The next morning Isabel was as late as Kingston. Gundred condoned the
offence on the score of fatigue, but Kingston regarded it with that
severity we always show to our own pet faults when we meet them in
people we dislike. Daylight added nothing and softened nothing in
his first impressions as to his wife’s cousin. Still untidy, still
disorderly, still ebullient, Isabel was as reprehensible as ever in
all she did and said, and Kingston’s irritation grew as he noticed
how often she said what he would have said himself, how she caught
his own flying thoughts while Gundred’s mind was still loitering in
their track, or busy with the teapot; how unable his instinct still
was to endorse the opinion of his reason that Isabel was altogether
unworthy of notice. Without seeming to, without caring to, she claimed
his notice, insisted on it, held it; and as the day went by, he found
himself looking at her again and again with reluctant interest. Each
time he forced himself to notice a loose strand of hair, a brooch
unfastened, a hook and eye gone wrong; but not the most strenuous
disapproval of details could kill his angry curiosity as to the
personality of which they made part. As she talked, her wide mouth,
with its scarlet lips, flickered and flashed at every feeling, and her
great eyes blazed at him, now green, now grey, now gold, till the white
was visible all round, and he felt himself bound in the magnetism of
their stare. Isabel had accepted Gundred’s proposal with equanimity.
Yes, she would make a part of their household gladly, until such
time, she said, as she married or eloped. What Gundred had meant--at
least, in part--as a favour done to the poor colonial cousin, the
poor colonial cousin accepted with the high calm of perfect equality,
easily, gracefully, and without a second thought or any emphasis of
gratitude. Gundred felt that her cousin’s manner of receiving favours
lacked something; she made them seem mere services; and her words,
too, sounded flippant and offhand to Gundred, who clung to small
politenesses and the proper observances of courtesy.
They were sitting out, all three, in the small square garden. The day
was sultry and mysterious, with curling heavy masses of white and
fawn-coloured cloud towering high over the rim of a pallid sea. Behind,
the mass of the Castle was of a bronzy-rose in the strange light,
dreamlike and splendid. In bed and border no flower stirred, and the
scent of roses rose straight into the leaden air like so many spires
of faint invisible smoke. They sat looking out towards the edge of the
world, the unwavering dim line of water that stretched beyond the old
wing of King Mark’s Chapel. Above all the rest of the Castle Isabel
loved to look at that old haphazard rickle of rooms, that crazy hive of
long-dead activities, which stood out from the rest of the building on
its defiant promontory over the sea. It was a little barnacle, growing
off the hulk of Brakelond, and attached only by the slender stalk of
one narrow passage, at whose outer end was its cluster of buildings,
the low squat chapel, then the rooms where Kingston, Gundred, and
Isabel had their dwelling, and, above, a second story, a series of low
rooms at present uninhabited.
‘Ivescar?’ said Isabel. ‘Ivescar--oh yes, thank you very much, Gundred.
I shall be ever so pleased to go to Ivescar. Oh, those little rooms of
ours are too delicious for words. And there’s no ivy too; that would
make them conventional. I love them. I don’t think the Castle does,
though. They seem too proud to belong to it. They keep themselves to
themselves. The ghosts are happier there than in the big tower. My room
was simply crammed with them, Gundred. All last night they hovered
about.’
‘You don’t say so!’ exclaimed Gundred. ‘How dreadfully inconvenient!
I do hope they did not keep you awake, dear. Do you really believe in
them? Surely not--no? One believes that God would never allow such
things. Anyhow, we must be very careful not to let the servants hear
about them, or all the housemaids will be giving notice. But I was
talking about Ivescar. We thought of going there in quite a few days
now. The summer is getting on, and Kingston wants to show me to all
our people there--tenants and so forth. One feels it rather one’s
duty--yes?’
‘Ivescar?’ repeated Isabel; ‘I don’t think I am very much interested in
Ivescar, am I? Of course, I am looking forward to going there. But it
cannot be anything like this. And I belong here. I am sure I do. It is
not anything like this, Gundred?’
‘Oh, dear me, no, of course not. There isn’t anything like this
anywhere. Ivescar is just a nice modern place, large and comfortable,
but quite modern. I haven’t been there yet, but Kingston has told
me all about it. His father bought it, estate and all, when he
married--didn’t he, Kingston?’
