PART IV.

Mount Latmos

CHAPTER I

I

A park, a lake, a red pillar box, a postman on a bicycle wearing a funny

flat helmet, a tall iron fence with an opening through which the taxi

passed. Nora had arrived at Saint Ethelfreda College in London. It was

exactly what an English college should be: red brick covered with ivy, a

stretch of that vivid green grass one always suspected on postcards, and

flowers, actually the snapdragons which since Newman’s ‘Apologia’ one

expected to find in English college gardens. The maid at the door, with

her crisp cap and apron and stiffly starched movements, was a perfect

specimen of the English servant, like those in the novel Nora had read

on the boat coming over.

‘Miss Talbot is expecting you, Miss. Won’t you step this way, Miss?’

Nora was ushered into a large room, very chilly and damp even the first

week of October, with all of the windows opening out into the pleasant

garden. A small, brown-haired woman, the resident tutor, Miss Talbot,

rose to shake hands with Miss Deming, the pupil of that unusual woman,

Professor Steele, who had visited Saint Ethelfreda.

Miss Talbot was all smiles, too many of them. Nora wished that the

resident tutor’s habit of cocking her head on one side like a robin and

opening her blue eyes very wide did not tempt her to laughter. On the

way to her room Nora was introduced to several severe-looking women in

college gowns who must be dons. They didn’t seem to recognize the

American’s donnishness. Evidently short hair didn’t impress the English

as a sign of a highly developed intellect.

The room set aside for the new American student was delightful, with

windows overlooking the garden and the park beyond, where through the

trees Nora could see sheep grazing. A fireplace and a scuttle of coals.

The delights of an open fire would be hers. A desk near the window, a

big armchair, a couch with an India print cover—everything most

comfortable surely. A knock at the door, and the maid she had seen

downstairs entered.

‘I trust everything’s all right, Miss. You want a bit of fire? London is

damp to the Americans, we find. We’ve had American young ladies here

before, Miss. I always take care of them.’

The maid, whose name was Clara, made Nora feel apologetic for her

careless, undistinguished American speech.

‘Now,’ Clara went on, when the coals began to burn, ‘I’m going to bring

up your tea. Miss Talbot said I might. I said you’d be tired after the

weary journey up to London.’

At the sound of the dinner bell the Saint Ethelfreda students gathered

in the chilly common room. Miss Talbot hurriedly introduced Nora to the

gaunt young woman beside her.

‘Miss South from New Zealand. Like two colonials, really.’

Nora looked at Miss South. Then her glance travelled to a girl standing

apart from the others, a girl with heavy black hair held by a large

jewelled pin, and deeply circled eyes, her wrinkled dress in startling

contrast to the English, all correctly attired for a formal eight

o’clock dinner.

‘Mademoiselle Lafleur, your next-door neighbor,’ murmured Miss Talbot.

The French girl’s tragic eyes lighted up for a moment. Miss Talbot put

out a stiff arm through which she slipped her hand, Nora was seized by

the New-Zealander, and a long procession of dons and students, two by

two, marched into the hall.

The dining-hall soared into heights of new oak imitating some

Elizabethan pattern, Nora suspected, and the girls seated at the rows of

tables appeared insignificant in the vastness of space over them.

Nora’s neighbors ate steadily and swiftly, talking very little. All of

them had red cheeks. Like Peggotty’s in ‘David Copperfield,’ as

brilliant as a red velvet pincushion. Nora had heard about English

complexions. It was the dampness, which at the moment hung like a grey

cloud around the chandeliers suspended from the lofty ceiling, now

obscured. These girls were so bony, too. Their arms, their necks, their

cheeks. Not one morsel of superfluous flesh.

From across the table she caught the word hockey—the hockey matches.

Hockey, not yet introduced at Petersfield, had already invaded some of

the American colleges, Nora told them.

‘It’s a topping game,’ ventured a quiet little girl with a shy smile.

‘Topping.’

Miss Talbot rose, Mademoiselle Lafleur took her arm, and the procession

marched back to the common room. The solemnity of the ceremony was

really delicious. The English girls began passing coffee. It was vile.

One sip almost choked Nora. She saw the French girl slide her cup under

the sofa. The dons, raw-boned and talking hockey, took two cups.

Nora, back in her room, closed the windows to shut out the clammy chill

of English air, and shook some coal over the fire. The common room had

kept the shivers chasing up and down her backbone.

A knock on her door. A girl who looked like Fuzzy Leland at Petersfield,

but much taller and thinner, entered.

‘Won’t you come to cocoa at ten o’clock?’ she said. ‘In my room at the

end of the corridor.’

Petersfield all over again. Even to night feeds. But something hot to

drink would be grateful before getting into bed. The sheets were always

damp. Some one on the boat had warned her never to sleep in an English

bed without slipping a watch between the sheets to see if the glass got

damp. But if it did, what next? Nora decided it was more comfortable not

to know too much about the sheets.

In the tall girl’s room—Sheldon her name was, and English girls called

one another by last names just like boys—five girls sat on the floor in

front of a bright fire. They were very friendly to the strange American,

but they didn’t talk much. Long—long pauses. The cocoa made a comforting

warm trickle down Nora’s clammy interior.

In bed that night Nora prayed that she wouldn’t have to live her

freshman year over again at thirty-one. It would be worse than

reincarnation. Those cocoa parties! Professor Steele was responsible for

her coming to Saint Ethelfreda. She had selected Miss Talbot as a

reliable caretaker for her dear pupil. Nora had counted on cheap

lodgings near the British Museum and the School of Economics before Miss

Steele got started on the lurid horrors of an unheated room, or at best

one with a reeking gas-fire, presided over by a slatternly landlady. She

also preached to Nora the duty of studying English university women at

first hand. Her pupil, with her deceptive youth, would be accepted as

one of the girls and could find out if they, in spite of their

seriousness, were any cleverer than the frivolous American girl who had

brains, even while she concealed them.

So here Nora was. Her room was very still. She could hear the ducks on

the lake and the striking of a church bell. Saint Ethelfreda College,

after a cocoa party, had betaken itself to slumber or to study, instead

of conversing loudly in the corridors, romping and squealing in the

Petersfield fashion. An American had to admit that the English respected

quiet.

At breakfast Annette Lafleur slipped into the vacant chair beside Nora.

All around her sat the English girls fresh from a morning tub, their

hair brushed back into a tight bun in a straight line with their shiny

noses. The French girl wore the tumbled dress of the night before. The

jewelled pin, which still upheld her sable coils, had an uncertain,

trembling tilt. Beside the snappy alertness of her neighbors, she looked

as if she had passed a troubled, sleepless night. She stirred a cup of

tea languidly, and looked around her. The English were quietly consuming

frightful quantities of porridge.

Opposite Nora sat the same quiet little hockey enthusiast to whom Nora

had spoken at dinner. She came from Dorsetshire, and her name by some

strange twist was Dorset, Lucy Dorset.

‘Going to play in the match Saturday, Dorset?’ called out the

cocoa-party hostess of the night before.

‘Hockey—always that hockey,’ muttered the French girl. She turned to

Nora. ‘I want to talk to you about America. Some day soon? This

afternoon maybe? I know many Americans.’

Nora and the New-Zealander walked through the park after breakfast, the

feeble sun lighting up the brown of the London trees and the red buses

lumbering past them. Miss South leaped on to the proper bus, Nora

clumsily catching on behind her.

At the British Museum they passed the guardian policemen at the outer

gate, the sight-seers already assembling, and the guards within. The

signatures of the Saint Ethelfreda officers gave Nora immediate access

to the reading-room sanctities.

‘That much done,’ sighed Miss South, leading the way to University

College and then to the School of Economics to arrange about lectures.

On her return, Nora knocked on the door next to hers. Mademoiselle

Lafleur, wrapped in a big white shawl, was leaning over a cold grate

rubbing her hands together.

‘Haven’t you lit your fire yet?’ Nora asked.

The French girl shook her head. In the centre of the mantel shelf above

her was a little shrine covered with gaily colored silk for a picture of

Napoleon as a young man, draped with the tricolor. Beside him nodded two

white carnations in a tipsy little vase. Mademoiselle Lafleur observed

the direction of Nora’s gaze.

‘The Savior of France,’ she said. ‘I pray for the coming of his

successor to save my poor country. A strong man——’

‘I think a descendant of the Napoleon family lives in America.’ Nora was

conscious of the inappropriateness of her matter-of-fact tone. ‘At least

I have a vague memory——’

‘If it could be a ruler with Napoleon’s blood,’ sighed Annette Lafleur.

When Nora suggested tea in her room in front of a blazing fire, the

great melancholy eyes lit up with a faint ray of response. The sight of

Clara bringing in a tray with an abundance of bread and butter, damson

preserves, plum cake, and tea for two hungry people, changed her into an

eager and normal girl.

‘Beautiful—beautiful.’

‘I’m going to start calling you Annette immediately,’ announced Nora,

pouring out fragrant hot tea from a squatty brown earthenware teapot.

‘And please call me Nora.’

‘With pleasure—Nora.’ Annette laughed over her clumsy fumbling with the

name. ‘To escape “Mademoiselle.” Mademoiselle—Mademoiselle with these

English from morning until night. Like a servant. It is horrible.

