for all and always for more. We
are in love, you see, even with-death.”
There was a silence; then Fort heard Pierson murmur:
“That is beautiful, monsieur; but oh! how wrong!” “And what do
you think, Nollie?” said the man in khaki suddenly. The girl had been
sitting very still in her low chair, with her hands crossed in her lap,
her eyes on the fire, and the lamplight shining down on her fair hair;
she looked up, startled, and her eyes met Fort's.
“I don't know; I wasn't listening.” Something moved in him, a
kind of burning pity, a rage of protection. He said quickly:
“These are times of action. Philosophy seems to mean nothing nowadays.
The one thing is to hate tyranny and cruelty, and protect everything
that's weak and lonely. It's all that's left to make life worth
living, when all the packs of all the world are out for blood.”
Noel was listening now, and he went on fervently: “Why! Even we
who started out to fight this Prussian pack, have caught the pack
feeling—so that it's hunting all over the country, on every sort of
scent. It's a most infectious thing.”
“I cannot see that we are being infected, Captain Fort.”
“I'm afraid we are, Mr. Pierson. The great majority of people are
always inclined to run with the hounds; the pressure's great just now;
the pack spirit's in the air.”
Pierson shook his head. “No, I cannot see it,” he repeated; “it
seems to me that we are all more brotherly, and more tolerant.”
“Ah! monsieur le cure,” Fort heard the painter say very gently,
“it is difficult for a good man to see the evil round him. There are
those whom the world's march leaves apart, and reality cannot touch.
They walk with God, and the bestialities of us animals are fantastic to
them. The spirit of the pack, as monsieur says, is in the air. I see
all human nature now, running with gaping mouths and red tongues lolling
out, their breath and their cries spouting thick before them. On whom
they will fall next—one never knows; the innocent with the guilty.
Perhaps if you were to see some one dear to you devoured before your
eyes, monsieur le cure, you would feel it too; and yet I do not know.”
Fort saw Noel turn her face towards her father; her expression at that
moment was very strange, searching, half frightened. No! Leila had not
lied, and he had not dreamed! That thing was true!
When presently he took his leave, and was out again in the Square, he
could see nothing but her face and form before him in the moonlight: its
soft outline, fair colouring, slender delicacy, and the brooding of the
big grey eyes. He had already crossed New Oxford Street and was some
way down towards the Strand, when a voice behind him murmured: “Ah!
c'est vous, monsieur!” and the painter loomed up at his elbow.
“Are you going my way?” said Fort. “I go slowly, I'm afraid.”
“The slower the better, monsieur. London is so beautiful in the dark.
It is the despair of the painter—these moonlit nights. There
are moments when one feels that reality does not exist. All is in
dreams—like the face of that young lady.”
Fort stared sharply round at him. “Oh! She strikes you like that, does
she?”
“Ah! What a charming figure! What an atmosphere of the past and future
round her! And she will not let me paint her! Well, perhaps only Mathieu
Maris.” He raised his broad Bohemian hat, and ran his fingers through
his hair.
“Yes,” said Fort, “she'd make a wonderful picture. I'm not a
judge of Art, but I can see that.”
The painter smiled, and went on in his rapid French:
“She has youth and age all at once—that is rare. Her father is an
interesting man, too; I am trying to paint him; he is very difficult. He
sits lost in some kind of vacancy of his own; a man whose soul has gone
before him somewhere, like that of his Church, escaped from this age of
machines, leaving its body behind—is it not? He is so kind; a saint,
I think. The other clergymen I see passing in the street are not at all
like him; they look buttoned-up and busy, with faces of men who might be
schoolmasters or lawyers, or even soldiers—men of this world. Do you
know this, monsieur—it is ironical, but it is true, I think a man
cannot be a successful priest unless he is a man of this world. I do not
see any with that look of Monsieur Pierson, a little tortured within,
and not quite present. He is half an artist, really a lover of music,
that man. I am painting him at the piano; when he is playing his face is
alive, but even then, so far away. To me, monsieur, he is exactly like a
beautiful church which knows it is being deserted. I find him pathetic.
Je suis socialiste, but I have always an aesthetic admiration for that
old Church, which held its children by simple emotion. The times have
changed; it can no longer hold them so; it stands in the dusk, with its
spire to a heaven which exists no more, its bells, still beautiful but
out of tune with the music of the streets. It is something of that which
I wish to get into my picture of Monsieur Pierson; and sapristi! it
is difficult!” Fort grunted assent. So far as he could make out the
painter's words, it seemed to him a large order.
“To do it, you see,” went on the painter, “one should have the
proper background—these currents of modern life and modern types,
passing him and leaving him untouched. There is no illusion, and no
dreaming, in modern life. Look at this street. La, la!”
In the darkened Strand, hundreds of khaki-clad figures and girls were
streaming by, and all their voices had a hard, half-jovial vulgarity.
The motor-cabs and buses pushed along remorselessly; newspaper-sellers
muttered their ceaseless invitations. Again the painter made his gesture
of despair: “How am I to get into my picture this modern life, which
washes round him as round that church, there, standing in the middle of
the street? See how the currents sweep round it, as if to wash it away;
yet it stands, seeming not to see them. If I were a phantasist, it would
be easy enough: but to be a phantasist is too simple for me—those
romantic gentlemen bring what they like from anywhere, to serve their
ends. Moi, je suis realiste. And so, monsieur, I have invented an idea.
I am painting over his head while he sits there at the piano a picture
hanging on the wall—of one of these young town girls who have no
mysteriousness at all, no youth; nothing but a cheap knowledge and
defiance, and good humour. He is looking up at it, but he does not see
it. I will make the face of that girl the face of modern life, and
he shall sit staring at it, seeing nothing. What do you think of my
idea?”