‘Yes,’ replied her husband; ‘he chose a county as far away as possible
from all his own people in Kent. They quarrelled with him when he
married, and now none of them will have anything to do with us. So he
thought when it came to settling down as a landed proprietor and all
the rest of it--my mother’s pet fancy, that was--that he would go right
away to the other corner of England. So now our own family, the Dadds,
are still sitting in Darnley-on-Downe, watching the coal-pits that
support the head of the clan at the other end of the country. It is a
quaint irony.’
‘Haven’t you any exciting possibilities among your relations?’ asked
Isabel, turning to him. ‘They sound a little stodgy, to say nothing of
the fact that they have all cut you.’
‘Well, there is a mystery, I believe. An uncle, a brother of my
father’s, who ran away to Japan, and is now a Buddhist Abbot or Bishop,
or something of the kind. But for all the excitement one is ever likely
to get out of him, he might as well never have been born. He is twelve
thousand miles away, and we shall probably never set eyes on him again.’
Gundred looked a little pained, and made haste to divert the
conversation from this irreligious topic, just as Isabel was about to
burst out into enthusiastic curiosity.
‘So Mr. Darnley bought this delightful estate in Yorkshire, and there
is no use thinking of unpleasant things in the past. Nothing could
sound nicer than Ivescar. Describe it, Kingston.’
‘Oh, well, it sits right up among the fells and moors, just under one
of the big mountains, in a tiny little bare glen all of its own. It
is a stern, splendid country, very large and stiff and barren, up at
Ivescar, and then, down below, there is a great fat valley, all smooth
and smiling, that rolls away westward to the sea. There are jolly
rivers and waterfalls all about in the hills, too, and wonderful caves
and crevasses and pitfalls. It’s quite unlike anything else in England,
and it grows on one in the most extraordinary way. There is something
very primeval and mysterious about it.’
‘And capital shooting,’ added Gundred. ‘Such nice moors, they tell
me, Isabel. We will go up and have lunch with the guns as often as we
can--yes?’
‘Yes, the moors are gorgeous,’ said Kingston. ‘I don’t shoot myself; I
have given it up. But the moors are certainly gorgeous. One can lose
one’s self on them for hours, and probably fall into potholes and
things.’
‘Oh, you must take up your shooting again, dear,’ protested Gundred,
who had the usual tender-hearted woman’s ambition that her husband
should destroy innocent lives as lavishly and enthusiastically and
successfully as fashion demands. ‘You must certainly take it up again.
I do think it such a good thing for a man to have some interest in
life, don’t you, Isabel--something for him to do in the country--yes?’
Isabel abruptly let this uninteresting development of the conversation
lapse unanswered.
‘The country does sound attractive,’ she conceded, turning eager eyes
on Kingston. ‘And you talk of it as if you belonged there. But you
don’t, of course.’
‘No, but my dear mother has spent so many years pretending to that
the pretence is second nature by now. Dear mother! it used to be the
funniest thing in the world to see her playing at the Old Established
Family. It was her great ambition, and she drilled my poor father day
and night into acting the squire. By now I verily believe she has
persuaded herself that we have been settled at Ivescar for half a dozen
centuries at least. She goes about among the tenants with the most
splendid air of having known them all, and all their families, since
the days of Edward the Confessor. There’s nothing so genuine as a good
imitation--except that the good imitation is generally too good, and
overdoes itself.’
‘Well,’ said Isabel, ‘you have fired me with a longing for the
mountains and the caves and waterfalls. But what is the house itself
like?’
At this point Gundred caught them up again. She had dropped out of the
dialogue in a twinge of decorous annoyance at the cavalier way in which
Isabel had ignored her opening on sport and shelved the conversation.
‘A very nice house, Kingston tells me,’ she put in. ‘Built about a
hundred years ago. Very comfortable and convenient.’
