The morning wore to an end. Clare had come in at the mid-morning break
to announce that the dress rehearsal would take place on the afternoon
of the following day. All costumes were to be ready. The day-girls were
to lunch at the school. She was brief and businesslike, inaccessible to
questions. She did not look at Louise.
Alwynne, later in the morning, supplementing her instructions, paused a
moment at the child's desk. But Louise gave no sign. Alwynne hesitated.
She herself was averse from verbal sympathy. Also she was pressed for
time, and Clare, she knew, wanted her. The one o'clock bell shattered
her indecision. She gave her directions and hurried away.
Louise packed her books together and went home.
She endured the cheerful noisy lunch; carried out some small commissions
for her step-mother; shepherded the troop of small boys into the paddock
behind the garden and saw them established at their games. She stayed a
moment with the round two-year-old, sprawling by the pile of coats, but
he, too, had his amusements. Every pocket tempted his enquiring fingers.
He ignored her.
She went back to the house. Habit brought her for the fiftieth time to
the attic, and she had opened the door before she remembered. She looked
about her. An iron bedstead, covered by a crude quilt, stood where the
trunk of books had lain. A square of unswept carpet lay before it. There
was a deal night-table and a candlestick of blue tin, with matches and a
guttered candle. Across a chair lay a paper-back, face downwards, and a
pair of soiled red corsets. The ivy had been cut away from the window,
and the sunlight cast no fantastic frieze, but a squared, black shadow
on the floor. The air was close, and a little rank. Louise shrank from
it.
"Mother?" she said; and then: "You've gone away, haven't you? It's no
use calling?"
She waited. The uneven water-jug rattled in its basin.
She spoke again--
"Mother, I know it's all spoiled here, but couldn't you come? Just for a
little while, Mother? I'm most miserable. Please, Mother?"
There was no answer.
"What shall I do?" cried Louise wildly. "What shall I do? Oh, what shall
I do?"
She turned from that empty place, stumbled to her room, and flung
herself across her bed. She was shaken by her misery, as a dog shakes a
rat. She cried, her head on her arms, till she was sick and blinded.
Loneliness and longing seared her as with irons.
The clock ticked, and the sunshine poured into the room. The shouts of
the children, the crack of the ball on bat sounded faintly. The house
slept. Two hours passed.
Somewhere a clock chimed and boomed. Four o'clock.
Slowly and stiffly Louise roused herself and got off her bed. She was
cramped and shivering. She stood in the middle of the room and held out
her hands to the brassy sunlight, but it did not warm her. She felt
dazed and giddy; her head burned as if there were live coals in it. Her
thoughts flowed sluggishly; she found it impossible to hurry them; they
split apart into fragments that were words and meaningless phrases, or
stuck like cogged wheels. Her mind moved across immense spaces to adjust
these difficulties, but she policed them in vain. There was one
sentence, in particular, that she could not deal with. It would not move
along and make room for other thoughts. It danced before her; its grin
spanned the horizon; it inhabited her mind; it was reversible like a
Liberty satin; it ticked like a clock: "What next? What next? What next?
Next what? Next what? Next what?"
What next?... Dully she reckoned it up. The tea-bell--homework--bedtime.
Night--and the false dreams. Morning--and the anger of Miss Hartill. Day
and week and month--and the anger of Miss Hartill. The years stretched
out before her in infinite repetition of the afternoon's agony, till her
raw nerves shrank appalled. Kneeling down, she told God that it was
impossible for her to endure this desolation. She implored Him, if He
should in truth exist, not to reckon her doubt against her, but to be
merciful and let her die. It was not the first time that she had prayed
thus, but never before with such fierce insistence. If He existed He
could impossibly refuse....
Speaking her thoughts, even to so indefinite a Listener, steadied her. A
ghost of hope had drifted through her mind. A ghost indeed; a messenger
that whispered not of waking but of sleep, not of arduous renewing but
of an end. Death was life upon his lips and life, death; yet he was none
the less a hope.
The familiar text upon the wall above her bed caught her eye. The
message seemed no more miraculous than the pansies and mistletoe that
wreathed about its gilt and crimson capitals. "God is our Refuge and
Strength, a very present Help in Trouble." "Ask and it shall be given
unto you" confirmed her from the other wall.
She sat between those tremendous statements and considered them.
God had never yet answered any prayer of hers.... Not, she supposed,
that He could not, but because He did not choose.... He was rather like
Miss Hartill.... But Miss Hartill would never understand.... At least
one could explain things to God--if God were.... And she asked so little
of Him--just to let her die and be at peace.... She thought He might--if
He had even time for sparrows.... She wondered how He would manage it!
If He would only be quick--because red-hot wires ran through her head
when she tried to think, and she was afraid--afraid--afraid--of
to-morrow and Miss Hartill....
The tea-bell pealed across the garden.
She tidied her hair, and fetching the sponge and towel stood before the
glass, trying to trim her marred face into some semblance of composure.
The boys would be clamouring--and one never knew.... There might be
tainted food--a loose baluster--a tag of carpet.... He had his ways....
She must not baulk Him....
She went downstairs.
The children were tired and cross and quarrelsome--the heat had soured
even cheerful Mrs. Denny. It was not a pleasant meal. But it could not
oppress Louise. Outwardly docile and attentive, her mind had withdrawn
into itself and sat aloof, inviolate, surveying its surroundings much as
it would have watched the actors in a moving picture. She was impervious
to bickerings and querulous comment. What did it matter? She would never
have tea with them again.... She was going away from it all.... If only
God did not forget....
All through the breathless evening she awaited His pleasure.
Long after the house was quiet, and Mrs. Denny tucking up her children,
had come and gone, Louise lay wakeful--still waiting.
