“You don’t count.”
Coral’s words, her look, her laughter—above all, her kindly,
contemptuous laughter—haunted Laura.
Since the day of her engagement she had been aware, underneath her
happiness, of certain inadequacies, fallings short in herself or—was it
possible?—in Justin. Preposterous! She heaped scorn upon the notion till
it was covered up again, and yet she knew it was there, huddled away in
a corner of her mind, ready at a word to shake itself free of its
trappings, to confront her, a naked living fact. “You don’t count.”
Coral’s three words were more than enough to waken it. She had failed
Justin in some way? Was that what Coral meant? Coral, who knew such a
lot about men. Coral, who seemed to think that Justin was no more than
anybody else, thought it ought to be easy to make him like one better
than birds’ eggs and books and things. She remembered how Coral had
turned on her one day, laughing and angry, saying: “You little fool, why
the devil don’t you flirt with him?”
That was all very well, of course, if one were pretty enough and clever
enough, a splendid, irresistible sort of person.... That sort of thing
worked in books.... But Laura would like any one to tell her how she was
to flirt with Justin? How to start even?... It seemed a hopeless
business.... Besides—besides—she didn’t want to ... she would just feel
a fool.... And that was what Coral meant, she supposed, by not
counting.... Or was it?... When Coral laughed—oh, Coral got on her
nerves!... She wished Coral had never come to Brackenhurst.... Coral and
life were so mysterious.... She thought that being grown-up was very
strange and difficult....
One day as she helped Justin with his precise, delightful task of
gumming labels on his latest finds, she broke out suddenly, guided by an
irresistible impulse—
“Justin, I do count, don’t I?”
He was doing things with a strip of paper and a paste brush.
“Here, hold this down, will you? No, not there, that’s not pasted
yet—where it’s curling. What were you saying?”
“You wouldn’t say I didn’t count, would you?” she revised it. “I do come
next to your mother, don’t I?” And then, quickly, “What is it—scissors?”
“No, the knife, the black handle. Yes, of course you count. What’s the
matter? Why not?” And then, as the subject dawned on him—“My dear child,
as if one made lists of that sort of thing and marked people off!”
She laughed.
“I do. Shall I tell you my list?”
He did not answer. That was his way of rebuking vanity.
She turned from him, disheartened. So silly of her to expect to get
anything out of Justin. But she was not at the door before he called to
her pleasantly enough—
“I say, hold this again, will you, please? I’m all gummy.”
She came back, and for half an hour sat beside him in silence, listening
to his breathing, watching his intent face, helping him when she could.
And as she sat thus, all he had meant to her since her childhood came
overwhelmingly into her mind. She was flooded with strange thoughts.
She thought:
It must be true that I don’t count.... There must be something lacking
in me or else I could make Justin look up and want to talk to me.... I’m
engaged to him.... Why can’t I put my arms round his neck and say “You
must do what _I_ want now?”
She thought again:
It is queer.... I’m so near to Justin.... His hand touches mine when I
pass him things ... and yet all the time we’re in two different
worlds.... He doesn’t know that.... Sometimes I think he doesn’t know
anything....
She thought:
It hurts me to be with him, and it hurts me not to be with him ... it
hurts me more every day.... And yet—this pain—I wouldn’t miss it....
It’s doing things to me all day long.... It’s making me grow.... I feel
so wise.... Justin would say “conceit” if I told him, but it isn’t
conceit.... I am awfully wise.... I know Justin all through.... He’s
just ordinary to Coral and every one. He’s just ordinary to himself....
But I see right inside—what God sees. It’s like being God to love a
person so.
And then this poor, triumphant, heaven-scaling humanity stumbled and
lost foothold and fell back again to Mother Earth.... I wish—she thought
wistfully—I wish he could want, sometimes, to kiss me....
But at that she caught her breath in a sort of horror at herself. What
had come to her? She could not understand herself any more. She felt
helpless and despairing and yet filled with faint, wicked happiness. She
looked across at Justin’s calm profile with a childish, mad impulse of
appeal. If only he had time to help her!... And yet, of course, she
could never even tell him that she wanted help.... These thoughts would
make Justin hate her if he knew.... She must not, must never think a
thought she could not own to Justin.... She must stamp out the
incomprehensible feelings that, in spite of herself, were surging over
her mind, the feelings that were as beautiful as music and yet, somehow,
were wicked.
All the panic-stricken summer day she struggled like a half-tamed bird
to free her child’s heart from the thrilling touch, the tightening grip
of ‘wickedness.’
She stayed late at the Priory, though she knew, guiltily, that Aunt
Adela was away and Gran’papa would eat a lonely supper. But she dreaded
the solitary walk home and the quiet evening and the long night of
thoughts that lay before her.
She went off at last with unnecessary last words to Coral and Mrs.
Cloud, and glanced back, as she went down the drive, at the friendly
house with the lamplight streaming from its big bay windows and Justin’s
shadow on the blind of his den, as if in leaving it she left behind her,
safety.
The gate clashed at her heels.
The night was soft, very quiet, neither warm nor cold. There was no star
in the sky and her only guide between the vague hedges was the dim
earth-shine of the chalk road, stretching out ahead of her like the
silvery track of a snail. She pulled her cloak about her, huddling into
herself. Her body was warm, but the loneliness of the night had put out
cold fingers and touched her throat. She could hear the little human
sounds she made, of breath and movement, rippling out and being
smothered in that ocean of silence.
Presently she descended into the deeper darkness of tree-thatched Wisdom
Lane, where the banks were steep and a huge chestnut put a period to the
run of the brambles. It was half circled by a seat that was unsightly
enough in the daytime, littered with paper and orange-peel and the
whirled siftings of the road—a wind’s dust-pan, a perch for the birds,
an urchins’ parliament. But at night lovers sat there.
