XV

HUGO was dumb, his companion inattentive to him in silence. They walked

on the turf of the Darra valley, along the edge of the water: he beat

with his stick at the gold, strident ragwort. At every flash of the

stick she glanced in surprise, but did not say: “Spare them.” Lois,

straggling behind, threw in twig after twig to the swollen, hurrying

Darra; ran a short way with each in intense excitement, lost it and

threw in another. She seemed absorbed but remotely dependent, like one

of the dogs. If she had fallen in with a loud enough splash and a cry

she might have distracted the couple ahead, but she was surefooted and

not quite certain enough of herself to fall in on purpose.

Recollections of Laura were now wiped for him from the startlingly

green valley, leaving the scene dull. Not a turn of the rocks with the

river, not a break-down of turf along the brink, not the Norman keep

with perishing corners (where they leaned and quarrelled till Laura

had wished aloud it would fall on them) gave back to him what they had

taken of that eroding companionship. He and she might never have come

here; they were disowned. The sharp rocks breaking out from the turf,

the impassive speed of the water were naked and had to be seen as

themselves, in some relation excluding him; like country seen from the

train, without past or future. And, having given proof of her impotence

to be even here, Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus, leaving only--as

in some rediscovered diary of a forgotten year--a few cryptic records,

walks, some appointments kept, letters received and posted.

He now guessed, in fact, he had never loved her. Shocked but with

an enlivening sense of detachment, he turned to Marda--but still

had nothing to say. She walked rather too quickly beside him, with

long steps. She was leaving to-morrow; she was to be in England

indefinitely: she seemed content. And for this, his anger released from

Laura, settled upon her. He loved her: a sense of himself rushed up,

filling the valley. The rocks again were transmuted: broken all over in

planes of light, a defeated sharpness, they were no more limestone.

“Mrs. Montmorency knows Leslie’s aunt,” said Marda suddenly. “Do you?

It seems so extraordinary?”

“If I ever did I’ve forgotten her.”

“She’s so nice.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Let’s ask Lois to come and talk to us.”

“She seems quite happy. Where do you go--after to-morrow?”

“Oh, Kent. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary?”

Having given the matter rather too marked attention, he pronounced that

her sense of the extraordinary seemed to him extravagant. She agreed

there did seem to be some disparity in their outlook. “Disparity!”

he cried out. “Everything! What a good thing we shall never need to

understand each other.”

“I never try to understand anybody,” she said mildly.

“No, indeed,” he replied with sarcasm. “Who is worth it?”

At this she looked back again for Lois. She remembered Francie,

seeing them off from the steps in a pink blouse, and the look that

fluttered after them down the avenue. No wonder Francie looked like a

windflower--her husband had this unfortunate ability to be young at any

time. His unordered moods gave him the churlishness of a schoolboy; his

silliness embarrassed her. Yet anger did illuminate him becomingly:

brighter and harder, for the first time he could be conceived as

lovable. Though in this personal atmosphere generated by his temper she

was feeling least herself, most nearly negative.

“I should like to go over there,” she said, looking across the water to

where trees began on a skyline and went down steeply, powdered yellow

with light on their tops.

“We can’t,” he said, triumphant, “the stepping-stones are covered.” He

showed her a line of faint scars, a hesitation across the current.

“I never thought of there being stepping-stones. I only wanted to cross

because we couldn’t. Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?”

“I should have thought you never were--don’t you even make rather a

point of that?”

She was exasperated past caution. “Mr. Montmorency, what _is_ the

matter?”

Seeing that he had overreached himself, been absurd, he raised his

eyebrows in courteous mystification--“Matter?”--did not reply but began

talking about his travels--the greenest river he knew was the Ain,

he said; had she ever looked down on the Ain?--an appointment he had

held in the North (a deterrent from travel), his five years in London

(release from the North), a business enterprise with which he had once

been connected. It had never been sound, he now saw, he said, but had

once had a chance of success. She took him as he had intended, as the

practical man _manqué_. They discussed the question of Canada, whether

he would have succeeded. She thought, emphatically, it was a pity he

had not tried. “But my wife’s health--” “Oh yes, Mrs. Montmorency ...”

“The fact is, I have not made her happy.”

“She would always be happy a little; she is wonderfully unselfish.”

“Do you mean--”

“Oh, what _is_ that? The ghost of a Palace Hotel?”

The mill startled them all, staring, light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a

bend of the valley. Lois had to come hurrying up to explain how it

frightened her. In fact, she wouldn’t for worlds go into it but liked

going as near as she dared. It was a fear she didn’t want to get over,

a kind of deliciousness. These dead mills--the country was full of

them, never quite stripped and whitened to skeletons’ decency: like

corpses at their most horrible. “Another,” Hugo declared, “of our

national grievances. English law strangled the--” But Lois insisted

on hurrying: she and Marda were now well ahead.