‘Ah, I know,’ interrupted Isabel. ‘That tells me everything. All
of the best Early-Victorian Tudor. Everything solid and handsome
and expensive, with a picture of your husband’s father in the
hall, life-size, carrying a gun and a dead rabbit. I can imagine
Ivescar--just a house--just a thing with doors and roofs and
windows--simply a place to live in. Now, this, this’--she waved her
hands comprehensively--‘this isn’t a place to live in. It’s a place
that lives on people. Here it’s the people that are subordinate to
the building. At Ivescar nobody cares about the house except for the
people. The house only exists to keep their feet warm, and send them up
their dinner all cosy and hot from the kitchen. Yes, Ivescar is a place
to live in, and this is a place to die in. One can’t imagine one’s self
dying in an ordinary house. Death is too big a thing to come under its
nice squatty ceilings. One feels the whole thing would fly in flinders;
Death would lift the roof off, and burst the walls, if he came in. He
is so large. But one could die here, and the setting would not be a bit
mean or unsuited to the drama. Any nice, carpety, cushiony building
does to live in; one wants a really-truly house to die in--a place
where one can receive the Great Visitor without feeling cramped or
undignified or cheap. Imagine dying in a chintz bedroom, with enamelled
tin baths and foot-pans and hot-water cans.’
‘Lots of people do,’ protested Kingston. ‘I suppose they have the
Elizabethan feeling that the play is more important than its setting.’
‘Oh, but they don’t die at all,’ cried Isabel. ‘Very few people are
great and holy enough to die. Nine people out of ten just change
shapes and go on again. You can tell that by the fuss they make. One
always fusses more when one harries about at a junction than when one
arrives at a terminus. Most people, when they come to die, are simply
getting out of one train and into another on their journey. Arriving
at the end is a much more simple solemn business. That is what I mean
by dying. And for that one needs a splendid stage. It is a far leap
into Nirvana, and if one is to make it, one wants a good take-off,
a running jump from a strong springy board, with nothing to trammel
one and lessen one’s movements. To hop along into another mean little
manifestation, as most people do, requires very little outside help.
It is hardly more than a shuffle from one bed to another. One does not
want any spring-board for that.’
‘I expect,’ said Kingston, ‘that a vast number of quiet good people
reach Nirvana without big jumps or spring-boards, or anything of the
sort. They go on living obscure, kindly lives, and then, at the end of
everything, they just gently slip away and cease, and enter Nirvana
without any splash at all.’
‘Ah, those are the people who go on the great journey without luggage.
But the average person takes any amount of packages and parcels with
him, all kinds of fears and fusses and hopes and terrors. And the
reason why he makes such a to-do whenever he has to change trains or
carriages is because he is so afraid he may leave one of the precious
bundles behind. He thinks they are his individuality, just as a decent
woman thinks that her clothes are hers. In fact, scarcely anyone
can conceive an idea of himself without his trappings. And so, all
along the Great Railway, you have people wailing and shrinking at the
thought of death. They know, in their heart of hearts, that at each
change they leave one or two of the bundles behind--a fear or a hate
or a habit--and they cannot understand that they can continue to be
themselves without the bundles. They think, as I said, that the bundles
are an essential part of themselves; whereas it is not till one has
gradually shed all one’s bundles that one can hope to arrive, one’s
own real unhampered self, at the Terminus. It is only the Self that is
meant to arrive, not the bundles. They are the common property of all,
like clothes and rugs and umbrellas, but each man’s self is a lone,
isolated thing.’
She spoke with her usual fire, urgently, with hands lavishly waved, and
blazing eyes. Gundred, quite out of the talk, left behind in the lower
world, looked on with bewildered disapproval.
‘Travelling is a great trouble--yes?’ she hazarded. ‘I always have as
little luggage as possible.’
Kingston dropped back into Gundred’s world with a crash. He had been
interested and uplifted on the wings of his cousin’s fantasies. He
could meet her flying in that empyrean of ideas. He loved the vague,
dim regions of her thought. Gundred, without clipping his wings, kept
him tethered to her own perch. Happily she clucked and hopped with him
in the glittering cage--a hen-soul yoked with a restless hawk’s. Now,
out of the free air beyond, had appeared a second hawk, and insensibly
Kingston’s wings began to flutter uneasily for a flight.
‘Yes,’ he said rather savagely, answering an unspoken question. ‘No
wonder poor Gundred can’t understand such mists and inanities. Have you
any idea what you mean, Isabel?’