But Fort had begun to feel something of the revolt which the man of
action so soon experiences when he listens to an artist talking.
“It sounds all right,” he said abruptly; “all the same, monsieur,
all my sympathy is with modern life. Take these young girls, and these
Tommies. For all their feather-pated vulgarity and they are damned
vulgar, I must say—they're marvellous people; they do take the rough
with the smooth; they're all 'doing their bit,' you know, and
facing this particularly beastly world. Aesthetically, I daresay,
they're deplorable, but can you say that on the whole their philosophy
isn't an advance on anything we've had up till now? They worship
nothing, it's true; but they keep their ends up marvellously.”
The painter, who seemed to feel the wind blowing cold on his ideas,
shrugged his shoulders.
“I am not concerned with that, monsieur; I set down what I see; better
or worse, I do not know. But look at this!” And he pointed down the
darkened and moonlit street. It was all jewelled and enamelled with
little spots and splashes of subdued red and green-blue light, and the
downward orange glow of the high lamps—like an enchanted dream-street
peopled by countless moving shapes, which only came to earth-reality
when seen close to. The painter drew his breath in with a hiss.
“Ah!” he said, “what beauty! And they don't see it—not one in
a thousand! Pity, isn't it? Beauty is the holy thing!”
Fort, in his turn, shrugged his shoulders. “Every man to his
vision!” he said. “My leg's beginning to bother me; I'm afraid
I must take a cab. Here's my address; any time you like to come. I'm
often in about seven. I can't take you anywhere, I suppose?”
“A thousand thanks, monsieur; but I go north. I loved your words about
the pack. I often wake at night and hear the howling of all the packs
of the world. Those who are by nature gentle nowadays feel they are
strangers in a far land. Good night, monsieur!”
He took off his queer hat, bowed low, and crossed out into the Strand,
like one who had come in a dream, and faded out with the waking. Fort
hailed a cab, and went home, still seeing Noel's face. There was
one, if you liked, waiting to be thrown to the wolves, waiting for the
world's pack to begin howling round her—that lovely child; and the
first, the loudest of all the pack, perhaps, must be her own father, the
lean, dark figure with the gentle face, and the burnt bright eyes. What
a ghastly business! His dreams that night were not such as Leila would
have approved.
IX
When in the cupboard there is a real and very bony skeleton, carefully
kept from the sight of a single member of the family, the position of
that member is liable to become lonely. But Pierson, who had been lonely
fifteen years, did not feel it so much, perhaps, as most men would have.
In his dreamy nature there was a curious self-sufficiency, which only
violent shocks disturbed, and he went on with his routine of duty, which
had become for him as set as the pavements he trod on his way to and
from it. It was not exactly true, as the painter had said, that this
routine did not bring him into touch with life. After all he saw people
when they were born, when they married, when they died. He helped them
when they wanted money, and when they were ill; he told their children
Bible stories on Sunday afternoons; he served those who were in need
with soup and bread from his soup kitchen. He never spared himself in
any way, and his ears were always at the service of their woes. And yet
he did not understand them, and they knew that. It was as though he, or
they, were colour-blind. The values were all different. He was seeing
one set of objects, they another.
One street of his parish touched a main line of thoroughfare, and formed
a little part of the new hunting-grounds of women, who, chased forth
from their usual haunts by the Authorities under pressure of the
country's danger, now pursued their calling in the dark. This
particular evil had always been a sort of nightmare to Pierson. The
starvation which ruled his own existence inclined him to a particularly
severe view and severity was not his strong point. In consequence there
was ever within him a sort of very personal and poignant struggle going
on beneath that seeming attitude of rigid disapproval. He joined the
hunters, as it were, because he was afraid-not, of course, of his own
instincts, for he was fastidious, a gentleman, and a priest, but of
being lenient to a sin, to something which God abhorred: He was, as it
were, bound to take a professional view of this particular offence. When
in his walks abroad he passed one of these women, he would unconsciously
purse his lips, and frown. The darkness of the streets seemed to lend
them such power, such unholy sovereignty over the night. They were such
a danger to the soldiers, too; and in turn, the soldiers were such a
danger to the lambs of his flock. Domestic disasters in his parish came
to his ears from time to time; cases of young girls whose heads were
turned by soldiers, so that they were about to become mothers. They
seemed to him pitiful indeed; but he could not forgive them for their
giddiness, for putting temptation in the way of brave young men,
fighting, or about to fight. The glamour which surrounded soldiers was
not excuse enough. When the babies were born, and came to his notice,
he consulted a Committee he had formed, of three married and two maiden
ladies, who visited the mothers, and if necessary took the babies into
a creche; for those babies had a new value to the country, and were
not—poor little things!—to be held responsible for their mothers'
faults. He himself saw little of the young mothers; shy of them,
secretly afraid, perhaps, of not being censorious enough. But once in a
way Life set him face to face with one.
On New Year's Eve he was sitting in his study after tea, at that hour
which he tried to keep for his parishioners, when a Mrs. Mitchett was
announced, a small bookseller's wife, whom he knew for an occasional
Communicant. She came in, accompanied by a young dark-eyed girl in a
loose mouse-coloured coat. At his invitation they sat down in front of
the long bookcase on the two green leather chairs which had grown worn
in the service of the parish; and, screwed round in his chair at the
bureau, with his long musician's fingers pressed together, he looked
at them and waited. The woman had taken out her handkerchief, and was
wiping her eyes; but the girl sat quiet, as the mouse she somewhat
resembled in that coat.