Miss—Miss—how would they suffer it?’ Annette began to drink her tea, her

chair up close to the comforting flames.

Annette began to question her new friend eagerly about the United

States. She had met American boys during the war. When the big trucks

stopped in front of her country home and the soldiers tried to buy

gasoline, she, the only member of her family speaking English, had to

talk to them. She had begun filling a note-book with her observations of

American men. To draw them out, she made a list of questions.

‘“Do you believe in Platonic love?” That was one of my questions,’

Annette said, looking at Nora with a triumphant and superior air. ‘And

always the young American man said yes, he believed in Platonic love.’

‘Of course,’ Nora agreed.

‘Then I decided the American young man is remarkable. Now the

Frenchman—of course I love my countrymen best—but no Frenchman believes

in Platonic love. And the Englishman—but they are too cold—too frozen to

believe in anything about love. The Englishman—I hate that kind of man.’

Nora had hoped there wouldn’t be another cocoa party that night. But

there was. This time Annette was invited. Cocoa parties were absolutely

new in her experience. She sat perched on a stool before her hostess’s

fire staring around her, a quizzical wonder in her eloquent eyes.

In Nora’s room afterward she went off into spasms of amusement. ‘I shall

write home,’ she snorted. ‘Cocoa—cocoa party.’ In her mocking tones the

words sounded very ridiculous. ‘Oh, my God!’ Annette threw herself face

downward on Nora’s couch.

The French girl interspersed all her remarks with free translations of

her _mon Dieu_. They flavored her speech like red pepper. Of course the

English girls were shocked by her ‘My God,’ which snapped out like a

firecracker.

But even more startling was the American student’s announcement that she

was taking lectures at the School of Economics. None of them went down

there. Somehow it seemed outside the pale of respectability, an

un-English place, they had been told. It also brought back too vivid

memories of that recent shameful but mercifully brief period when a

Labor Government had ruled England, and a coal-miner had donned satin

breeches to bow before the King. There seemed to be no radicals at Saint

Ethelfreda.

II

Down in the visitors’ room, located with the assistance of Clara, Nora

found Ellen Powys. Ellen, very fresh and lovely, with the pink bloom of

her new home, looked very English in her broad-brimmed hat, tweed

costume, homespun scarf, and chamois gloves.

‘I’ve come to carry you home with me for tea,’ she said, enfolding Nora

in a warm embrace. She looked around the bare little room with its

hissing gas-fire. ‘Isn’t this the quaintest place? Like an inquisitorial

chamber. And I walked through miles and miles of halls to find it.’

Ellen was the mother of four substantial British subjects, waiting to be

displayed to Mummy’s American friend in a big cheerful nursery, presided

over by a Scotch nurse; two boys and two girls, the youngest a babe of

three months. They were beautiful and blond like their parents, with

firm hard legs like pillars. Even the small baby promised a stalwart

robustness.

‘You see,’ explained Ellen, as they drove away in her two-seater, ‘I’m

not clever like Michael. So I took to the baby business. All we can hope

is that the children will inherit their father’s brains.’

On Sunday Nora went a second time to the Powys’s Kensington flat, where

Michael’s friends working with him on the paper and a pleasant mixture

of other people dropped in for supper.

Michael had the same beautiful radiance, but he looked more substantial,

and his enthusiasms were tempered by a sobriety and humor which he had

not yet developed in his Petersfield days.

‘I expected you’d get over,’ Michael said to Nora. ‘I hope we can be

some help to you, Ellen and I. We’ll do what we can.’

The guests began to arrive rapidly. They were gayer than Nora had

anticipated, with a careless and informal kindness to the American

stranger unlike the studied benevolence of Saint Ethelfreda. In their

talk, glancing over various employments and avocations, there was none

of that veneration for the arts which characterizes the outsider. Most

of them, it appeared, had a recognized place in a chosen craft.

‘Jolly piece of acting you put on last week, Jerry.’ A stout man

expanding beyond the confines of his dinner jacket nodded toward an

Irish boy stretched out on the floor before the fire.

‘And a jolly bit of writing you spun out for me in “The Londoner,”’ the

actor rejoined. ‘It was kind of you, Norris.’

‘The honest overflow of a disciplined heart,’ laughed the other.

Supper was handed out informally to the guests, who stood around in

groups balancing plates or sought quiet corners. Nora found herself in a

window-seat between an elderly woman whose studio overlooked Hammersmith

Bridge and a young journalist who was trying between assignments to

write a great novel on the war. Others joined them, talked to Nora,

drifted away. Ellen brought up a few people to be introduced to Nora,

but she left her guests largely to themselves.

It was the most delightful evening Nora had yet spent in England. She

leaped on a bus at a near-by corner, with a new affection for London and

for old friends. At the edge of the park near the college gates, she

passed two policemen.

‘Good evening, Miss,’ they said with a warming politeness.

Yes, London was a charming place. She sped along, the church bell

striking, striking. It must be midnight. She reached the college gates.

They were closed. She tried to pull them open. She strained against

them. No response. They were locked. The porter’s lodge on the other

side was in darkness. She looked around. No one was in sight. She

examined the gate. Yes, she could climb over it. She lifted her skirt,

placed one foot on the first cross-piece, up and up, now over, and

quickly climbed down the other side. Walking up the avenue of beech

trees, casting long shadows over the driveway, she remembered that this

was Sunday night, Sunday in England, church-going, propriety, a quiet

evening at home. The college entrance was locked. Of course it would be.

But a light in one of the first-floor windows saved her. She crept over

to it, called softly, and Willis, a very serious second-year girl,

appeared at the window.

‘I’m locked out,’ Nora said.

‘Of course. It’s past midnight,’ announced Willis.

‘May I climb into your window?’ The window-sill was close to the ground.

The only difficulty was in leaping over the flower borders which

stretched between.

‘I oughtn’t to let you,’ scolded Willis. ‘If you trample the flowers——’

But Willis was so absorbed in higher mathematics that she had no desire

to inquire into the American girl’s irregularity. She said good-night

chillily and went on with her work.

The next morning a note in Nora’s post-office box summoned her to Miss

Talbot’s room. She knocked on what she thought was the proper door.

‘Come in,’ called a faint voice.

Miss Talbot was seated at the opposite end of her very long room in

front of an official table.

‘Will you please go around to the other door,’ suggested Miss Talbot,

‘and not tramp through my sitting-room?’ Nora looked around her, backed

out of the room, and found a door marked ‘Office.’ Evidently, Miss

Talbot’s room possessed a public and a private entrance.

Nora stood in front of the official table, Miss Talbot not asking her to

be seated.

‘I am informed that you were not in the college at closing time last

night, Miss Deming. Your entrance later needs some explanation.’

‘I—I didn’t know—that the gates were locked. When I returned——’ Nora

felt the black guilt of a small child unable to make the proper

explanation to his elders.

‘You did not consult me about any evening engagement, Miss Deming.’

‘You mean that I—if I go out evenings——’

‘Every resident in this college makes no engagement without consulting

me,’ Miss Talbot declared.

‘I—I didn’t know,’ Nora faltered.

‘Oh.’ Into Miss Talbot’s exclamation one could read almost anything.

Outside the inquisitorial chamber, Nora realized that Miss Talbot was

ignorant of her academic standing in her own country, her age, her years

of independence. She must go back and explain. But something held her

outside Miss Talbot’s door. Why should she live in this English college

without the restrictions of the other students, free of the shackles

which held them? The girls had accepted her as one of them. She would

not spoil the naturalness of her position.

Her heart still beat with enraged thumps. Her cheeks burned. She

remembered now the rancor the young suffer against restraint. So this

was what the English girls had to endure.

Annette was delighted at Nora’s experience in bumping her head against

the unyielding stone wall of a British Sabbath. She, too, had suffered.

But she had her peculiar kind of revenge. Whenever Miss Talbot appeared

within her orbit, she muttered under her breath two phrases which she

had found in Gaston Leroux: ‘Smirking with the careful charm of a woman

a little along in years who relies still on infantine graces,’ and ‘fat

smile of importance,’ which was even better.

The English girls called Miss Talbot ‘Tabby,’ and they resented her

tyranny as much as did the two foreigners. None of them, however, dared

to rebel. Poor Jonesie, an honors student in chemistry, always studying

long after midnight, had asked for permission to go to a Bach concert.

‘You will never distinguish yourself by running out at night like a

servant girl,’ pronounced Tabby icily.

Jones, on a scholarship and not far enough removed from the servant

class to escape the sting in Tabby’s words, had submitted to the

decision.

‘She’s a tyrant,’ one of Jonesie’s champions said. ‘It’s power she

loves. Poor Jonesie who gets dull working so hard——’

‘If one felt Tabby did it for our good. The way she grins when she says

something nasty——’

But Fairfield, a stubby girl from Cheshire, always defended Tabby.

‘She’s clever—awfully clever. You all know that.’ No one disputed

Fairfield. All of them had too many sore memories of Tabby’s

relentlessly powerful tongue. ‘You’ve got to let Tabby have a little

temperament,’ she concluded.