It was an airless night. Every other moment the little unaccountable
noises of a sleeping building broke the warm silence. Shadows scurried
across the counterpane and over her face like ghostly mice, as the trees
outside her window bent and nodded to a radiant moon.
She was weary to the point of exhaustion. Momently her body seemed to
shrink away from her into the depths of the bed--warm, fathomless
depths--leaving her essential self to float free and uncontained. She
would resign herself luxuriously to the sensation of disintegration, but
with maddening regularity her next breath clicked body and soul together
anew. Yet, as she drowsed, the space between breath and breath
lengthened slowly, till they lay divided by incredible æons in which her
thoughts wandered and lost themselves, grew hoar and died and were born
again; while the dead-weight of her body sank ever deeper into sleep,
was recalled to consciousness with ever increasing effort.
She speculated languidly upon her sensations. They recalled a day at the
dentist's, years before. A tube had been placed over her mouth and she
had struggled, remembering a hideous story of a woman--a French
marquise--that she had read in a magazine. The name began with a "B" or
a "V." "Brin--" something. The Funnel--_The Leather Funnel_--that was
the name of the story.... But there came no choking water--only sweet,
buzzing air.... And then her body had dropped away from her, as it was
doing now.... She recalled the sensation of rest and freedom; she had
passed, like a bird planing down warm breezes, into exquisite
oblivion.... She had returned, centuries later, to a dull aching pain,
harsh noises, and lights that were like blows.... But if she had not
returned? She would have been dead.... They would have buried her....
Such things had happened.... So that was death--that cradling, beautiful
sleep. And God was sending it to her now; flooding her, drowning her in
its warm comfort.... God was very good.... She was sorry--sorry that she
had often not believed in Him.... But Miss Hartill didn't.... But she
would never see Miss Hartill any more.... Perhaps, years after, when she
was tired of sleeping, she would go back and see her again.... There was
All Souls' Night, when you woke up.... But she would not frighten Miss
Hartill.... She laughed a little, to think that she could ever frighten
Miss Hartill.... She would just kiss her, a little ghost's kiss that
would feel like a puff of air ... and then she would go back and sleep
and sleep and sleep ... with only the yew-berries pattering on to her
gravestone to tell her when another year had drifted past.... It was
funny that people could be afraid to die.... She wondered if ghosts
snored, and if you heard them, if your grave were very close? It was her
last thought as she slid into slumber.
Instantly the breakfast gong came crashing across her peace. She fought
against waking. Her eyelids lifted the weight upon them as violets press
upwards against a clod of rotten leaves. She lay dazedly, her mind
cobwebbed with dreams, her thoughts trickling back into the channels of
the previous night. Slowly she took in her situation. There was the
window, and a shining day without: she could hear the starlings
quarrelling on the lawn, and the squeak of an angry robin.... There was
her room, and the tidy pile of clothes by the bed ... the bed, and she
herself lying in it.... So she was not dead! There was to-day to be
faced, and Miss Hartill's anger, and all the other hundreds and
thousands of days....
And she must get up at once.
Her sick mind shrank from that, as from a culminating terror. She was
desperately tired; her body ached as if it had been beaten. Dressing was
a monstrous and impossible feat.... It could not be.... Yet her
step-mother would come--she was between God and Mrs. Denny--and God had
left her in the lurch.
She lay shielding her eyes from the strong light.
The pressure on her eyeballs was causing the usual kaleidoscopic ring of
light to form within her closed lids. The phenomenon had always been a
childish amusement to her; she was adept at the shifting pressure that
could vary colour and pattern. She watched idly. Red changed to green,
purple followed yellow, and the ring narrowed to a pin-point of light on
its background of watered silk; then it broke up as usual into starry
fragments. But they danced no dazzling fire-dance for her ere they
merged again into the yellow ring; to her distracted fancy they were
letters--fiery letters, that formed and broke and formed again.
G--O--D--then an H and a P and an L. She puzzled over them. "God hopes?"
"God helps?" But He hadn't.... "God helps?" A Voice in her ears exactly
like her own took it up--"Those that help themselves." It spoke so
loudly that she shrank. The universe echoed to Its boom: yet she knew
so well that the Voice was only in her own head.
No wonder her head ached, when it was all full of Lights and Voices....
And Miss Hartill would be angry if she took Them to school.... If only
she need not go to school.... Why--why had God cheated her? "He helped
those----" Was that what They meant?
She looked about her, brightening yet uncertain; then her long plait of
hair caught her eye. Lazily she lifted it, disentangled a strand no
thicker than coarse string, and doubling it about her throat, began to
tighten it, using her fingers as a lever, till the blood sang in her
ears. She had sat upright in bed for the greater ease. Suddenly she
caught sight of her face in the wardrobe mirror. It was growing pink and
puffy; the eyes goggled a little. The sensation of choking grew
unendurable. Instinctively her fingers freed themselves and the noose
fell apart. She swung forward, panting, and watched her features grow
normal again.
"It's no good. Oh, I am a coward," cried Louise, wearily.
Her mother's old-fashioned travelling clock, chiming the quarter,
answered her, and for a moment forced her thoughts back from those
borderlands where sanity ends. Habit asserted itself; she was filled
with everyday anxieties. She was late, certainly for breakfast, probably
for school. She jumped out of bed, washed and dressed in panic speed,
collected her belongings and hurried from the house.
Her father, hearing the gate clack, glanced up from his newspaper.
"Has that child had any breakfast?" he demanded, uneasily.
There was no answer. He was late himself, and his wife had poured his
coffee and left the room. He could hear her heavy footfall in their
bedroom overhead.
He returned to his reading.