“Yes, Mrs. Mitchett?” He said gently, at last.
The woman put away her handkerchief, sniffed resolutely, and began:
“It's 'Ilda, sir. Such a thing Mitchett and me never could 'ave
expected, comin' on us so sudden. I thought it best to bring 'er
round, poor girl. Of course, it's all the war. I've warned 'er
a dozen times; but there it is, comin' next month, and the man in
France.” Pierson instinctively averted his gaze from the girl, who
had not moved her eyes from his face, which she scanned with a seeming
absence of interest, as if she had long given up thinking over her lot,
and left it now to others.
“That is sad,” he said; “very, very sad.”
“Yes,” murmured Mrs. Mitchett; “that's what I tell 'Ilda.”
The girl's glance, lowered for a second, resumed its impersonal
scrutiny of Pierson's face.
“What is the man's name and regiment? Perhaps we can get leave for
him to come home and marry Hilda at once.”
Mrs. Mitchett sniffed. “She won't give it, sir. Now, 'Ilda, give
it to Mr. Pierson.” And her voice had a real note of entreaty. The
girl shook her head. Mrs. Mitchett murmured dolefully: “That's 'ow
she is, sir; not a word will she say. And as I tell her, we can only
think there must 'ave been more than one. And that does put us to
shame so!”
But still the girl made no sign.
“You speak to her, sir; I'm really at my wit's end.”
“Why won't you tell us?” said Pierson. “The man will want to do
the right thing, 'I'm sure.”
The girl shook her head, and spoke for the first time.
“I don't know his name.”
Mrs. Mitchett's face twitched.
“Oh, dear!” she said: “Think of that! She's never said as much
to us.”
“Not know his name?” Pierson murmured. “But how—how could
you—” he stopped, but his face had darkened. “Surely you would
never have done such a thing without affection? Come, tell me!”
“I don't know it,” the girl repeated.
“It's these Parks,” said Mrs. Mitchett, from behind her
handkerchief. “And to think that this'll be our first grandchild and
all! 'Ilda is difficult; as quiet, as quiet; but that stubborn—”
Pierson looked at the girl, who seemed, if anything, less interested
than ever. This impenetrability and something mulish in her attitude
annoyed him. “I can't think,” he said, “how you could so have
forgotten yourself. It's truly grievous.”
Mrs. Mitchett murmured: “Yes, sir; the girls gets it into their heads
that there's going to be no young men for them.”
“That's right,” said the girl sullenly.
Pierson's lips grew tighter. “Well, what can I do for you, Mrs.
Mitchett?” he said. “Does your daughter come to church?”
Mrs. Mitchett shook her head mournfully. “Never since she had her
byke.”
Pierson rose from his chair. The old story! Control and discipline
undermined, and these bitter apples the result!
“Well,” he said, “if you need our creche, you have only to come
to me,” and he turned to the girl. “And you—won't you let this
dreadful experience move your heart? My dear girl, we must all master
ourselves, our passions, and our foolish wilfulness, especially in
these times when our country needs us strong, and self-disciplined, not
thinking of ourselves. I'm sure you're a good girl at heart.”
The girl's dark eyes, unmoved from his face, roused in him a spasm of
nervous irritation. “Your soul is in great danger, and you're very
unhappy, I can see. Turn to God for help, and in His mercy everything
will be made so different for you—so very different! Come!”
The girl said with a sort of surprising quietness: “I don't want the
baby!”
The remark staggered him, almost as if she had uttered a hideous oath.
“'Ilda was in munitions,” said her mother in an explanatory voice:
“earnin' a matter of four pound a week. Oh! dear, it is a waste
an' all!” A queer, rather terrible little smile curled Pierson's
lips.
“A judgment!” he said. “Good evening, Mrs. Mitchett. Good evening,
Hilda. If you want me when the time comes, send for me.”
They stood up; he shook hands with them; and was suddenly aware that the
door was open, and Noel standing there. He had heard no sound; and how
long she had been there he could not tell. There was a singular fixity
in her face and attitude. She was staring at the girl, who, as she
passed, lifted her face, so that the dark eyes and the grey eyes met.
The door was shut, and Noel stood there alone with him.
“Aren't you early, my child?” said Pierson. “You came in very
quietly.”
“Yes; I heard.”
A slight shock went through him at the tone of her voice; her face had
that possessed look which he always dreaded. “What did you hear?” he
said.
“I heard you say: 'A judgment!' You'll say the same to me,
won't you? Only, I do want my baby.”
She was standing with her back to the door, over which a dark curtain
hung; her face looked young and small against its stuff, her eyes very
large. With one hand she plucked at her blouse, just over her heart.
Pierson stared at her, and gripped the back of the chair he had been
sitting in. A lifetime of repression served him in the half-realised
horror of that moment. He stammered out the single word—
“Nollie!”
“It's quite true,” she said, turned round, and went out.
Pierson had a sort of vertigo; if he had moved, he must have fallen
down. Nollie! He slid round and sank into his chair, and by some
horrible cruel fiction of his nerves, he seemed to feel Noel on his
knee, as, when a little girl, she had been wont to sit, with her fair
hair fluffing against his cheek. He seemed to feel that hair tickling
his skin; it used to be the greatest comfort he had known since her
mother died. At that moment his pride shrivelled like a flower held to a
flame; all that abundant secret pride of a father who loves and admires,
who worships still a dead wife in the children she has left him; who,
humble by nature, yet never knows how proud he is till the bitter thing
happens; all the long pride of the priest who, by dint of exhortation
and remonstrance has coated himself in a superiority he hardly
suspects—all this pride shrivelled in him. Then something writhed and
cried within, as a tortured beast cries, at loss to know why it is being
tortured. How many times has not a man used those words: “My God! My
God! Why hast Thou forsaken me!” He sprang up and tried to pace his
way out of this cage of confusion: His thoughts and feelings made the
strangest medley, spiritual and worldly—Social ostracism—her soul in
peril—a trial sent by God! The future! Imagination failed him. He went
to his little piano, opened it, closed it again; took his hat, and stole
out. He walked fast, without knowing where. It was very cold—a clear,
bitter evening. Silent rapid motion in the frosty air was some relief.