Nora soon discovered that Fairfield was right. Tabby was so much more

than a tyrant. At the International Dinner given at the Trafalgar Club,

she overheard Miss Talbot talking to a distinguished Frenchman partly in

French and partly in English in a brilliant fashion which she realized

she at Tabby’s age could never equal. In the candlelight, Tabby, with

her firm white neck and shoulders, the brilliant green of her eyes, the

delicately shifting color of her face intensified by the rose of her

gown, was very handsome, one of the most notable women there. Only as

the shades of Saint Ethelfreda drew around her did she become sharp and

hard, ruling with a force which none dared question. She had two lives

which never crossed each other.

III

Lucy wanted to be Nora’s friend. She gave a light little knock on Nora’s

door, lingered over her fire, talked to her about Hardy, the Dorsetshire

poet, whose verse stirred her, another Dorsetshire person, as nothing

else had. Gradually she told more about herself. She came from a family

whose ambition for her was success at the county balls. But she wasn’t a

success. She couldn’t be. At dances her hair got wet and stringy. She

knew she was awkward. And dancing made her tired—so very tired. She came

to college to escape the county balls. Her father had been angry, her

mother sad, at their daughter’s failure. But she loved Saint Ethelfreda.

And she loved hockey. Hardy and hockey—strange little Lucy.

One night she looked up at Nora with a bird-like glance from her

footstool in front of the fire. ‘Do you like Mademoiselle?’ she asked.

‘I’ve seen you talking to her.’

‘I find her very interesting—very different,’ Nora told her.

‘I’m afraid I don’t care for the French. We always have a French girl

here at college. They seem very strange. Not like the English. I don’t

like people who are different. That’s English, I suppose. We’re narrow,

you think?’

‘But I’m different.’

‘In such a nice way,’ interrupted Lucy. ‘You seem so friendly—easy to

talk to. Really,’ she added, the courage rising in the depths of scared,

blue-green eyes.

There seemed no poetry in the English girls—except Lucy—no imagination.

When Annette insisted upon reading aloud her latest discovery in English

verse at the cocoa parties, reading it as it should be read—tenderly,

with moments of fire, of passion, their red cheeks flushed carmine and

they looked down toward their boots. They appeared proud of their lack

of emotion, at least their concealment of it, of their regular and

studious life at college. They expected to secure posts in a school,

good ones if they got ‘firsts’ in the examinations, those eventful

examinations, which, at the end of three years, decided their

professional standing in life. To be successful students, they

eliminated all vanity. Neatness, an almost oppressive soapy cleanliness,

they insisted upon, but scraped-back hair and dull woollen dresses under

academic gowns were the marks of the serious university woman. They, the

daughters of doctors, barristers, schoolmasters, and clergymen in

provincial towns, had no curiosity about London. They laughed at the

time Nora wasted with sight-seeing. They had been to the Tower and the

Zoo. A few of the more spirited had visited Madame Tussaud’s. When

necessity took them to East London, they avoided buses which carried one

relentlessly through miserable thoroughfares. They used the Underground,

bolted out as quickly as they could, and didn’t look around them. They

felt a sense of good form in not staring at the misery of others. Out of

kindness several of the older girls went with Nora to the City churches

like Saint Bartholomew’s, but they disapproved of her choosing a

different one each Sunday. They hinted that it seemed too much like

church sight-seeing. But Nora told them with a laugh that she was not

above such ecclesiastical junketings.

All the political sense the female novelists gave to Englishwomen Nora

never discovered at Saint Ethelfreda. Not one of them had attended a

session of Parliament. There wasn’t time. They couldn’t understand

politics. Conservative, Liberal—they left all that to their fathers. A

government election the year before had started the college, so Maggs

said, into staging a mock election, in which, even in play, most of

Saint Ethelfreda had kept away from Labor. The few votes given all came

from day students, London girls, who sported with a mild radicalism. But

never the residents from the provinces.

‘Too stodgy and respectable,’ declared Maggs, a new acquaintance of

Nora’s, who was Cockney to the marrow.

There were no Socialist Leagues, no arguments about the duty of bearing

fatherless children, or of becoming sisters to the unwashed Bolshevists.

When Nora dropped in to visit the history seminars, she kept comparing

the English and the American way. Petersfield played more lightly with

the mind. It wasted time with college activities, but there was an

intensity, an enlivening force in its best moments which she felt Saint

Ethelfreda lacked. Here was the daily faithful application, the mature

self-direction which flitting American girls seldom arrived at, the

solid, honest accomplishment. Balance, restraint—these were the

intellectual virtues of Saint Ethelfreda. But the ignorance of

contemporary events, the indifference held the students in a sluggish

theoretical backwater. They could not translate what they read into

terms of the present. Yet was Petersfield any better? She was probably

nursing romantic memories of her own college. All college women,

possibly, were equally out of the world.

The brilliant students at University College and the School of Economics

were generally men. Not all. The short-haired women with masculine dress

and the prim Quaker ladies with strong opinions she had met at Professor

MacPherson’s Sunday afternoon teas argued boldly about political

philosophy with the Hindoos, the eager Jews, the Boer, the Canadians, a

Siamese, the New-Zealanders, the Egyptian, the shabby Irish and English.

Although they were solidly Labor, they represented delicate shades of

distinction hard for an outsider like Nora to catch. Some of them were

Fabians, much interested in the Fabian Kindergarten, instituted for the

young and faltering in radical thought. Others were Guild Socialists

ready to watch the spectacular downfall of the present capitalistic

society almost any moment. When Nora carried back these prophecies to

her own college, the chemistry don had laughed like a horse, throwing

back her head, and screaming, ‘What nonsense!’ Others among Professor

MacPherson’s guests, merging Fabianism and Guild Socialism, represented

the most subtle and tantalizing of thinkers. But none of them had the

middle-class taboos of Saint Ethelfreda, with the belief in the

necessity of respectability. How they despised Saint Ethelfreda! Those

women!

Michael Powys’s crowd, which Nora met almost every Sunday, were less

statistical, less grubby. What brought all of them to Ellen’s little

drawing-room was their common belief that a man could be a painter or a

journalist and at the same time hope that England could be made a less

hopeless hole to live in. They wanted to reconstruct a society shattered

by war and still, after eight years, sadly in pieces, so that one could

be spiritually comfortable while one fiddled in Queen’s Hall or hurried

off the last pages of proof. But all of this seriousness they concealed.

To Nora the well-set-up and carefully finished young men were the most

graceful product of British civilization. Their perfection of ease, the

best American men never succeeded in giving the effect of such

undesigned art. The women, young matrons like Ellen, with serene eyes

and delicate flower-like bloom, lacked the nervous intensity which wore

one out with American women.

But at ten o’clock the porter was beginning to lock the college gates,

and Nora had to leave these delightful people warming up to their best

conversation to return to another week of porridge, Tabby, and the dons,

and table talk of hockey.

IV

London was now held fast in the grip of November fogs. The light October

mists were only happy memories. Day after day, when Nora looked out of

her window, even the nearest trees were hidden by greyish vapor, and the

thick air made her eyes burn and her throat dry. Going to the Museum,

she felt as if she were walking in her sleep as she passed from one

choking area to another. The water on the pavements, the slimy streets,

the sooty air made her spirits sink. She felt as if something were

pushing her down to the pavement, and she would never be able to get up

again.

In the reading-room the grey clouds floated up to the lofty dome,

dropping down upon the men and women huddled in their stalls, and giving

to the benevolent attendants in skull caps imprisoned in a sacred inner

circle the dark, forbidding obscurity of mischief-loving genii.

When she and Annette went to the theatre in Hammersmith, the fog, like

pea-soup the British described it, was so dense that the policemen after

the play escorted parties to the Underground. Along the edge of the park

they felt their way, touching the iron palings of the fence for

guidance. They heard voices near by, but could see no one.

When the fog lifted after five days and a convalescent sun glimmered

weakly over the streets, Nora went to the Wallace gallery to see ‘The

Laughing Cavalier.’ She found it an amusing pastime to move slowly away

from the compelling smile of the merry gentleman in the painting to see

how far it could follow her. Farther and farther away she went, the eyes

pursuing her with their tantalizing gaiety. Suddenly the laughter was

gone. She looked around her. The same pall had fallen over all the

neighboring canvases—Reynolds, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Titian, and the

rest. The fog had returned and was rapidly filling the gallery. As she

passed through the room full of old French clocks, all ticking away with

different voices and rhythms in the dimness, they seemed to be closing

in upon her, ticking, ticking, in her ears, all around her head, at her

back, over her feet. She ran down the staircase to get away, and out

into the black chasms of Marylebone High Street.

The next day she was back in the B.M. She had been reading aimlessly for

almost two months and had got nowhere. Nineteenth-century England

stretched out greater and greater, vast unexplored spaces. One plunge

seemed as sensible as another. It really made no difference. Sometimes

she stayed away from the reading-room and from her lectures, but the

weeks were slipping by, and she had done nothing. If she sat in that

grey, airless tomb, an inspiration might suddenly come to her. She had a

cold, and her hacking cough made the dried-up old woman in the chair

next look up sharply from her copying. She reached in her bag, and

brought out a box of lozenges.

‘Here, take this,’ she said crossly. Nora obediently swallowed one, and

thanked her.