His irritation was all against Gundred’s inadequacy. It showed her
almost in an inferior light. Characteristically, though, he diverted
his annoyance to the score of his cousin’s mysticism, and unburdened on
her the feelings that his wife had engendered.
‘Idea?’ replied Isabel scornfully. ‘No; why should I? If anyone ever
stopped to think what their words really meant, and refused to speak
until they had found out, why, no one would ever open their lips
again. Man sends the words, and Heaven, we trust, sends the meaning.
I have vague notions of a meaning very far away above and beyond all
the harassing futilities of language, beyond the domain of grammar and
derivations and split infinitives and metaphors and things. But of
course one can’t hit it; one can only aim at it. One shoots off into
the clouds in the hope of sometimes winging a truth. There’s no use
sitting and aiming, aiming, aiming; one has to up with the gun of one’s
mind and blaze away. Nine times out of ten one misses dead, but bit by
bit one gets practice, just as in earthly shooting, until at last one
has attained a good average level of success, though I am afraid till
the end of the chapter one only wings Truth, never gets it fair and
square in the heart.’
‘Shall we go in and have tea--yes?’ said Gundred, with gentle dignity,
into which was mixed a fine proportion of reproof. She rose and moved
towards the door. Isabel looked after her.
‘I have shocked Gundred,’ she said candidly and callously. ‘I suppose
I was bound to. She is too fascinating and pretty for words, but I
don’t feel, somehow, as if her soul and mine were really cousins. I’m
sorry if I have hurt her. It is all my fault. One is such a fool. One
gets interested in an idea, and off one goes at score, and nothing else
matters in the world but the hunting of it down. You are like that,
too, though you are pretending hard not to be. Why do you? Are you
trying to match Gundred? You’ll never be able to, you know.’
She looked up at him, laughing. Her face had a radiant, exasperating
vitality. In that moment he disliked her more even for what she had
than for what she lacked.
‘Don’t see how you can possibly tell that,’ he said, standing over her,
with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair; ‘and I don’t see that it
matters--to you, at all events.’
‘A perfect match,’ continued Isabel, pursuing her thought with no
attention to Kingston--‘a perfect match--I suppose it is when neither
husband nor wife is a match for the other. No, it doesn’t matter a bit.
Only I am interested. I always am. I have only just arrived from the
back of beyond, and yet I feel as if I had known you both--known you,
at least, for half a dozen centuries. I can see all sorts of odd things
in your mind--things that you have no idea of. You are quite naked to
me as I look at you.’
Kingston conceived an instant red desire to shake and maltreat this
insolent barbarian.
‘Are you coming in to tea?’ he asked, turning away as if to leave her.
Isabel sat up in the long garden chair in which she had been lounging.
‘Stop,’ she said.
Angrily, against his will, he stopped and turned towards her. Her voice
compelled him. Unknown voices were answering her in his heart.
‘Well?’ he asked, trying to mitigate the animosity that surged within
him, no less at her demeanour than at the power she exerted.
‘Don’t be so angry with me,’ she replied; ‘or don’t be angrier than you
can help. I am a moral hooligan; I am quite irresponsible. So you need
not think me more odious than I am. Honestly I mean no harm. But one
must amuse one’s self.’
‘Necessarily by annoying everyone else?’ asked Kingston as amiably as
he could.
‘I don’t mean to,’ said Isabel; ‘nobody ever cared less about annoying
people than I do.’ She rose swiftly, with a certain lithe splendour of
movement. ‘Listen,’ she said in a new voice of seriousness, her eyes
on a level with his: ‘I have an impulse. I will tell you the truth, as
far as I can. Perhaps you think that what I say and do is simply bad
manners and sheer native offensiveness. It isn’t that. It is that I
don’t care--neither what happens, nor what I say, nor what anyone else
in all the world may say or think or do. I don’t care a damn. Not a
single solitary. I never have. And, of course, that simplifies conduct
immensely, though I admit it may make one a little trying to live with
at times. Do you understand?’