As Noel had fled from him, having uttered her news, so did he fly from
her. The afflicted walk fast. He was soon down by the river, and turned
West along its wall. The moon was up, bright and nearly full, and the
steel-like shimmer of its light burnished the ebbing water. A cruel
night! He came to the Obelisk, and leaned against it, overcome by a
spasm of realisation. He seemed to see his dead wife's face staring
at him out of the past, like an accusation. “How have you cared for
Nollie, that she should have come to this?” It became the face of the
moonlit sphinx, staring straight at him, the broad dark face with
wide nostrils, cruel lips, full eyes blank of pupils, all livened and
whitened by the moonlight—an embodiment of the marvellous unseeing
energy of Life, twisting and turning hearts without mercy. He gazed into
those eyes with a sort of scared defiance. The great clawed paws of the
beast, the strength and remorseless serenity of that crouching creature
with human head, made living by his imagination and the moonlight,
seemed to him like a temptation to deny God, like a refutation of human
virtue.
Then, the sense of beauty stirred in him; he moved where he could see
its flanks coated in silver by the moonlight, the ribs and the great
muscles, and the tail with tip coiled over the haunch, like the head of
a serpent. It was weirdly living; fine and cruel, that great man-made
thing. It expressed something in the soul of man, pitiless and remote
from love—or rather, the remorselessness which man had seen, lurking
within man's fate. Pierson recoiled from it, and resumed his march
along the Embankment, almost deserted in the bitter cold. He came to
where, in the opening of the Underground railway, he could see the
little forms of people moving, little orange and red lights glowing.
The sight arrested him by its warmth and motion. Was it not all a dream?
That woman and her daughter, had they really come? Had not Noel been but
an apparition, her words a trick which his nerves had played him?
Then, too vividly again, he saw her face against the dark stuff of the
curtain, the curve of her hand plucking at her blouse, heard the sound
of his own horrified: “Nollie!” No illusion, no deception! The
edifice of his life was in the dust. And a queer and ghastly company
of faces came about him; faces he had thought friendly, of good men and
women whom he knew, yet at that moment did not know, all gathered round
Noel, with fingers pointing at her. He staggered back from that vision,
could not bear it, could not recognise this calamity. With a sort of
comfort, yet an aching sense of unreality, his mind flew to all those
summer holidays spent in Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, by mountain
and lake, with his two girls; what sunsets, and turning leaves, birds,
beasts, and insects they had watched together! From their youthful
companionship, their eagerness, their confidence in him, he had known so
much warmth and pleasure. If all those memories were true, surely this
could not be true. He felt suddenly that he must hurry back, go straight
to Noel, tell her that she had been cruel to him, or assure himself
that, for the moment, she had been insane: His temper rose suddenly,
took fire. He felt anger against her, against every one he knew, against
life itself. Thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his thin black
overcoat, he plunged into that narrow glowing tunnel of the station
booking-office, which led back to the crowded streets. But by the time
he reached home his anger had evaporated; he felt nothing but utter
lassitude. It was nine o'clock, and the maids had cleared the dining
table. In despair Noel had gone up to her room. He had no courage left,
and sat down supperless at his little piano, letting his fingers
find soft painful harmonies, so that Noel perhaps heard the faint far
thrumming of that music through uneasy dreams. And there he stayed, till
it became time for him to go forth to the Old Year's Midnight Service.
When he returned, Pierson wrapped himself in a rug and lay down on the
old sofa in his study. The maid, coming in next morning to “do” the
grate, found him still asleep. She stood contemplating him in awe; a
broad-faced, kindly, fresh-coloured girl. He lay with his face resting
on his hand, his dark, just grizzling hair unruffled, as if he had not
stirred all night; his other hand clutched the rug to his chest, and
his booted feet protruded beyond it. To her young eyes he looked rather
appallingly neglected. She gazed with interest at the hollows in his
cheeks, and the furrows in his brow, and the lips, dark-moustached and
bearded, so tightly compressed, even in sleep. Being holy didn't make
a man happy, it seemed! What fascinated her were the cindery eyelashes
resting on the cheeks, the faint movement of face and body as he
breathed, the gentle hiss of breath escaping through the twitching
nostrils. She moved nearer, bending down over him, with the childlike
notion of counting those lashes. Her lips parted in readiness to say:
“Oh!” if he waked. Something in his face, and the little twitches
which passed over it, made her feel “that sorry” for him. He was a
gentleman, had money, preached to her every Sunday, and was not so very
old—what more could a man want? And yet—he looked so tired, with
those cheeks.
She pitied him; helpless and lonely he seemed to her, asleep there
instead of going to bed properly. And sighing, she tiptoed towards the
door.
“Is that you, Bessie?”
The girl turned: “Yes, sir. I'm sorry I woke you, sir. 'Appy New
Year, sir!”
“Ah, yes. A Happy New Year, Bessie.”