Another day Nora, writing hard on a new project for a book, toiled with

a scratching pen. Screech—screech—it was annoying. Once more her

neighbor regarded her with hostility. She handed Nora a thick blotter.

‘I can’t stand that pen of yours,’ she scolded. ‘You write on this.’

Four o’clock. Nora was accomplishing nothing. She would go back to

college. She reached her room exhausted, her head aching, her neck

stiff. As she sipped her tea in front of the fire, the pounding of heels

in the hallway making throbs of pain shoot through her head, she knew

that she hated everything at Saint Ethelfreda, everything except Annette

and Lucy and Maggs—and dear old Clara who made her fire and brought her

beautiful tea every day. Tabby and the other dons—yes, she hated them.

They had no feeling. They were so hard—hard. Was it being shut up in a

college nunnery which made them like this? Would she—yes, she was afraid

that some day she, too——‘Consign me to the watery depths if I get that

way,’ she confided to her diary. ‘Make me love the human race, O ye

great powers of the universe.’

‘I don’t see how you can live this way,’ protested Annette as she

watched her friend start off after breakfast every morning. ‘A system so

unbending—I should die, Nora.’

She clapped her hands together for joy when Nora, after dinner,

stretched out on her couch, with Annette and Lucy for an audience,

before the fire, cursed the B.M. and all the diabolical realms of

scholarship.

‘You Americans are delightful!’ cried Annette. ‘So—so complicated. Going

off to the B.M. with that bag after breakfast. That Nora, I

say—she cares only for books and for working. But now you are

delightful—delightful, Nora.’ She rushed over and kissed her friend on

both cheeks.

But Lucy was shaking her head. Lucy’s main regret was that she had

wasted most of her youth with the county balls. ‘You don’t know, Nora.

You’ve done so much. And I—I must work every minute now to make up for

all the time I lost. Books—books. I can never get enough. There’s

nothing in life equal to good books. They are everything.’

Annette snorted. ‘It is the soul—the heart. An empty heart——’ Annette’s

great eyes were lifted toward the ceiling. ‘A heart not loving——In this

college there is nothing for the heart—nothing.’

Lucy looked arch. ‘Is it the young men you miss, Annette?’

‘English young men? I do not care for English young men.’ Annette

marched out of the room.

‘You know the French,’ hinted Lucy when Annette had closed the door

majestically behind her. Lucy had read Balzac the preceding summer and

had even peeped into Maupassant’s ‘Une Vie.’ ‘They’re always thinking

about young men.’

Poor Lucy! Did she never have shy memories of the young men in Dorset

with whom she had danced year after year?

When Nora emerged from the reading-room at noon and found the sun

shining, a low pale sun scarcely rising above the grey Georgian houses

with yellow blinds in Bedford Square, she often decided not to go back

to her work, but to spend the afternoon walking the streets. She was

almost happy then. She loved the winding lanes of the City, the mazes of

Southwark, the forest of church spires she saw from London Bridge.

But too often at the end of these footsore adventures, there was the old

pressure of pain at her neck, the tight ache in her throat. She must be

homesick. It was being out of her own country. She wanted Petersfield,

Miss Steele, Ruth and Helen, dear Cordelia and the quiet Maronac house

near the lake. With her international conception, she had once scoffed

at an irrational love of one’s own country. But there was something—you

just couldn’t explain it away. She felt it even in the friendliness of

Michael’s and Ellen’s drawing-room. The most charming, appealing people,

and yet between them and her such fearful gulfs yawned. From the women

she felt less separated, but it was the men she wanted to know. The

Irish actor—there were several actors; the violinist who played for his

friends as he never played in Queen’s Hall; the painter in the Royal

College of Art hating his classes the way Margaret Abington had

hated hers; the intense man with the streaks of grey in his

chrysanthemum-yellow hair, who was on Michael’s paper—it was they who

followed her as she ran toward the college gates. But perhaps even more

she thought of the men who were nothing. What they did wasn’t what

mattered. It was their grace, their careless talk with her, their mere

existence she wanted for herself. But they were all English, and removed

from her by this silly and accidental fact. She always the stranger. She

vowed she would keep away from the supper parties, but the next week she

suffered all over again the blend of pleasure and pain.

No one—nothing was to blame. She was tired. She worked too steadily in

the B.M. The bad air, and then getting nowhere with her work. She must

stay away for a few days and rest. But in the morning she started

reading a new book. She was afraid of the silence of her room, broken

only by the hard heels of the English girls marching back and forth to

and from lectures. She admitted to herself sitting late at night over

her dying fire that when she had come to England she had counted on

life’s being different for her. New scenes. A fresh existence.

Something—changing all the past. The men at Ellen’s—each week the

feeling that she would meet some one who——But always the same thing. The

Englishmen standing in groups against the wall. ‘Clever American woman,’

they might say. ‘Attractive in an odd way. Almost beautiful, you know.’

These composed Britishers whom Annette hated and Nora found mysteriously

different. But never did they and she quite meet on a common

understanding. Perhaps if she had not been forced to hurry away so soon

after supper——

‘It’s ridiculous—you running back to that old college like a

schoolgirl,’ scolded Ellen. ‘Michael could write a letter to that

woman—his connection with the paper would impress her. That kind always

are impressed that way.’

‘If you like,’ Michael added, smiling at Nora.

But Nora remained firm in asking for no concessions, and each week she

had the same sensation of just missing what she most wanted.

Work—doing something. She must keep very busy.

V

On the last Saturday before the Christmas vacation, Maggs, Nora,

Annette, and Lucy went to visit the Docks. From the Underground they

walked through Shadwell, the district where Michael Powys, as a

Cambridge undergraduate, had lived in his vacations. When they started,

the sun had shone upon their undertaking, but now the gloom of winter

intensified the dreariness of the rows and rows of wretched houses and

the dirt of the children playing in the narrow streets.

A guide at the entrance to the Docks conferred with Maggs. He handed

over the young women to the foreman of the ivory warehouse. Thousands of

elephants’ tusks from East and West Africa, from Asia, from South

Africa, lay piled upon the floor. The foreman pointed to one beautiful

polished tusk, a creamy, shiny white.

‘Worth two hundred and fifty pounds, that one,’ he informed them.

There were walrus and rhinoceros tusks in the great warehouse, and

twisted tusks, at least five feet long, from an Arctic fish, out of

which ivory beads were made.

The spice warehouse had the delicious odor which Nora associated with

Eastern tales. Nutmegs, cloves, cinnamon, all sent up great columns of

pungent sweetness. Wool—rubber—in all stages. Australia, South Africa,

Siam, New Zealand, South America. The tropics—frozen seas. These far-off

treasures nursed the imagination, freed one from the confining walls of

Saint Ethelfreda. Oceans—typhoons—sailors—deserts—caravans—the whole

world.

The wine cellars the guide saved for the end, dim, cavernous spaces, the

roofs white with the fungus growth from evaporating wine, through which

both the guide and his party carried torches which lighted up the rows

of fat casks.

But the heavy fog had shut off the river from the Docks, and no boats

could land, so the wharves stretched out into nothing.

On the way back to the Underground station, they passed the Shadwell

Market. Nora thought herself hardened to misery after almost three

months of London. She had learned to hurry past the men without legs

sprawled on the pavement who drew pictures with colored chalk and held

out ragged caps for pennies. She had seen a wild-eyed man feeding out of

a garbage can in Tottenham Court Road. From the steps of the National

Gallery she had watched the army of unemployed mass themselves at

Trafalgar Square, distribute their handbills, with unutterable woes upon

them, and make their terrible speeches. She knew that if she stood in a

theatre queue to get a cheap seat in the pit, she must endure the lively

business contrived by those who gathered in a few pennies where they

could. There were the three blind men led past the queue by a fat boy.

They seemed to follow her everywhere. And the organ wheeled up by the

red-faced man, who played and sang, while his friend, with iron plates

on his heels, did a clog dance. There were whole families trooping past,

avoiding the penalties of begging by some pathetic display of feeble

wits. Card tricksters, melodramatic monologuists with appeals to heaven,

fiddlers, pipers—all of them concluding with the same speech before they

passed the hat. They were the London unemployed. The world owed them a

living. ‘Only a penny or two, Miss.’

But Nora was not prepared for Shadwell Market filled with Christmas

toys. Dolls hung suspended over the crowd of children, beautiful smiling

dolls with pink and blue dresses, perambulators for dolls, beds,

bureaus, little stoves, boxes of dishes with tiny teapots, Noah’s arks,

games, drums, pistols, trumpets, a toy telephone, pails of candy,

barrels of nuts, apples, oranges. Around them crowded dirty ragged

little girls of eight or ten, carrying pale babies under their shawls.

Even little boys carried babies. Women, tugging small children by the

hand, showed that there would soon be new babies. Babies—more babies. So

the world goes on.

Nora had never seen so many children before. And children in a great

flock often bring tears to the eyes, even if they are happy children.

The others stopped to buy some toys for the college Christmas tea. Nora

bought dolls, and, when she came to the dirtiest little girls carrying

the dirtiest babies, she slipped a doll into their hands.