She spoke calmly, indifferently. But in every word she spoke he
could hear the note of a perfect pride, of a pride so intense as
to be quite careless, quite impersonal, quite unself-conscious. It
was true that she did not care. But her indifference was based on
no obtrusive conceit, on no selfish ill-breeding, no instinct for
flamboyance and advertisement. It was the deep base of her nature,
a serene impermeability to other people’s opinion, and Gundred had
something of the same quality; but Gundred was indifferent because her
pride made her feel superior to all the world. The pride of Isabel was
that higher, more terrific pride which leaps beyond a mere comparison
of one’s self with others, and is simply an all-absorbing sense of
individuality. Whether Isabel was superior to others she never cared
to stop and consider; all she cared for was the thought that she was
she and they were they. The comparison was still there, but implicit,
subconscious, tacit. Her personality defied criticism by ignoring it.
Kingston suddenly found the serene audacity of her attitude a challenge
to his interest.
To wake feeling in such a Stylites of egoism, to win her praise or her
condemnation, would be a task more piquant to a professed emotionalist
than any seduction to a sensualist. To seduce the mind of Isabel, to
draw it down from its heights, and force it to feel, fear, or hate--at
least, to abandon its indifferentism, there was a test of skill. Had
the indifference been a pose, the task would have been cheap, lacking
in adventure. That it was mere undecorated nature was at once the
defender’s great strength and the besieger’s strong attraction. It
challenged arrogantly, irresistibly. Then Kingston remembered how much
he disliked his cousin, and refused to hear the call. Strenuously he
shut his ears to it, and gave her appeal a colourless answer.
‘In some ways,’ he said, ‘I suppose it is as well not to care what
people think or say. But the position is always an ungraceful one, and
is certain ruin to one’s hopes of popularity. However, if you don’t
care, of course, popularity does not matter to you, either one way or
the other.’
‘No,’ said Isabel; ‘one demands it, and expects it. And if one doesn’t
get it as one’s right, one refuses to accept it as anyone’s favour.
And obviously the lack of it can make no real difference. How can
unpopularity affect one’s opinion of one’s self? And that is the only
thing in the world that really does matter. By that alone one rises or
falls, is glorified or condemned.’ She spoke quietly and carelessly, as
much to herself as to him or the world at large. Just so, in such cool,
insolently indifferent tones might Queen Isabel have discussed her own
attitude from a dispassionate external point of view.
‘Incidentally,’ replied Kingston, ‘one runs the risk of giving any
amount of pain to any number of inoffensive people.’
‘Now you are trying to make me feel a brute,’ answered Isabel. ‘But
it is no good. If they are hurt, it is their own fault. Pain always
implies some weakness in the person who suffers it. And you can’t make
one person responsible for the inherent weaknesses of another, just
because his action has stirred certain hidden symptoms to life. You
might just as well scold me if I gave a tea-party, and somebody with
advanced consumption got a cold at it, and died off. The disease was
in him, not in me or my tea-party. And moral suffering is the symptom
of a sort of moral phthisis. Only the diseased can suffer. So, as
long as my actions are sane and healthy in themselves, you must not
call them names if they happen to stumble on weak spots and corns in
other people’s natures. I never knew the corns were there. I simply
went my way. Everyone has a right to. Everyone must. And one is only
responsible to one’s self, and only responsible for one’s self. So much
for your accusation of hurting other people.’
‘I never heard anything so callous in my life. If you were as bad as
your words you would be a perfect fiend. But, mercifully, everyone in
the world is better than their words, and worse than their thoughts.’
‘Ah! you are a sentimentalist, Kingston. I am a realist.’
‘Everyone thinks himself that. The only difference between the
sentimentalist and the realist is that the sentimentalist’s reality is
warm and beautiful, while the realist’s is glacial and hideous. And
they are neither of them real realities, either. The real reality has
something of both, and a great deal more than either or both together.
Each view is only a glimpse of the great whole.’
‘Yes; that’s not a bad idea. However old one may grow or think one’s
self, one remains astonishingly much of a baby in the face of the
immensities. I suppose to take any point of view is childish. One ought
to take them all together, all at once--be a drunkard and a teetotaler
and a bishop and a butcher and a thief and a saint all at one moment in
one’s own person. That is the only way to get the perfect knowledge.
And that, I suppose, is what the idea of God is. To understand
everything by being everything. However, as that is so, I don’t think
one need be ashamed of being a baby with lop-sided, partial, babyish
views and fanaticisms.’