She saw his usual smile, saw it die, and a fixed look come on his face;
it scared her, and she hurried away. Pierson had remembered. For full
five minutes he lay there staring at nothing. Then he rose, folded the
rug mechanically, and looked at the clock. Eight! He went upstairs,
knocked on Noel's door, and entered.
The blinds were drawn up, but she was still in bed. He stood looking
down at her. “A Happy New Year, my child!” he said; and he trembled
all over, shivering visibly. She looked so young and innocent, so
round-faced and fresh, after her night's sleep, that the thought
sprang up in him again: 'It must have been a dream!' She did not
move, but a slow flush came up in her cheeks. No dream—dream! He
said tremulously: “I can't realise. I—I hoped I had heard wrong.
Didn't I, Nollie? Didn't I?”
She just shook her head.
“Tell me—everything,” he said; “for God's sake!”
He saw her lips moving, and caught the murmur: “There 's nothing
more. Gratian and George know, and Leila. It can't be undone, Daddy.
Perhaps I wouldn't have wanted to make sure, if you hadn't tried
to stop Cyril and me—and I'm glad sometimes, because I shall have
something of his—” She looked up at him. “After all, it's the
same, really; only, there's no ring. It's no good talking to me now,
as if I hadn't been thinking of this for ages. I'm used to anything
you can say; I've said it to myself, you see. There's nothing but to
make the best of it.”
Her hot hand came out from under the bedclothes, and clutched his very
tight. Her flush had deepened, and her eyes seemed to him to glitter.
“Oh, Daddy! You do look tired! Haven't you been to bed? Poor
Daddy!”
That hot clutch, and the words: “Poor Daddy!” brought tears into his
eyes. They rolled slowly down to his beard, and he covered his face with
the other hand. Her grip tightened convulsively; suddenly she dragged it
to her lips, kissed it, and let it drop.
“Don't!” she said, and turned away her face.
Pierson effaced his emotion, and said quite calmly:
“Shall you wish to be at home, my dear, or to go elsewhere?”
Noel had begun to toss her head on her pillow, like a feverish child
whose hair gets in its eyes and mouth.
“Oh! I don't know; what does it matter?”
“Kestrel; would you like to go there? Your aunt—I could write to
her.” Noel stared at him a moment; a struggle seemed going on within
her.
“Yes,” she said, “I would. Only, not Uncle Bob.”
“Perhaps your uncle would come up here, and keep me company.”
She turned her face away, and that tossing movement of the limbs
beneath the clothes began again. “I don't care,” she said;
“anywhere—it doesn't matter.”
Pierson put his chilly hand on her forehead. “Gently!” he said, and
knelt down by the bed. “Merciful Father,” he murmured, “give us
strength to bear this dreadful trial. Keep my beloved child safe, and
bring her peace; and give me to understand how I have done wrong, how I
have failed towards Thee, and her. In all things chasten and strengthen
her, my child, and me.”
His thoughts moved on in the confused, inarticulate suspense of prayer,
till he heard her say: “You haven't failed; why do you talk of
failing—it isn't true; and don't pray for me, Daddy.”
Pierson raised himself, and moved back from the bed. Her words
confounded him, yet he was afraid to answer. She pushed her head deep
into the pillow, and lay looking up at the ceiling.
“I shall have a son; Cyril won't quite have died. And I don't want
to be forgiven.”
He dimly perceived what long dumb processes of thought and feeling had
gone on in her to produce this hardened state of mind, which to him
seemed almost blasphemous. And in the very midst of this turmoil in his
heart, he could not help thinking how lovely her face looked, lying back
so that the curve of her throat was bared, with the short tendrils of
hair coiling about it. That flung-back head, moving restlessly from side
to side in the heat of the soft pillow, had such a passion of protesting
life in it! And he kept silence.
“I want you to know it was all me. But I can't pretend. Of course
I'll try and not let it hurt you more than I possibly can. I'm
sorry for you, poor Daddy; oh! I'm sorry for you!” With a movement
incredibly lithe and swift, she turned and pressed her face down in the
pillow, so that all he could see was her tumbled hair and the bedclothes
trembling above her shoulders. He tried to stroke that hair, but she
shook her head free, and he stole out.
She did not come to breakfast; and when his own wretched meal was over,
the mechanism of his professional life caught him again at once. New
Year's Day! He had much to do. He had, before all, to be of a cheerful
countenance before his flock, to greet all and any with an air of hope
and courage.
X 1
Thirza Pierson, seeing her brother-in-law's handwriting, naturally
said: “Here's a letter from Ted.”
Bob Pierson, with a mouth full of sausage, as naturally responded:
“What does he say?”
In reading on, she found that to answer that question was one of the
most difficult tasks ever set her. Its news moved and disturbed her
deeply. Under her wing this disaster had happened! Down here had been
wrought this most deplorable miracle, fraught with such dislocation of
lives! Noel's face, absorbed and passionate, outside the door of her
room on the night when Cyril Morland went away—her instinct had been
right!
“He wants you to go up and stay with him, Bob.”
“Why not both of us?”
“He wants Nollie to come down to me; she's not well.”
“Not well? What's the matter?”
To tell him seemed disloyalty to her sex; not to tell him, disloyalty
to her husband. A simple consideration of fact and not of principle,
decided her. He would certainly say in a moment: 'Here! Pitch it
over!' and she would have to. She said tranquilly:
“You remember that night when Cyril Morland went away, and Noel
behaved so strangely. Well, my dear; she is going to have a child at
the beginning of April. The poor boy is dead, Bob; he died for the
Country.”
She saw the red tide flow up into his face.
“What!”
“Poor Edward is dreadfully upset. We must do what we can. I blame
myself.” By instinct she used those words.