The next morning in the British Museum, Nora picked up a book Annette

had wanted her to read. It was about the emotion of beauty. She read a

few pages. Then the book dropped from her hand. She had decided that

instant to write a history of women in the textile industries.

VI

Nora was sitting in the drawing-room of Michael Powys’s brother Tom in

Felton, two hours out of Manchester. Mrs. Powys, in a setting of heavily

stuffed furniture and large oil paintings, was pouring tea. Her fat

blonde face had an amusing lack of harmony with her elaborate Paris

clothes.

‘I can’t understand why you want to see our mills, Miss Deming. You

won’t understand anything about it. I never can. Just fearful noise and

queer hot smells. I insisted that we live as far away as possible. All

that dirt, you know. Even here the atmosphere is always smoky. Please

don’t talk about the mill to Tom when he comes in. He’s so bored by any

reference to it. Of course, it’s profitable. But if he hadn’t inherited

the business, we could live in London or near by like Michael and

Ellen.’

As a preparation for her visit the next morning, Mrs.

Powys felt impelled to contribute a few facts. ‘They’re so

ungrateful—working-people. The more you do for them, the worse they

are. In bad times, my husband has kept his factory going at a loss to

himself just to help out his hands. But they never appreciate such

things.’

‘Isn’t it also an advantage to an employer to keep his industry from

getting disorganized?’ Nora inquired.

‘Not at all. And you’ll be shocked at the way those mill women neglect

their children. Off to the mills before their babies are two weeks old.

The children grow up wild—hardly know their mothers. If they’d stay

home, take care of their houses, and cook proper meals——’

It was useless to bring a ray of light into Mrs. Powys’s dark views of

the human beings upon whom her husband’s industry rested.

In the morning Nora motored through hilly country dark with smoke to Mr.

Powys’s mill, where the manager conducted her over the various

departments, shouting out explanations of the mysteries of cotton

manufacture above the din of machinery. He had worked for the Powys

family, father and son, for forty years. Splendid men both of them. If

their workers did the right thing, they couldn’t have better employers.

But with these trade-unions putting wrong ideas in people’s heads and

the Labor Party in Parliament shouting nonsense, there was no telling

what England was coming to.

On the second day Nora was conducted through another mill by Miss

Chapin, a slow-moving, spiritless woman in the Welfare Department, and a

friend of Maggs and the girls at the Working-Women’s College near

London. They went from one hot, noisy department to another. In the

spinning-room Nora found women employed, ring-spinning it was instead of

the mules, which required men. Many of the workers were far advanced in

pregnancy. And the little ‘doffers’ who took off the full bobbins and

put on empty ones appeared very small for the legal fourteen years.

Neglect and undernourishment had not made giants of North England

people.

Miss Chapin was discouraged about her mill. It belonged to an extensive

limited company, with no concern in the industry except its profits. She

disapproved of the policy carried out of taking back the mothers of

illegitimate children, a bad example for the rest of the girls.

‘The only difference they make is that the unmarried girls have to stop

work a month sooner than the others. But they can come back as quick.

They bring their babies in here for me to see. It’s seldom they try to

get rid of them. I can’t understand it.’

There was much Miss Chapin would never understand. But she did the best

she could.

Nora mingled in the noon crowd of mill people hurrying home to their

dinner. The women, with their shawls thrown over their heads shuffling

along in clogs, were a picturesque novelty to a stranger. Small brothers

and sisters came bringing lunches wrapped up in red bandanna

handkerchiefs for members of the family who lived too far away from the

mills to go home. The babies in the perambulators, potential spinners

and weavers, in a community where few children dreamed of a future

outside the mills, looked sad to Nora. The rows of stone houses buzzed

with the excitement of home-coming workers. A little doffer whom Nora

had noticed in the spinning-room smiled at her from a group of children.

‘I seen you in our place,’ she said shyly.

Nora ate a cheerless bun and a hard banana on a chilly bench near the

trolley line. The spring sun had been obscured by the dense clouds of

smoke which gave the manufacturing community a uniformly drab

countenance. Raw winds blew from the sea.

The trolley entered a beautiful valley, with tall chimneys rising above

the pale green foliage of early spring. The next mill, unlike the

efficiently constructed new building Nora had seen in the morning, was a

rambling structure close to a stream, which had evidently in an early

day furnished water-power. Miss Gretton, the Welfare Worker, in a light

but littered office, was a brown-eyed, enthusiastic woman close to

forty. She was attached to her employer, John Alexander, by a lifetime

of the finest kind of association. He was a grand old man with four sons

just like him. All of them lived within sight of the factory. Four

generations of workers had toiled in the mills established by the

grandfather of the present owner. His employees were recognized in all

the mill towns clustered around Manchester as steady, honest men and

women. Old John Alexander got the best of them. He tolerated no

looseness. No children born out of wedlock in his mills. One case in

fifty years, Miss Gretton said.

The workers stopped to show Nora what they were doing. At piece-rates,

this meant the gift of valuable time. But a pleasant spirit of

friendliness was evident everywhere. One woman explained her warping;

another, handsome and pink-cheeked, her weaving. In a corner a very old

man, following an obsolete method of warping, worked alone.

‘He was too old to learn the new ways,’ Miss Gretton explained. ‘He

never looks up from his work. I don’t believe he’s seen me all the years

I’ve been here.’

In the Welfare Room a young girl brought tea for the visitor. All the

mill was taking a few minutes off for afternoon ‘drinking.’ Over their

tea Miss Gretton admitted that family mills like hers were rapidly being

replaced by the limited companies operating scores of mills, with

impersonal, disinterested stockholders. The paternalistic system must

give way to some organization where the workers looked out for their own

well-being. But the old way, at least their mill, had been so pleasant.

Like Miss Chapin she had her discouragements. The evening clubs designed

for the improvement of the work-people were not well attended.

‘The cinema and boxing matches—it’s all some of them want. And now the

radio. We’ve tried reviving some of the old village customs—the games,

the May pole and the May dances. There’s one old man who’s tried to keep

them up. But they don’t care. And the reading-clubs and the

lectures—what was my father’s life and mine—only a few want them.’

When they parted at the trolley station, Nora, waving from the car until

she could see Miss Gretton’s sturdy figure no longer, knew that her book

was already begun.

VII

In the British Museum reading-room Nora began over again. All her life

she had been preparing herself for the new book. Women—women—their

lives—their frustrations—their work. What she had done before was like

the background of a tapestry—sky, earth, trees. She was now to weave in

the main figures. These she had already started in the dark winter weeks

when she thought she was accomplishing nothing.

She wanted to be fair, to observe all sides, to keep her historic

perspective. She was pleading no cause, making no case. Perhaps when the

facts were gathered, her readers could go farther. But that was not for

her. She no longer felt fatigue. Every day showed some trifle finished.

More and more hours—stretching out the labor of the day.

At night the immensity of her task lay before her when she tried to

sleep, like the vast spaces of the heavens which she had observed with

Ruth Ewing back in Petersfield. All those whirling worlds and millions

of suns. Numbers, space, time, they went beyond all human comprehension.

Hardy’s ‘Two in a Tower,’ which Ruth had sent her at Christmas time. The

poetry of the sky. Immeasurable infinity. A big undertaking. It was what

one tried to do. All those women—all countries—all ages. The little she

could do for England was less than the smallest star. Generations of

women spinning—spinning—spinning. In Greece, in Palestine, all over

Europe. China, India, Japan—perhaps she would never know much about

them. Even in England the Wyf of Bath, the ladies Piers Plowman had

chided, Margaret of Shrewsbury—but so many more. Then women the

weavers—carders—winders. In her dreams one pale figure after

another—stretching on and on—an endless procession—the same unending

toil. Spiders—they had become spiders. Long silken threads everywhere.

Had she read of a woman changed into a spider? A Greek tale. She was

awake.

* * * * *

‘Are you made so, Nora, that in the spring you can shut yourself up in

that miserable B.M.?’ inquired Annette sarcastically. ‘Live on books in

the spring? The sun so beautiful. The sunshine on my face, my hands—it

is as if I, too, were growing like the flowers. The daffodils springing

up in the grass. By moonlight I wander down to the lake. Like

butterflies fluttering—the daffodils on the edge of the water. Another

week, and they will be gone. My poor little Nora. Is it the little old

men in the skull caps in that B.M. reading-room she dreams about at

night?’ Annette, laughing, bobbed forward and kissed Nora with her

double-cheeked French kiss.

‘You don’t think you are working too hard?’ inquired Lucy gently.

At first Nora fought against the pain in her neck which climbed to the

top of her head and lay there like a heavy pressing stone and then went

down, down her back, until each aching nerve cried out, and she could

not sleep. Through a course of spring lectures at the School of

Economics given by the most famous historian of industrial England, a

man who emerged seldom from his country library, Nora hung on. Each day

a little harder than the one before. One morning in May she had to stay

in bed.

Matron, the college nurse, said all she needed was rest. She shut

Annette and Lucy out of the room. She pushed back the curtains so that

the sunshine streamed through wide-open windows, and one could hear the

birds singing in the garden, and smell the tang of the earth and the

sweetness of the flowers. Nothing but rest. Sleep—sleep once more. One

hour after another. The church bells—the clicking heels in the hallway

between lectures, and the voices and the strike of balls in the near-by

tennis courts.