The river darkened and thundered towards the mill-race, light came full

on the high façade of decay. Incredible in its loneliness, roofless,

floorless, beams criss-crossing dank interior daylight, the whole

place tottered, fit to crash at a breath. Hinges rustily bled where a

door had been wrenched away; up six stories panes still tattered the

daylight. Mounting the tree-crowded, steep slope some roofless cottages

nestled under the flank of the mill with sinister pathos. A track

going up the hill from the gateless gateway perished among the trees

from disuse. Banal enough in life to have closed this valley to the

imagination, the dead mill now entered the democracy of ghostliness,

equalled broken palaces in futility and sadness; was transfigured by

some response of the spirit, showing not the decline of its meanness,

simply decline; took on all of the past to which it had given nothing.

Rooks disturbed the trees, disturbed the echoes. “_Don’t_ go in!” cried

Lois and clutched Marda’s arm convulsively.

“Come on,” said Marda, “I feel demoralized, girlish. Let’s hide from

Mr. Montmorency.” Lois shied through the gateway with more than

affected nervousness. This was her nightmare: brittle, staring ruins.

Mr. Montmorency, disgruntled, still dawdled by the river; the idea of

escape appeared irresistible. But the scene was strangely set for a

Watteau interlude. Inside the mill door, a high surge of nettles; one

beam had rotted and come down, there was some debris of the roof.

“If he starts shouting,” Lois said, apprehensive, “he’ll certainly

bring the mill down. Oh, I can’t come in, oh, I can’t possibly. Oh,

it’s beastly here; I feel sick. I think you are quite mad!”

“I think you’re a shocking little coward.”

“I’m not afraid of anything _reasonable_. But I’m simply nervous, one

can’t help that.”

“Come in through that door.”

“But it’s so _high_.”

Marda put an arm round her waist, and in an ecstasy at this compulsion

Lois entered the mill. Fear heightened her gratification; she welcomed

its inrush, letting her look climb the scabby and livid walls to the

frightful stare of the sky. Cracks ran down; she expected, now with

detachment, to see them widen, to see the walls peel back from a

cleft--like the House of Usher’s.

“Hate it?” said Marda.

“You’d make me do anything.”

The sun cast in through the window sockets some wild gold squares

twisted by the beams; grasses along the windows trembled in light.

Marda turned and went picking her way through the nettles; there was

a further door, into darkness--somewhere, a roof still held. “Marda,

help: here’s a dead crow!” “Tchch!”

“But it’s very dead!” Shuddering exaggeratedly, leaping in a scared

way over the nettles, Lois also made for the dark doorway, eager for

comment, contempt, consolation. She was a little idiot--appealing, she

felt quite certain, to a particular tenderness.

In the dark of a lean-to, Marda was moving dimly. “Stairs!” she

exclaimed with interest. Then she was back in a flash and stood in

the door, barring it. She stood intently; menace contracted about her

attitude.

“What?” whispered Lois.

“Ssh--some one’s asleep here.”

“Perhaps they’re dead?” She stared past Marda’s shoulder into the

darkness, and, desirous, laughed, then clapped the back of a hand to

her mouth--unnatural gesture, adequate to the drama. Gradually, she

was able to see a man lying face down, arms spread out; a coat rolled

into a pillow under his face which twisted sideways a little to let him

breathe. One fist, clenched loosely, strayed to a clump of nettles;

the knuckles must have been stung quite white. He could not feel the

nettles--one had to imagine sleep like that! Behind him, stairs went up

into visibility, to a gash of daylight.

Ashamed, the two young women stood elbow to elbow. Marda stepped back,

some plaster crackled under her heel.

“What’s that?” said the man softly.

“Come away quickly--come--”

But the man rolled over and sat up, still in the calm of sleep. “Stay

there,” he said, almost persuasively: a pistol bore the persuasion out.

They were embarrassed by this curious confrontation. Neither of them

had seen a pistol at this angle; it was short-looking, scarcely more

than a button. The man sat looking at them with calculating intentness,

like a monkey, then got up slowly: the pistol maintained its direction.

“Don’t be silly,” said Marda. “Go to sleep again. We’re not--”

“Are there any more of yez?”

“One--not interested either. Better let us go now, there will be less

talk.”

“We’re just out for a walk,” said Lois, surprised at her own voice.

“Indeed,” said the man. “It is a grand evening for a walk no doubt. Is

it from Castle Trent y’are?”