‘Perhaps not. But you seemed to be proud of it. There is a great
difference between being proud and not being ashamed.’
‘Yes, Kingston, there is. And I admit it. And I give in. And I am
defeated. And I want my tea. And I will try to behave prettily. And be
an altruist with the tea-cake instead of an individualist.’
Concessions occasionally mollify. But Isabel made hers so abruptly,
so flippantly that it seemed as if she threw up the battle not
conscientiously, but because she no longer thought it worth the trouble
of fighting. Irritation swept over Kingston at being thus cheated
like a child--played with, flouted, and put by as soon as the game
had begun to weary the older player. His little victory lost all its
satisfaction. He attributed his exasperation entirely to the impudent
frivolity of Isabel and not at all to any underlying eagerness and
enjoyment that he might have been beginning to develop in the dialogue.
Outraged reasonableness swelled his demeanour as he turned in silence
and led the way towards the Castle. Suddenly he felt a hand on his arm.
‘Do be friends,’ said Isabel softly and earnestly. ‘We have been
friends for such ages in the past, I expect, that it would be a pity to
begin badly in the present. I am only a barbarian, not a venomous toad.
So do be friends.’
‘Do you really want to be?’ asked Kingston abruptly.
‘Yes,’ said Isabel--‘yes,’ she repeated slowly, as if surprised at
herself.
‘Soberly and seriously?’ inquired her cousin. ‘I mean, is it a thing
you honestly want? I thought you cared about nobody’s opinion.’
‘I didn’t,’ she answered, ‘and I don’t. And yet just this I do care
for. I want you to be friends with me. In my heart I am friends with
you already--greater friends than I could ever have believed. Why
should I be, why should I want to be? I have no idea. Well, what do you
say?’
‘Yes, if you will,’ replied Kingston. ‘Why shouldn’t we be friends? We
count as cousins.’
‘You don’t like me yet, of course,’ said Isabel calmly. ‘But, then,
nobody does at first. All I want is that you shouldn’t be hostile and
stick out bristles and resist. The rest will come.’
Kingston’s consciousness was in a whirl. He knew that he thoroughly
disliked this saucer-eyed, eager creature. Everything she said and did
aroused in him pulses of animosity so keen as to be almost physical.
On the other hand, in some strange way, she allured, fascinated,
excited him. She led his instincts captive, while his judgment went
charging down upon her undaunted. Irritating though she might be, she
was neither stodgy nor boring. His mind seemed to pringle under her
influence, fiercely yet thrillingly, like a numb, constricted limb
awakening from its sleep. Compared to Gundred, she was as brandy to
milk. Of course Kingston loved the milk and loathed the brandy. But
loathsome though it might be, he could not deny that the brandy was
more potent, more stirring, more exciting than the milk. Since the
brandy was forcing itself into his cup, there was no need to throw it
roughly away; he might sip, under protest, now and then, without danger
of contracting any disloyal craving for brandy instead of milk.
‘Very well,’ he said; ‘let us be friends, Isabel. One can’t control
one’s love or liking. But everything comes to those who wait. So we
will be friends.’
His candour pleased her.
‘Control?’ she said. ‘Our feelings control _us_, if they are real
feelings. The only real feelings are those that are uncontrollable.’
‘I am the son of many generations of unreal feelings then. There are no
love stories in my quiet family--at least, only one, and that was a mad
freak.’
‘There are no others in mine,’ said Isabel, ‘except hate stories,
perhaps. And I suppose they are the same thing, only turned wrong way
out.’
‘I believe that real love is quite calm and level, you know,’ explained
Kingston. ‘Your great blazing stories are built of passion, not of
love. A big love is very quiet, and goes on peacefully from day to day,
almost monotonous in its imperceptible development.’
‘It sounds too like the kingdom of heaven to be very satisfactory on
earth,’ said Isabel.
‘Anyhow,’ replied Kingston, hotly defending what nobody had attacked;
‘I say that the happy concert of lives and marriages--ideal lives and
marriages--is based on tranquil harmonies, not on melodramatic chords.’
Isabel smiled quietly. ‘Why are we talking about love?’ she asked. ‘It
was friendship we were settling on.’
He made no reply, and they entered the Castle.