At last Nora got restless. She wanted to see Annette and Lucy. She must

thank Miss Talbot for the irises she had sent. Matron gave her a

reluctant smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps you may have a visitor now

and then.’

From Clara, Nora first learned that London was not so peaceful as usual.

Clara had come in from her walk through her favorite streets, and was

making a little fire, now that the chill of evening was coming on.

When she faced around, Nora detected an unnatural excitement in her

usually calm eyes. ‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ she began. ‘Not

even the paper this morning to tell us the news.’ Clara reached for the

scuttle and shook it violently over the blazing kindlings. ‘They’ve gone

mad—don’t know what they’re doing. Everything’s stopped—the trains they

say. And all those dock-men down where you young ladies was——’

‘You mean the miners—that it’s a sympathetic strike——’ Nora in her sick

retreat had not seen a paper for days. She sat up in bed and stared at

Clara.

‘There’s none o’ my sympathy in it.’ Clara turned with a snap toward

Nora. ‘What do they think they’re doin’—London with no milk, butter,

nothing. It’s starvation. Like the war. I know how it’ll go.’

Tabby during her frequent short visits had never mentioned the strike.

To one suffering from nervous fatigue she was a delightful visitor. She

had been ill during the war—a breakdown it was—and she had a skill in

darting lightly over inconsequential topics which was both restful and

entertaining.

What had prostrated Tabby? Had the war stricken her? One would never

know.

To-night, having heard Clara’s excited tones she divined at once what

they had been discussing.

‘I hoped you wouldn’t know,’ she said, when she and Nora were alone.

‘But of course that would be impossible.’ Tabby stretched out in the big

chair near the fire. She looked very weary, her color gone, her eyes

protruding and heavily circled. ‘Things will be patched up,’ she

continued. ‘They always are in England, you know. We make no desperate

experiments—tearing down the old and beginning all over again. The Labor

leaders are already scared. The strike has been too successful—the

suddenness and completeness. They could do almost anything if they

dared. But they only talk. Every one talks. In a few days we’ll go on

the same old way.’

Nora began to tell Tabby about her interrupted book, her visits to

industrial England, her months of reading.

‘You are older than most of the students here, Miss Deming?’

‘Yes,’ Nora answered.

‘I thought so.’ Tabby was gazing into the fire. ‘I wonder if our

universities will ever be anything but the playing-fields of infants.’

‘I’d forgotten—that we, too, are like that—until I came here. I thought

at first we were better—less intellectually provincial—more interested

in the broader aspects of learning. But lying here—so many things——’

Tabby had no illusions, then. But why couldn’t she do something—treat

the girls like equals—show them her own mind brilliant, clear,

relentlessly logical?

Even Annette had caught glimpses of the real Tabby. ‘She talks French

like an angel,’ Annette often said. ‘I love her for that. For making my

language beautiful—not like the rest of the English.’

Annette was beginning to droop. She longed for Paris. May in Paris. In

London, the daffodils had become shrivelled husks on green stems. Before

Nora was well enough to go back to the B.M., the general strike was

over. The suddenness of the end no one could understand. The strikers

assumed an apologetic attitude toward their recent insurrection. Only

the miners held out, deserted by the rest, they thought, with no relief

in sight. The vague promises of gentlemen—not for them.

VIII

Nora, seated in the taxi beside Annette, was seeing her off to Paris.

That morning she had said good-bye to Lucy, fighting back her tears. The

year was over. Annette, waving toward the red-brick buildings visible

through the trees until they were hidden from her sight, threw herself

against Nora and sobbed.

‘Dear Saint Ethelfreda, dear Saint Ethelfreda. Will I ever see the

beloved college again?’

‘But Annette,’ Nora reminded her, ‘you know you really didn’t like it

here.’

‘A whole year of my life—a whole year. Part of myself I leave behind me.

Never again will those happy days return to me.’

At the station she wept afresh. ‘We are sisters,’ she sobbed against

Nora’s shoulder. ‘Sisters forever. Although the great ocean is between

us, never will I forget my dear Nora. Never until I die.’ The train

sighed and began to move, Annette mopped her eyes, waved her

handkerchief, and threw kisses to her dear friend. At last Nora was

alone on the platform, friendless in London.

In the deserted college, she began to pack her trunk hurriedly. She was

leaving London in the morning to go down to Cornwall for a few weeks.

After that, she planned to take lodgings near the B.M. and read through

the summer.

Late that night, she stood looking out of the window. There was a

shimmer of moonlight over the garden, and she could smell the roses in

the border. Like Annette, she felt a stirring of the heart at leaving

Saint Ethelfreda. When she had said good-bye to the girls, she had got a

glimpse into their locked lives. She pitied them as she pitied herself.

England, bowed down by taxes, by debt, by its huge pauper population,

fed just enough by the dole to save it from utter starvation, held out

no rosy promises to girls of the impoverished middle class. They would

never marry the young men who in normal times would have become their

husbands. Young men were too poor. If they married, they must seek

brides with a dowry.

Consciously or unconsciously, after observing the spinsterhood of their

native villages which went for a walk in the afternoon, poured out tea

in a fussy, chilly drawing-room, or looked over the ‘Times’ before

dinner, these girls had worked out escape from such a life by going to

the universities. The hope of a profession—teaching or medicine—that was

life for them. And in fighting for this kind of existence, they crushed

out weakness, softness. They seemed hard. Struggling for scholarships,

for ‘firsts,’ for posts with a living stipend—one had to be hard. And

Miss Talbot, who knew so much better than the girls what was ahead of

them, held them to their work. She had appeared tyrannical, cruel, but——

Nora, so much older, with so much more of the struggle behind her, fewer

years of helpless longing for the overpowering emotion that clutched at

the throat, stung the eyes, made stabs of pain at the breast—for her now

there was the salty flavor of work. But for them——

A tap on the door. Clara held something in her hand. ‘A letter, Miss, by

the late post.’

The letter was from Judge Andrews. Cordelia was dead. She had been dead

almost three weeks. The end had come quickly. Two weeks before her death

she had been living alone, no one but her family doctor suspecting there

was little of life left to her. The malady had been of long standing,

ever since the year Nora went away to college, Judge Andrews believed.

During the last two years, when Nora had not been back to Maronac,

Cordelia had been much worse. The previous summer Doctor Elliot had

wanted to send for Nora before she started abroad, but Cordelia had

refused. She had been a resolute, valiant sufferer.

Cordelia’s last letter was in Nora’s bag to be answered in the quiet of

Cornwall. She brought it out now. The date over a month back. Close to

the end. The crabbed, almost undecipherable writing was unchanged, the

news the usual parish happenings. Della had a baby of her own now. She

and Nora would go together to see it next summer. Cordelia wrote, made

plans for the future when she knew she was dying.

A resolute woman. Resolute and self-denying always. That terrible

abnegation of Cordelia’s. Regret was useless. It was too late. Cordelia

with gnawing pain for two years, and no one near her. That lonely

house—the succession of empty rooms—Cordelia waiting to die.

The rest of Judge Andrews’s letter was business. Cordelia left

everything to Nora, more than most people thought she had, the house

with all of its furnishings, and property and investments which brought

a comfortable income.

Nora’s eyes were dry as she stared at the facts of Judge Andrews’s

letter. If she had loved Cordelia more—been kinder—remembered her

oftener.

Nora realized for the first time what it meant to be entirely alone. She

had no one. The tears came. She sobbed in the stillness of her

dismantled room in Saint Ethelfreda College.

CHAPTER II

I

All the afternoon the scene from the train window had been the dreary

wastes of Cornwall moors, trees tortured and dwarfed by twisting sea

gales, stretches of furze, gorse, and rock, occasionally enlivened by

sprightly clusters of purple flowers which tossed in the summer wind.

Perhaps Nora had made a mistake to come. The Cornwall of which she had

dreamed in London had been that of rocky coasts, with brilliant

contrasts of sea, cliffs, and sky, and a midsummer sun which shone

daily. Such beauty, she remembered now, had its foundation only in

Margaret Abington’s raptures over the summer she had spent at the

farmhouse near Trebavas, where Nora was going; a memory to which

Margaret returned again and again. Usually her friend had been right

about places.

Nora’s travelling companions had done nothing to relieve the monotony of

the journey. Opposite her sat a pale, dark man whose spiritless

expression and well-kept, bloodless hands suggested illness. For some

time he had looked as if he wanted to talk to some one, but she had

gazed steadily out of the window. She was afraid he would begin to tell

her about his ruined health. Beside him was a young mother with a very

active child, a smeary-faced little girl with thin, molasses-tinted hair

which her mother had tried to curl. A querulous voice followed her

succession of bobbings up and down, ‘Now, Annie, be good; sit still,

Annie. No, you can’t have more sweeties, dearie.’

The child was now plunging toward the fourth traveller in the carriage,

whose face, hidden behind his London paper, Nora had not seen since he

entered. When the porter had arranged his luggage in the rack, very

good, but long used, the dull sheen of it, its substantial quality, had

made her curious about its owner, a tall man in shaggy tweeds and golf

stockings who had slipped quietly into the seat beside her a moment

before the train moved. He had the careless, travelled ease of the bags

over his head, an aloofness to his companions in the carriage.