“Danielstown.”

The man’s eyes went from one to the other, and remained ironically

between them. His face was metal-blue in the dusk and seemed numbed

into immobility. “It is time,” he said, “that yourselves gave up

walking. If you have nothing better to do, you had better keep in the

house while y’have it.”

Marda, a hand on the frame of the doorway, remained unmoved, but Lois

could not but agree with him. She felt quite ruled out, there was

nothing at all for her here. She had better be going--but where? She

thought: “I must marry Gerald.” But meanwhile Marda, holding her arm

all the time, had softly, satirically pressed it. They could not but

feel framed, rather conscious, as though confronting a camera. The man,

who did not cease to regard them with uneasy dislike, asked which way

they had come, whom they had met, if they had observed any movement of

soldiers about the country. He remained dissatisfied; evidently they

had the appearance of liars.

Meanwhile Mr. Montmorency, suspicious of merriment somewhere and

determined to humour no one, had sat down to smoke on a parapet. At its

base the bank descended; the river rushed loudly, dark with its own

urgency, under his dangling feet. The mill behind affected him like a

sense of the future; an unpleasant sensation of being tottered over.

Split light, like hands, was dragged past to the mill-race, clawed

at the brink and went down in destruction. He looked at the opposite

hill, its distinct and peaceful trees. Marda belonged there and might

be imagined composedly walking. Knocking some ash off, he leaned

forward and groaned at the intervening water--“On the wrong side”--

He missed Francie; there welled up in him one great complaint to

Francie. She--selfless woman--would non-committally rustle; some tender

fidgeting always relieved her intentness of listening. Distressed

for her husband, she would let out little sighs. He would tell her

everything.... Yet he could not, for Marda was everywhere present, a

clear ruddy-white mask of surprise. She impinged on the whole of him,

on his most intimate sense of himself, with her cool sombre amusement.

Had she a ghost everywhere?--there was something of her in Francie.

“It is like this,” he began to rehearse, “what I need is--”

A shot, making rings in the silence. Eardrums throbbing, he gathered

up the reverberations with incredulity. A battle--a death in the mill?

_Whose_ death? He leapt to one thought, a flash of relief in the panic.

The front of the mill--he ran round to it--grinned with vacancy: corpse

of an idiot. He steadied himself in the door, watched his cigarette

drop into the nettles, then stumbled in over the debris. A crow’s

flight, stooping wildly among the rafters, dislodged a trickle of

plaster. He paused in the well of ruin, terrified for them all. But the

crow swerved out through the roof.

“Marda!”

“All right,” said Lois. They appeared in a doorway and looked at him

gravely, rather suspiciously. Marda put up a hand to her mouth--in an

incredible half-glimpse, he thought he saw blood round the lips.

Something released in his voice, he said: “Marda--for God’s sake--”

Lois, as though the mill were falling, went white, then crimson.

He had, distantly, some apprehension of an emotional shock. Marda,

perplexedly, continued sucking her hand. Then she took Lois’s

handkerchief, dabbed at her knuckles, wiped the blood from her

lips--where no more came--returned to her knuckles. “I have lost some

skin,” she said at last resentfully. “Just, a pistol went off--you

heard?--by accident. I seem to have lost some pieces of skin.”

“Let me go past,” he said violently.

“We swore--” began Lois.

“Some one went upstairs backward, not very sensibly, not having eaten

much for four days. There was some plaster--the pistol went off,

naturally. It was silly, really. Look at my beastly hand--I was holding

on to the door.”

“Let me get past--”

“But we _swore_, Mr. Montmorency--”

“_You_ deserve to be shot!” He turned in a manner terrifying to all of

them--most of all to himself--on this interruption. “You don’t seem to

see, you seem to have no conception--”

“Then why sit there and smoke?” said Lois, trembling. “I saw you--you

and your old conceptions.”

“Shut up,” said Marda, “oh, do shut up!”

“Don’t stand there, let me go past; I’ll--”

“Oh, do let’s talk about something else--”

“We swore,” went on Lois priggishly. “There never was anybody, we never

saw anybody, _you_ never heard--”

But nobody listened. Vaguely, he waved her silent.

“The fact is,” said Marda, “we are neither of us good at explosions.

Perhaps if we sat down and thought it over? Perhaps if you went for a

walk--_not_ up in the trees?”

“No more hide-and-go-seek,” he said, playful with fury. “Still

bleeding--?”

“Not like I can--I have rather a high standard. Do you remember the

scraper? No, I might have done--_this_--on the broken edge of a slate:

it will be the edge of a slate if you don’t mind. And, being me, it was

bound to happen.”