Laura, who had so often passed by with a smile or a shrug of cool wonder
at the ways of ‘poor people,’ content to court in public, swerved
suddenly off the path and into the road, slipping by the dark seat like
a shadow. Yet she had, unwillingly, a glimpse of the couple that, since
she could remember, always seemed the same, sitting as they always sat,
clasped, motionless, the woman’s head on the man’s breast, the faces
grey-white like the road beyond the shadows.
Laura, in that glance, half recognized their own maid, doubtfully, as a
goodwife eyes a changeling. She knew—her common sense told her—that at
ten o’clock Ellen would slip through a back door and appear five minutes
later, capped and decent and respectful, with a tray and glasses in her
hand, and no inexplicable glory on her common face. But at this moment,
she, Laura, the mistress, was ignored: was not even seen. She knew that
she might pass and repass a dozen times and they would not stir. She was
inconsiderable, invisible, impalpable. She did not exist.
She went her way, humbly, filled with awe and wonder and intolerable
envy. What was this transmuting force, this holy spirit that could draw
a magic circle about a housemaid and a groom in which to sit out their
hour in a public way, inviolate, divine?... What was it?... What did it
mean?... What did it all mean?... And why should she, Laura, feel
herself ignorant, shut out, and desperately lonely?... She was of all
women fortunate.... She was alive.... She was engaged to Justin.... But
this new thing—what was it?... What was it that he and she had not yet
found—what gift of God that (as she saw with sudden clearness) they
could in no wise find, save together?... Life and she herself and Justin
had become, since the morning, mysterious and mutually inexplicable....
Why was she feeling so strangely?... Why had she to hurry past those
enchanted yokels as one proved negligible, incomplete, a half
creature?... Why was not Justin with her that she might carry herself as
one justified, oblivious of the world as the world of her?...
She came out into the broad road again and again the silence of the wide
fields surged in upon her, and her soul clung to her terrified, like a
wrecked sailor clinging to a spar.
She should have asked Justin to come with her.... If she had asked he
would have come.... It was only that it had not occurred to him.... The
stubbornness that would ask nothing, that would accept nothing of him
that was not spontaneous, was receiving its just reward....
It was such a silence, such a loneliness of soul—so achingly intensified
by her consciousness of the two behind her in the shadows, that she felt
it like a leaden cope pressing her down, crushing into shapelessness the
pitiful resistance of her pride. If Justin had come to her then, she
could have besieged him like any wanton for the dole of a kind look, of
an arm about her shaken body.
She had come to a standstill in the middle of the road because she could
not bear any longer the sound of her own feet running after her: and so
waited, impotently, for the passing of a fellow creature or her own
mood. And presently, mercifully, the face of the night changed to her.
The loneliness faded from it like a veil withdrawn, and with it the
sense of isolation that had oppressed her faded too. She was gradually
aware of the universal alive-ness of the still world about her. It was
as if her late, bewildered thoughts had evolved some ruthless one who
stood beside her, thrusting a torch into the secrets of the deep ditches
and shuttered cottages and mist-veiled fields, and, with a heavy hand
upon her neck, bowed her forward to peer at what the light revealed.
And she saw—saw the arcades and the galleries of the hedges and how
unbelievably full they were of living, mated things: saw the warm round
nests and in each a stir of bright eyes and perking crests: saw the
day-moths with their flattened wings, asleep upon blanched blackberry
leaves: saw the snuggled mice in the straw stacks and hares couched in
the standing corn and the friendly horses drowsing shoulder to crupper:
saw tramps sheltering in the flowery chalk-pits and lovers under the
stars: and beneath thatched roofs men lying, pinned down by the sleep
that comes of earthy labour, and women kept awake by life awake in their
bodies, and little children dreaming, and old folk at their dying, and
the dead reviving eternally in the divine womb of earth.
She was held by her youth and her ignorance as in a narrow cell; but
through the bars of her imprisonment she stretched forth hands in
passionate greeting to these her kith and kin. She was overwhelmed by a
sense of alliance, of sisterhood: she felt herself gathered in,
embraced, merged in the endlessly faceted identity of the universe. She
was burningly happy. All knowledge sang in her ears: all secrets lay
bare and beautiful to her eyes. She understood all things and forgot
them, and remembered them, and forgot them again, with the carelessness
of illimitable possession.
Out of that timeless ecstasy she looked down upon her life lying like a
sloughed snake-skin at her feet: surveyed the length of it, past,
present, and future, with infinite wise amusement, thinking——Here Laura
went wrong.... This—how foolish! she did not do.... And then, with a
quickening and personalization of interest——She should have told
Justin—I must tell Justin....
But at that, as if the word ‘Justin’ were the signal for the inevitable
revulsion, she felt herself contracting, shuddering away again from the
universal life, crying in futile anger and despair: “All this—is too
big—is too big for me. This will kill me. I can’t hold it. I’m not God!”
And so, with the roar in her ears of huge waters rushing into a deep and
narrow channel, was back in her body again, with but one word of all the
infinite wisdom that had been hers echoing in her memory—the one word
‘Justin.’ She found herself repeating it over and over again,
unintelligently, like a lost child—“Justin. Where’s Justin? I want
Justin.”
And all the myriad voices of the life she had shared merged in one to
answer her, to answer with laughter that was like sunlight, with
laughter that was like tears, to answer her with the still small Voice
Itself—
“Find Justin then. Love Justin then. Am I not Justin also?”
She listened and was comforted: and going home, went to bed and slept.
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