Annie’s waving, sticky hands now clutched at the defences of newspaper.

‘Annie,’ shouted her mother, ‘don’t trouble the gentleman. I’m sorry,

sir,’ she apologized, giving the child’s hands a quick smack.

‘Not at all. No trouble,’ he murmured, once more resuming his reading.

Nora, roused from the dreariness of the landscape, had looked quickly

toward the disturbed traveller. He was, as she had suspected, like those

young men she had met at Ellen’s, who were nothing in particular, with

the baffling charm of nonchalant, cheerful acceptance of that importance

which is superior to any mere profession or slavery to the arts. They

had achieved significance at birth, with no trouble to themselves. If it

had been trouble——But this stranger, at second glance, was not entirely

of their brotherhood. He was lean like them, but with more iron about

him. His face was bronzed, his very dark hair burned by the sun. His

prominent cheek-bones and his nose and jaw had the angularity which

might be Scotch. Pictures of Highland chieftains showed the same hawk

profile. His general bearing, his erectness as he sat in the swaying

carriage, suggested military discipline—the army—a man who gave orders.

The pale man, encouraged by the confusion, looked up once more at Nora.

He pointed to the purple flowers clustered against the rocks.

‘Foxgloves. That’s Cornwall. They’re everywhere.’

‘But it’s desolate country,’ she said.

‘You wait.’ A bland smile lighted up the drooping features. ‘Wait till

you get near the sea.’ His gaze wandered to the man next to her, but the

newspaper was too much of a barrier. He went on talking to Nora. ‘You’ve

never been in these parts before?’

‘No.’

‘You’re travelling toward the coast?’

‘Yes.’ Then, not wishing to seem rude to a person so obviously ill, she

added, ‘I’m going to Trebavas. You know it? I get off at Pelreath.’

There was a rustle of newspaper beside her. Her neighbor’s eyes were

turned in her direction. They were deep blue, with a direct glance that

did not avoid hers, as he slowly measured her with a detached, swift

interest before he returned to his paper.

‘Very fine coast,’ the pale man said. ‘I know the south coast better.

Around Penzance. I go there for the climate.’

‘Oh, yes.’ He was ill, then. She was conscious of the difference between

the two men in the carriage, the tanned vigor of one, the anæmic

transparency of the other. He wouldn’t live long. Perhaps he knew.

A deep voice interrupted Nora’s speculations. ‘Would you care to look at

this?’ The man in tweeds was holding out his newspaper.

Although she didn’t care to read, she thanked him, and made a pretence

of examining the headings on the first page.

‘The cricket matches at Lord’s—they’re on page 12,’ he suggested.

She smiled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t care much about cricket.’

‘Oh.’ The rising and falling of his interjection was like Tabby’s.

‘I don’t understand cricket.’

‘It’s very simple, really.’ He was now smiling too, his smile making him

unexpectedly boyish and a little less assured. His blue eyes had a gleam

which attracted the smeary little girl a second time. She turned from

the pictures in her mother’s gaudy magazine and looked at him. Then,

dropping down from her seat, she planted a sticky fist upon his knee.

‘Annie, don’t you bother the gentleman.’

‘Please don’t be troubled on my account.’ Again that aloof expression

which covered his face like a mask. ‘I, too, am going to Trebavas,’ he

said, turning once more toward Nora to escape the mother’s embarrassed

apologies. ‘It’s an unusual place to go. Very isolated and dull,

really.’

‘I had a friend who spent a summer there and loved it. It’s because of

her I’m going.’

He crossed one leg over the other, and shifted his position in his

corner seat so that they faced each other. ‘Yes—the quiet. I understand.

And very fine cliffs.’

‘She has told me about them. The colors—the blackness of them and then

the deep green sea.’

‘My old school friend is rector there. I’ve been coming to him for short

visits a long time now. Rather a nice old Norman church. He’s very keen

about it. He’ll be glad to show it to you. It’s away from the village,

close to the cliffs. One hears the sea all through the prayers.’

‘How lovely!’

‘Yes, but——’ He looked smilingly toward Nora’s childlike face under her

severe blue travelling hat. ‘It may be too unexciting for a young

person.’

He evidently took her for an eccentric American schoolgirl, wandering

about in queer places. She smiled to herself, and to hide the quiver of

her lips looked out of the window again.

With late afternoon, the sun, falling lower, made long shadows on the

moor and deepened the mauve of the massed foxgloves to purple. One would

not care to walk alone in this threatening, waste country. The sick man

and the troublesome child first went to sleep, then the tired mother.

Nora and her neighbor were left to themselves. They conversed from time

to time in low tones. A shyness swept over her. She took up the paper

lying between them.

‘I wonder if they’ll take Germany into the League this summer.’

‘You believe in the League? I thought Americans didn’t, you know.’

‘Yes—many of us. We place our hopes in anything that——’

‘You have no interest in the glories of our late disturbance, then?’ he

inquired.

He was clearly enough a military man. No need to be silly or get

excited. One’s real opinions—they are saved for the rare moments—not for

a railway carriage.

‘No,’ she answered, ‘not very much.’

There was something queer about his eyes, behind the deep blue of them

and the directness of their glance, which she could not understand. He

was hiding something—not from her only, a stranger, but from every one.

Some hurt—some painful secret.

Looking out, Nora saw Pelreath painted on the station benches. Some

ponies with two-wheeled carts were waiting near the platform. As she

began to bestir herself, the sleepers awoke. The tall stranger was

lifting her bags from the rack and carrying them out to the platform. He

raised his hat, and turned to get his own luggage. The pale man smiled

at her, the mother and child waved. In front of her a slight Englishman

in clerical dress was examining the passengers. He looked a little like

Father Stokesbury—the same brilliant smile.

‘Neville, old boy! I couldn’t see you at first.’

The wind-swept wastes, the rocks, the furze and gorse. A pang of

desolation swept Nora. She had come all this distance to throw herself

among strangers.

‘Miss Deming? The American lady? I got the pony an’ jingle over this

way, Miss.’ A mild little man had approached her, his stiff hat held

like a salver in front of him.

As Nora climbed into the cart, she saw her travelling companion driving

off in a grey two-seater with his old friend. He lifted his hat and

smiled before they disappeared behind the tall hedges of the road toward

Trebavas.

‘The rector’s got his friend down again,’ observed Nora’s driver. ‘Army

man. Major West.’ As they passed between the hedges which shut out the

landscape, he introduced himself as Thomas Pentillie, Mrs. Bodmin’s new

husband. She was Bodmin now only for business. They had been married two

weeks. ‘In time for the summer visitors,’ he explained. ‘I’m a big help

to her that way.’

The road turned suddenly and ascended above the valley. There was a rush

of air, and then Nora saw the sea. It was booming against a deep purple

cliff lost in green water and pale green spray.

‘Oh,’ she breathed.

Mrs. Pentillie, who as Mrs. Bodmin had known Miss Abington, a very

pleasant American lady always out on the rocks painting, ushered Nora up

to a little room on the third floor with a view of the sea.

‘It was hers—your friend’s. I remember her wantin’ the top o’ the

house,’ Mrs. Pentillie said.

Nora stood looking out of the open window. A chill filled the room now

that the sun lay low over the water. It was almost time for supper, Mrs.

Pentillie had announced. Only a moment or two before she had to join the

strange Britishers below, sit down at a table crowded with holiday

visitors. She could hear their voices. Somehow she had not thought of

them before—only seacoast and great spaces. She was afraid. She wasn’t

very hungry. If she could walk out toward the sea first—not have any

supper. Walk toward the church—a bell tinkled, tinkled. Doors slammed.

Some one laughed. Again the bell. Nora washed hastily, brushed back her

hair, and went downstairs.

The other boarders—paying guests they said in England, even at Mrs.

Pentillie’s possibly—were already seated. Nora slipped into a vacant

chair. A strange man, not Mr. Pentillie, was at the head of the table,

carving a guinea fowl. Nora sniffed at it hungrily. An angular woman

next to her smiled.

‘Miss Deming, let me make you acquainted with every one.’ She began to

call out the names of the people gathered around the table.

‘Oh, the American lady,’ commented a stout woman down near the guinea

fowls. She paused in a monologue she had begun upon the Second Coming.

‘We been hearing about you. Travelling all alone, too. You Americans are

so adventurous.’

Opposite Nora sat a husband and wife talking together. There was

something so united, so indivisible about them, that Nora sensed their

relationship at once. Next to Miss Wallis, who had conducted the

introductions, were two women who looked exactly like her, the same dun

coloring which was neither brunette nor blonde, the same bloodless faces

and bony figures. They were sisters, Miss Wallis told her, all taking

the holiday they looked forward to the whole year.

‘After a winter in London,’ she concluded.

The other two bobbed behind or in front of their obstructing relative,

and said a word or two to Nora. This was a beautiful place. She would

love it. Miss Wallis explained about the others in a low tone during the

passing of plates. The man serving, Mr. Downey, was on furlough from

Central Africa. Some Government job. His wife hadn’t seen him in three

years. She couldn’t stand the climate. The child between them, a bright

little thing, was almost four years old. Sad—living that way. And the

two on the other side, aunt and niece, both post-office clerks in

London. Nora looked in the direction of a stout black-haired woman with

a face like a tomato and a girl much like her, slightly less red, with a

shaggy mane of coarse, dark bobbed hair.