He was set on transgressing the decencies. “Don’t you _realize_ you

might have been--”

Marda laughed, coming out through the door of the mill beside him. He

looked at her lips--no higher--angrily--burningly. Lois looked quickly

away. She thought how the very suggestion of death brought this awful

unprivacy.

They took his place on the parapet. Warily, they watched him walk back

the way they had come, with effort, as though breasting a current.

Lois took up his forgotten matchbox, shook it and put it away in her

pocket. Their sex was a stronghold, they had to acknowledge silently;

traditionally, one could always retreat on collapse. Mr. Montmorency

having taken away with him any element of agitation, they were left

with a particular sort of shyness.

“How one talks!” said Marda.

Lois tied up the hand, she said it seemed like Providence that her

handkerchief should be clean to-day. Marda’s was coloured, that would

never have done. One had always heard that dye ran into the blood.

“I don’t think it would,” said Marda. “It boils, it is really a good

handkerchief.... This is the worst of big hands.”

“I suppose they are rather big.”

“Sorry we went in?”

“No.”

“You are being nice to me.... One won’t be girlish again--I think, as a

matter of fact, we were being goatish.”

“But I’ve had a ... a revelation,” said Lois. She bent forward over the

river, felt streaks of light fly over her face and felt that speech did

not matter when so much was being carried past. “About Mr. Montmorency

... he’s being awful about you, isn’t he?”

The statement, almost a query, fluttered up at the end. But Marda’s

face was inscrutable with reflections.

“About you. I had no idea--I was too damned innocent,” she explained

with precision--“till we all stood in there and shouted.--Hear him tell

me I ought to be shot?”

“He was all--dishevelled. He had to be adequate.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind. But, I mean, aren’t you rather--embarrassed?”

“One can’t help things.”

“_I_ was awful, I said, ‘You and your old conceptions.’ They are rather

old, aren’t they?... I mean, really: he was in love with my mother.”

“Well, I’m going away, aren’t I?”

“But, I mean, what is the good of this? It doesn’t make anything.”

Marda said, inconsequent: “I hope I shall have some children; I should

hate to be barren.”

“Once I really meant to love him, but it would never have done.”

Marda leant against Lois’s shoulder. “You are wonderful!”

“Not so protected as you imagine.”

“Nothing gets past your imagination.”

“I wish,” said Lois thoughtfully, “I had really been shot. But I

couldn’t be.” Later she added: “I’m sorry I said that about Mr.

Montmorency. What will become of him?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m glad he wasn’t my father.”

“He couldn’t be anything’s father.”

“Where shall you be this time to-morrow?”

“In the train.”

“Funny,” said Lois. “Queer.” Her heart thumped, she looked at her

watch. “Half-past six,” she said. “It’s harder, for some reason, to

imagine what I’ll be doing or where I shall be.”

“A nice walk with Laurence, a nice cheerful squabble. If you want

something to talk about, talk about me.”

“No, no, I mean ... No.” She looked up from the water. “You know,”

she said, “all this has quite stopped any excitement for me about the

mill. It’s a loss, really. I don’t think I’ll come down this part of

the river again.... Will you have to tell Leslie? I don’t think you

ought to: a swear _is_ a swear, isn’t it, even in England.”

Nothing would have induced Marda to confirm Leslie’s opinion that

her country was dangerous as well as demoralizing. He hated to think

of even his aunts at that side of the Channel. She expected, some

forty-eight hours ahead, to be walking with him in a clipped and

traditional garden, in Kentish light. Under these influences, she would

be giving account of herself. Leslie’s attention, his straight grey

gaze, were to modify these wandering weeks of her own incalculably, not

a value could fail to be affected by him. So much of herself that was

fluid must, too, be moulded by his idea of her. Essentials were fixed

and localized by their being together--to become as the bricks and

wall-paper of a home.

At present, the mill was behind her, tattered and irrelevantly

startling, like a dream of two nights ago. And Lois kept turning upon

her a tragic and obstinate gaze: she could sense a persistence of

Leslie upon the mental scene. Lois said, but defeatedly: “He is certain

to be suspicious.”

“I certainly won’t tell.”

“So it will be a secret?”

“A perfect secret.”

“Thank you so much,” said Lois. As though breaking a spell, she shifted

away down the parapet, put her feet to the ground, and was surprised to

feel her legs trembling under her. “Here,” she said generously, “comes

Mr. Montmorency.”

He came: “with demurest of footfalls.” They smiled and shouted along

the bank. Yes, they could come now; yes, they were feeling splendid.

“Shan’t we be late for dinner?”

“That is impossible,” shouted Mr. Montmorency, who was coming back to

them looking formal and pleasant.