“Blame yourself? Stuff! That young—!” He stopped.
Thirza said quietly: “No, Bob; of the two, I'm sure it was Noel;
she was desperate that day. Don't you remember her face? Oh! this war!
It's turned the whole world upside down. That's the only comfort;
nothing's normal.”
Bob Pierson possessed beyond most men the secret of happiness, for he
was always absorbed in the moment, to the point of unself-consciousness.
Eating an egg, cutting down a tree, sitting on a Tribunal, making up
his accounts, planting potatoes, looking at the moon, riding his cob,
reading the Lessons—no part of him stood aside to see how he was doing
it, or wonder why he was doing it, or not doing it better. He grew like
a cork-tree, and acted like a sturdy and well-natured dog. His griefs,
angers, and enjoyments were simple as a child's, or as his somewhat
noisy slumbers. They were notably well-suited, for Thirza had the same
secret of happiness, though her, absorption in the moment did not—as
became a woman—prevent her being conscious of others; indeed, such
formed the chief subject of her absorptions. One might say that they
neither of them had philosophy yet were as philosophic a couple as one
could meet on this earth of the self-conscious. Daily life to these two
was still of simple savour. To be absorbed in life—the queer endless
tissue of moments and things felt and done and said and made, the odd
inspiriting conjunctions of countless people—was natural to them;
but they never thought whether they were absorbed or not, or had any
particular attitude to Life or Death—a great blessing at the epoch in
which they were living.
Bob Pierson, then, paced the room, so absorbed in his dismay and
concern, that he was almost happy.
“By Jove!” he said, “what a ghastly thing!
“Nollie, of all people! I feel perfectly wretched, Thirza; wretched
beyond words.” But with each repetition his voice grew cheerier, and
Thirza felt that he was already over the worst.
“Your coffee's getting cold!” she said.
“What do you advise? Shall I go up, heh?”
“I think you'll be a godsend to poor Ted; you'll keep his spirits
up. Eve won't get any leave till Easter; and I can be quite alone, and
see to Nollie here. The servants can have a holiday—, Nurse and I will
run the house together. I shall enjoy it.”
“You're a good woman, Thirza!” Taking his wife's hand, he put it
to his lips. “There isn't another woman like you in the world.”
Thirza's eyes smiled. “Pass me your cup; I'll give you some fresh
coffee.”
It was decided to put the plan into operation at mid-month, and she bent
all her wits to instilling into her husband the thought that a baby more
or less was no great matter in a world which already contained twelve
hundred million people. With a man's keener sense of family propriety,
he could not see that this baby would be the same as any other baby.
“By heaven!” he would say, “I simply can't get used to it; in
our family! And Ted a parson! What the devil shall we do with it?”
“If Nollie will let us, why shouldn't we adopt it? It'll be
something to take my thoughts off the boys.”
“That's an idea! But Ted's a funny fellow. He'll have some
doctrine of atonement, or other in his bonnet.”
“Oh, bother!” said Thirza with asperity.
The thought of sojourning in town for a spell was not unpleasant to Bob
Pierson. His Tribunal work was over, his early, potatoes in, and he had
visions of working for the Country, of being a special constable, and
dining at his Club. The nearer he was to the front, and the more he
could talk about the war, the greater the service he felt he would
be doing. He would ask for a job where his brains would be of use. He
regretted keenly that Thirza wouldn't be with him; a long separation
like this would be a great trial. And he would sigh and run his fingers
through his whiskers. Still for the Country, and for Nollie, one must
put up with it!
When Thirza finally saw him into the train, tears stood in the eyes of
both, for they were honestly attached, and knew well enough that
this job, once taken in hand, would have to be seen through; a three
months' separation at least.
“I shall write every day.”
“So shall I, Bob.”
“You won't fret, old girl?”
“Only if you do.”
“I shall be up at 5.5, and she'll be down at 4.50. Give us
a kiss—damn the porters. God bless you! I suppose she'd mind
if—I—were to come down now and then?”
“I'm afraid she would. It's—it's—well, you know.”
“Yes, Yes; I do.” And he really did; for underneath, he had true
delicacy.
Her last words: “You're very sweet, Bob,” remained in his ears all
the way to Severn Junction.
She went back to the house, emptied of her husband, daughter, boys,
and maids; only the dogs left and the old nurse whom she had taken into
confidence. Even in that sheltered, wooded valley it was very cold
this winter. The birds hid themselves, not one flower bloomed, and the
red-brown river was full and swift. The sound of trees being felled for
trench props, in the wood above the house resounded all day long in the
frosty air. She meant to do the cooking herself; and for the rest of the
morning and early afternoon she concocted nice things, and thought
out how she herself would feel if she were Noel and Noel she, so as
to smooth out of the way anything which would hurt the girl. In the
afternoon she went down to the station in the village car, the same
which had borne Cyril Morland away that July night, for their coachman
had been taken for the army, and the horses were turned out.
Noel looked tired and white, but calm—too calm. Her face seemed to
Thirza to have fined down, and with those brooding eyes, to be more
beautiful. In the car she possessed herself of the girl's hand, and
squeezed it hard; their only allusion to the situation, except Noel's
formal:
“Thank you so much, Auntie, for having me; it's most awfully sweet
of you and Uncle Bob.”
“There's no one in the house, my dear, except old Nurse. It'll be
very dull for you; but I thought I'd teach you to cook; it's rather
useful.”
The smile which slipped on to Noel's face gave Thirza quite a turn.
She had assigned the girl a different room, and had made it
extraordinarily cheerful with a log fire, chrysanthemums, bright copper
candlesticks, warming-pans, and such like.