‘They can’t talk without swearing,’ Miss Wallis said sadly.

On Nora’s end of the table were two middle-aged women dressed in heavy

black. They were discussing the church services of the preceding Sunday.

The church was, then, not very far away.

After supper, when the rest of the procession trooped into the

drawing-room, the Wallis sisters offered to show Nora the path to the

cliffs. In a week they had learned all the pleasant walks in the

vicinity. As the four passed back of the house, two of Mrs. Pentillie’s

Leghorn hens trailed after them. Cows in a near-by farmyard looked up,

and then came slowly toward the fence. As they walked along the narrow

hedge-bordered path, the youngest of the three sisters joined Nora. She

was probably not much over thirty, less neutral than the other two, with

a sturdy spring to her step unlike the drag of theirs.

‘Two men among us,’ she began. ‘One a Quaker—the other from Africa. And

both married. Rare, isn’t it? Is this what I’ve come down from London

for?’

Her sisters behind laughed heartily. They regarded Dora as a terrible

wag, Nora guessed almost immediately.

‘And the Quaker lady hangs on to her husband as faithfully as to her

pocket-book,’ Dora went on.

All three regarded the middle-aged femininity of their fellow guests as

a tremendous joke on Adeline Pinks, the post-office niece, probably as

much on her aunt, one of those maiden ladies who never knows that her

day is over.

‘They keep an eye out for what Pentillie will bring from the station.

“Another woman,” they said, when you drove up before supper.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nora said, laughing.

They climbed over one slate hedge. A light mist lay over the cliffs

above the sea, which resounded from below. The high grass between the

hedge-rows was very wet, the foxgloves against the stone walls drooping

with their load of dew. As she was mounting the stairway made of flat

stones over the second hedge, she heard her first lark. The bird had

swooped up, and was singing, singing as he climbed higher and higher.

She sat on the flat top of the stile, looking up toward the sky and

listening to the warblings, fainter and fainter. Just as the poets had

told her, singing as all of her life she had dreamed they would sing.

The three sisters stood waiting for her to climb over the hedge. While

she had been sitting on the stile, the larks had slowly gathered in the

sky, one after another, hundreds of them, it seemed, singing together,

close to the last yellow light.

They went on toward the cliffs. Far below sounded the sea, covered with

a lacy haze, like thick cobwebs. They stood, looking down, not speaking

a word.

They followed the path close to the edge of the cliffs, as it twisted in

and out. Another hedge. Standing on the last tone, Nora saw a square

tower rising above a dip in the flat stretches of green. The church. A

queer feeling, like pain, made her turn.

‘Shouldn’t we be going back? It’s getting dark.’

Between the last hedge-rows, in sight of Mrs. Pentillie’s lights, night

had already fallen. They crept cautiously forward. In the drawing-room

the household was gathered around the Government official from Africa

telling tales. Nora paused at the doorway, listened a moment, and then

went upstairs.

II

In the morning she hurried through breakfast and took the path which led

to the sea. The sky above her was deep sapphire, the sun strong and

clear. She could hear the lambs bleating from the other side of the

hedges, the tinkle of bells, the ecstasy of the morning sea. She

followed the general direction of the preceding night, and sat close to

the edge of the cliff, looking down. Some sheep were grazing in the

grassy crevices between the black rocks. The gulls swept close over her

head, and dipped down to the water, with hoarse shrieks. A sweetness—a

familiar sweetness was all around her. Wee purple flowers close to the

ground everywhere. Thyme—wild thyme. She knew from the smell. She

pressed a purple cluster between her fingers.

A crunching of rocks, and footsteps approaching. Possibly some one from

Mrs. Pentillie’s house. Nora gazed steadily out upon the sea.

‘Good-morning.’ The tweeds—the familiar voice. ‘I felt sure I should see

you again.’

Major West seated himself on the rock beside her. ‘Jolly day, isn’t it?

So you’re a near neighbor of Reggie’s? Over there? How very good! And do

you think you’ll like this place?’

She assured him that she liked it, that already she loved it. Trebavas

was what she had wanted. She went on to describe the Pentillie

gathering, its middle-aged quality. They would not bother her. She liked

them that way best, she had decided. They wouldn’t wander far away from

Mrs. Pentillie’s summer-house, with the British flag floating over it, a

border of geraniums, and a comfortable view of the sea.

They sat looking over the shining blue water. He brought out a pipe,

knocked it against the rock. The sheep bounded up the trail and tinkled

past them. Once more the larks were beginning to sing, a faint, cheerful

squeak only, high in the sky.

‘Reggie’s in the church. Should you care to see it? Oh—I forgot to

introduce myself yesterday. Neville West——’

She murmured her name in return, and he helped her up from the rock.

They climbed over the stiles, passed rude heaps of stone, like the ruins

of a castle wall, and entered the churchyard. Reginald Enderby stood in

the doorway. As she saw him in the sunshine, holding a funny

broad-brimmed hat like Father Stokesbury’s, he looked enough like him to

be an older brother—older than Father Stokesbury, so long ago. When he

smiled, he was like an old friend.

‘Miss Deming would like to see the church, Reggie.’

‘Delighted, dear boy. It’s really a snug little place, Miss Deming.’

The church was like a twilight chamber. Its thick walls were cut by

Norman windows with dim glass; there was a Norman font near the door,

with four fat legs and a funny face cut into the stone.

‘Major West says this old chap looks like me.’ The rector twinkled.

It was a beautiful little church in its dusky way, with its timbered

roof, its black-oak rood screen, its dull seats, and grey stone walls.

Looking out through the open doorway, one felt the peace of its shade, a

retreat from the burning brightness of the sky and sea. The rector

pointed out the tombstones in the churchyard propped up with buttresses.

‘To keep the winter winds from blowing them away,’ he explained. ‘We

have some jolly blows here then.’

She glanced back for another look at the interior. ‘You like our old

places?’ he asked her.

‘Very much.’

‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to have tea with us in the garden this

afternoon. The widow of the former rector is coming. It would be a

pleasure to her, I know. There are some ruins of the thirteenth-century

monastery there I’d like to show you.’

Major West walked back toward Mrs. Pentillie’s with Nora. She was late

for dinner. Mr. Downey had finished serving.

‘Well, where you been?’ inquired the large woman, who was still arguing

the tenets of Seventh Day Adventism. ‘I thought you’d jumped over the

cliff.’

* * * * *

In the rectory garden Nora was seated beside Mrs. Cecil, the widow of

Father Enderby’s predecessor, white-haired, her large hands covered with

diamonds. As Mrs. Cecil talked, a cigarette dangled from her mouth. When

the others took the burden of the conversation, she smoked with quick

puffs one cigarette after another. She was like a chimney, with good

drawing powers.

Major West talked very little. He sat holding his pipe, looking across

first at one and then the other of Reggie’s guests. When they were

exploring the monastery after tea, Father Enderby took possession of

Nora, Major West coming up slowly behind with Mrs. Cecil, who had little

interest in ecclesiastical remains, she said.

‘I’m one myself,’ she informed Nora. ‘Not in very good condition. Can’t

you restore me—like the church—Reggie?’

The monastery ruins were a hoary background for the garden. Foxgloves

grew close to the lichen-covered walls, and there were clematis vines

over one sunny end.

‘Charming—charming,’ Mrs. Cecil murmured at appropriate intervals, in

spite of the fact that her best days had been spent here. Reggie really

had improved the garden. Then she confided to Nora: ‘These men know

nothing about my poor legs. Handsome man—Major West. Reggie’s always

talking about him. How violent he looks sometimes! Don’t fall in love

with him, my dear. Young girls always do with that kind of menacing

desperation when it smiles at them.’ Mrs. Cecil laughed at her blush.

‘Take Reggie instead. He’s one of the sweetest creatures. A saint with a

sense of humor.’

III

Nora had been in Trebavas a week. Since the day of the rectory tea,

Reggie—she thought of him as Reggie always—had assumed the rôle of guide

to the young American who had strayed into his quiet settlement. He

offered himself and his two-seater in her service, Major West with

comical dignity perched behind in the dicky, for a pilgrimage in search

of such neighborhood antiquities as Cornish crosses and churches with

Saxon walls, for a visit to the slate quarry, and a sight of the spot

where Reggie had seen the very rare Cornish chough. Major West laughed

at these excursions, but he did not refuse to join them.

In the primitive Cornwall scene of tumbling sea and rock, Major West,

even in his rough country clothes, remained the sophisticate for whom a

London club window in Saint James’s Street seemed the appropriate

setting. The face, with the arrogant curve of nose and the jaw held with

unconscious pride, was a powerful contrast to Reggie’s mild rusticity.

But between the two men existed an understanding which Nora, as an

outsider, envied. They shared innumerable ancient jokes, had been raw

schoolboys together, made frequent references to the war when they, no

matter how separated, had depended on each other. ‘Good old Reggie,’

Major West said of his friend. ‘Poor sinner,’ Reggie called the Major.