She went up with her at bedtime, and standing before the fire, said:
“You know, Nollie, I absolutely refuse to regard this as any sort of
tragedy. To bring life into the worlds in these days, no matter how,
ought to make anyone happy. I only wish I could do it again, then I
should feel some use. Good night dear; and if you want anything, knock
on the wall. I'm next door. Bless you!” She saw that the girl was
greatly moved, underneath her pale mask; and went out astonished at her
niece's powers of self-control.
But she did not sleep at all well; for in imagination, she kept on
seeing Noel turning from side to side in the big bed, and those great
eyes of hers staring at the dark.
2
The meeting of the brothers Pierson took place at the dinner-hour,
and was characterised by a truly English lack of display. They were so
extremely different, and had been together so little since early days
in their old Buckinghamshire home, that they were practically strangers,
with just the potent link of far-distant memories in common. It was of
these they talked, and about the war. On this subject they agreed in the
large, and differed in the narrow. For instance, both thought they knew
about Germany and other countries, and neither of course had any real
knowledge of any country outside their own; for, though both had passed
through considerable tracts of foreign ground at one time or another,
they had never remarked anything except its surface,—its churches, and
its sunsets. Again, both assumed that they were democrats, but neither
knew the meaning of the word, nor felt that the working man could
be really trusted; and both revered Church and, King: Both disliked
conscription, but considered it necessary. Both favoured Home Rule for
Ireland, but neither thought it possible to grant it. Both wished for
the war to end, but were for prosecuting it to Victory, and neither knew
what they meant by that word. So much for the large. On the narrower
issues, such as strategy, and the personality of their country's
leaders, they were opposed. Edward was a Westerner, Robert an Easterner,
as was natural in one who had lived twenty-five years in Ceylon. Edward
favoured the fallen government, Robert the risen. Neither had any
particular reasons for their partisanship except what he had read in
the journals. After all—what other reasons could they have had? Edward
disliked the Harmsworth Press; Robert thought it was doing good. Robert
was explosive, and rather vague; Edward dreamy, and a little didactic.
Robert thought poor Ted looking like a ghost; Edward thought poor Bob
looking like the setting sun. Their faces were indeed as curiously
contrasted as their views and voices; the pale-dark, hollowed, narrow
face of Edward, with its short, pointed beard, and the red-skinned,
broad, full, whiskered face of Robert. They parted for the night with an
affectionate hand-clasp. So began a queer partnership which consisted,
as the days went on, of half an hour's companionship at breakfast,
each reading the paper; and of dinner together perhaps three times
a week. Each thought his brother very odd, but continued to hold the
highest opinion of him. And, behind it all, the deep tribal sense that
they stood together in trouble, grew. But of that trouble they never
spoke, though not seldom Robert would lower his journal, and above the
glasses perched on his well-shaped nose, contemplate his brother, and
a little frown of sympathy would ridge his forehead between his bushy
eyebrows. And once in a way he would catch Edward's eyes coming
off duty from his journal, to look, not at his brother, but at—the
skeleton; when that happened, Robert would adjust his glasses hastily,
damn the newspaper type, and apologise to Edward for swearing. And
he would think: 'Poor Ted! He ought to drink port, and—and enjoy
himself, and forget it. What a pity he's a parson!'
In his letters to Thirza he would deplore Edward's asceticism. “He
eats nothing, he drinks nothing, he smokes a miserable cigarette once
in a blue moon. He's as lonely as a coot; it's a thousand pities he
ever lost his wife. I expect to see his wings sprout any day; but—dash
it all I—I don't believe he's got the flesh to grow them on. Send
him up some clotted cream; I'll see if I can get him to eat it.”
When the cream came, he got Edward to eat some the first morning, and at
tea time found that he had finished it himself. “We never talk about
Nollie,” he wrote, “I'm always meaning to have it out with him and
tell him to buck up, but when it comes to the point I dry up; because,
after all, I feel it too; it sticks in my gizzard horribly. We Piersons
are pretty old, and we've always been respectable, ever since St.
Bartholomew, when that Huguenot chap came over and founded us. The only
black sheep I ever heard of is Cousin Leila. By the way, I saw her the
other day; she came round here to see Ted. I remember going to stay with
her and her first husband; young Fane, at Simla, when I was coming home,
just before we were married. Phew! That was a queer menage; all the
young chaps fluttering round her, and young Fane looking like a cynical
ghost. Even now she can't help setting her cap a little at Ted, and he
swallows her whole; thinks her a devoted creature reformed to the nines
with her hospital and all that. Poor old Ted; he is the most dreamy chap
that ever was.”
“We have had Gratian and her husband up for the week-end,” he wrote
a little later; “I don't like her so well as Nollie; too serious and
downright for me. Her husband seems a sensible fellow, though; but the
devil of a free-thinker. He and poor Ted are like cat and dog. We had
Leila in to dinner again on Saturday, and a man called Fort came too.
She's sweet on him, I could see with half an eye, but poor old Ted
can't. The doctor and Ted talked up hill and down dale. The doctor
said a thing which struck me. 'What divides us from the beasts? Will
power: nothing else. What's this war, really, but a death carnival of
proof that man's will is invincible?' I stuck it down to tell you,
when I got upstairs. He's a clever fellow. I believe in God, as you
know, but I must say when it comes to an argument, poor old Ted does
seem a bit weak, with his: 'We're told this,' and 'We're told
that: Nobody mentioned Nollie. I must have the whole thing out with Ted;
we must know how to act when it's all over.”
But not till the middle of March, when the brothers had been sitting
opposite each other at meals for two months, was the subject broached
between them, and then not by Robert. Edward, standing by the hearth
after dinner, in his familiar attitude, one foot on the fender, one
hand grasping the mantel-shelf, and his eyes fixed on the flames, said:
“I've never asked your forgiveness, Bob.”
Robert, lingering at the table over his glass of port, started, looked
at Edward's back in its parson's coat, and answered:
“My dear old chap!”
“It has been very difficult to speak of this.”
“Of course, of course!” And there was a silence, while Robert's
eyes travelled round the walls for inspiration. They encountered only
the effigies of past Piersons very oily works, and fell back on the
dining-table. Edward went on speaking to the fire:
“It still seems to me incredible. Day and night I think of what it's
my duty to do.”
“Nothing!” ejaculated Robert. “Leave the baby with Thirza; we'll
take care of it, and when Nollie's fit, let her go back to work in a
hospital again. She'll soon get over it.” He saw his brother shake
his head, and thought: 'Ah! yes; now there's going to be some d—d
conscientious complication.'
Edward turned round on him: “That is very sweet of you both, but it
would be wrong and cowardly for me to allow it.”
The resentment which springs up in fathers when other fathers dispose of
young lives, rose in Robert.
“Dash it all, my dear Ted, that's for Nollie to say. She's a woman
now, remember.”
A smile went straying about in the shadows of his brother's face. “A
woman? Little Nollie! Bob, I've made a terrible mess of it with my
girls.” He hid his lips with his hand, and turned again to the flames.
Robert felt a lump in his throat. “Oh! Hang it, old boy, I don't
think that. What else could you have done? You take too much on
yourself. After all, they're fine girls. I'm sure Nollie's a
darling. It's these modern notions, and this war. Cheer up! It'll
all dry straight.” He went up to his brother and put a hand on his
shoulder. Edward seemed to stiffen under that touch.
“Nothing comes straight,” he said, “unless it's faced; you know
that, Bob.”
Robert's face was a study at that moment. His cheeks filled and
collapsed again like a dog's when it has been rebuked. His colour
deepened, and he rattled some money in a trouser pocket.
“Something in that, of course,” he said gruffly. “All the same,
the decision's with Nollie. We'll see what Thirza says. Anyway,
there's no hurry. It's a thousand pities you're a parson; the
trouble's enough without that:”
Edward shook his head. “My position is nothing; it's the thought of
my child, my wife's child. It's sheer pride; and I can't subdue
it. I can't fight it down. God forgive me, I rebel.”
And Robert thought: 'By George, he does take it to heart! Well,
so should I! I do, as it is!' He took out his pipe, and filled it,
pushing the tobacco down and down.
“I'm not a man of the world,” he heard his brother say; “I'm
out of touch with many things. It's almost unbearable to me to feel
that I'm joining with the world to condemn my own daughter; not for
their reasons, perhaps—I don't know; I hope not, but still, I'm
against her.”
Robert lit his pipe.
“Steady, old man!” he said. “It's a misfortune. But if I were
you I should feel: 'She's done a wild, silly thing, but, hang it, if
anybody says a word against her, I'll wring his neck.' And what's
more, you'll feel much the same, when it comes to the point.” He
emitted a huge puff of smoke, which obscured his brother's face,
and the blood, buzzing in his temples, seemed to thicken the sound of
Edward's voice.
“I don't know; I've tried to see clearly. I have prayed to be
shown what her duty is, and mine. It seems to me there can be no peace
for her until she has atoned, by open suffering; that the world's
judgment is her cross, and she must bear it; especially in these days,
when all the world is facing suffering so nobly. And then it seems so
hard-so bitter; my poor little Nollie!”
There was a silence, broken only by the gurgling of Robert's pipe,
till he said abruptly:
“I don't follow you, Ted; no, I don't. I think a man should screen
his children all he can. Talk to her as you like, but don't let the
world do it. Dash it, the world's a rotten gabbling place. I call
myself a man of the world, but when it comes to private matters—well,
then I draw the line. It seems to me it seems to me inhuman. What
does George Laird think about it? He's a knowing chap. I suppose
you've—no, I suppose you haven't—” For a peculiar smile had
come on Edward's face.
“No,” he said, “I should hardly ask George Laird's opinion.”
And Robert realised suddenly the stubborn loneliness of that thin black
figure, whose fingers were playing with a little gold cross. 'By
Jove!' he thought, 'I believe old Ted's like one of those Eastern
chaps who go into lonely places. He's got himself surrounded by
visions of things that aren't there. He lives in unreality—something
we can't understand. I shouldn't be surprised if he heard voices,
like—'who was it? Tt, tt! What a pity!' Ted was deceptive. He was
gentle and—all that, a gentleman of course, and that disguised him;
but underneath; what was there—a regular ascetic, a fakir! And a sense
of bewilderment, of dealing with something which he could not grasp,
beset Bob Pierson, so that he went back to the table, and sat down again
beside his port.
“It seems to me,” he said rather gruffly, “that the chicken
had better be hatched before we count it.” And then, sorry for his
brusqueness, emptied his glass. As the fluid passed over his palate, he
thought: 'Poor old Ted! He doesn't even drink—hasn't a pleasure
in life, so far as I can see, except doing his duty, and doesn't even
seem to know what that is. There aren't many like him—luckily! And
yet I love him—pathetic chap!'
The “pathetic chap” was still staring at the flames. 3
And at this very hour, when the brothers were talking—for thought and
feeling do pass mysteriously over the invisible wires of space Cyril
Morland's son was being born of Noel, a little before his time.