“Be quiet, Mother!” Then—“Well, Kent? Well?”
“Well?” he repeated after her.
“Madala? How’s Madala? What about Madala Grey?”
“Dead!” he said.
_Dead._ The word fell amongst the group of us in the circle of
lamp-light, like a plummet into a pool. _Dead._ For an instant one could
hear the blank drop of it. Then we broke up into gestures and little
cries, into a babel of dismay and concern and rather horrible
excitement.
Instinctively I separated myself from them. It was neither bad news nor
good news to me, but it recalled to me certain hours, and they—it was as
if they enjoyed the importance of bereavement. Anita talked. Miss Howe
was gulping, and dabbing at her eyes. The Baxter girl kept on
saying—‘Dead?’ ‘Dead?’ under her breath, and with that wide nervous
smile that you sometimes see on people’s faces when they are far enough
away from laughter. Great-aunt had shrunk into her corner. I could
barely see her. The blonde lady had her hand on her heart and was
panting a little, as if she had been running, and yet, as always, she
watched Mr. Flood. He had pulled out a note-book and a fountain-pen and
was shaking at it furiously, while his little eyes flickered from one to
another—even to me. I felt his observance pursue me to the very edge of
the ring of light, and drop again, baulked by the dazzle, as I slipped
past him into the swinging shadows beyond. It’s odd how lamp-light cuts
a room in two: I could see every corner of the light and shadow alike,
and even the outer room was not too dim for me to move about it easily;
but to those directly under the lamp I knew I had become all but
invisible, a blur among the other blurs that were curtains and pictures
and chairs. They remembered me as little as, absorbed and clamorous,
they remembered the man who had brought them their news, and then had
brushed his way through question and comment to the deep alcove of the
window in the outer room and there stood, rigid and withdrawn, staring
out through the uncurtained pane at the solid night beyond. I could not
see his face, only the outline of a big and clumsy body, and a hand that
twitched and fumbled at the tassel of the blind.
And all the while Anita, white as paper, was talking, talking, talking,
saying how great the shock was, and how much Miss Grey had been to her—a
stream of sorrow and self-assertion. It was just as if she said—‘Don’t
forget that this is far worse for me than for any of you. Don’t
forget——’
But the others went on with their own thoughts.
“Dead? Gone? It’s not possible.” Miss Howe was all blubbered and
deplorable. “What shall we do without her?”
“Yes—that’s it!” The Baxter girl edged-in her chair to her like a young
dog asking for comfort.
“For that matter, from the point of view of literature,” Anita’s voice
grated, “she died a year ago.”
“It’s not possible! That’s what I say—it’s not possible!” It was strange
how even the Baxter girl ignored Anita. “Dead! I can’t grasp it.
It’s—it’s too awful. She was so vivid.”
“Awful?” Mr. Flood was biting his fingers. “Awful? Nothing of the kind.
You know that Holbein cut—no, it’s earlier stuff—‘Death and the Lady,’
crude, preposterous. And _that’s_ what it is. Old Bones and Madala Grey?
That’s not tragedy, that’s farce! Farce, dear people, farce!” Then his
high tripping voice broke suddenly. “Dead? Why, she wasn’t thirty!”
“She was twenty-six last June,” said Anita finally. “Midsummer Day. I
know.”
“June!” He caught it up. “Just so—June! Isn’t that characteristic? Isn’t
that Madala all over? Of course she was born in June. She would be. She
_was_ June. June——
“Her lips and her roses yet maiden
A summer of storm in her eyes——”
Miss Howe winced.
“For God’s sake don’t Swinburnize, Jasper! She’s not your meat. Oh, I
want to cry—I want to cry! Dead—at twenty-six——”
“In child-bed,” finished Anita bitterly, and her voice made it an
unclean and shameful end.
Mr. Flood’s glance felt its way over her, hatefully. It never lifted to
her face.
“Of course from your point of view, dear lady——” he began, and smiled as
he made his little bow of attention.
I thought him insolent, and so, I believe, did Miss Howe. She lifted her
head sharply and I thought she would have spoken; but Anita gave her no
time. There was always a sort of thick-skinned valiance about Anita.
“Oh, but you all know my point of view. She knew it herself. I never
concealed it. You know how I devoted myself——”
“A bye-word, a bye-word!” said Miss Howe under her breath.
“—but not so much to her as to her gift. I should never allow a personal
sentiment to overpower me. I haven’t the time for it. But she had the
call, she had the gift, and because she had it I say, as I have always
said, that for Madala Grey, marriage——”
“And all it implies——” Mr. Flood was still smiling.
She accepted it.
“Marriage and all that it implies was apostasy. I stand for Literature.”
“And Literature,” with a glance at the others, “is honoured.”
They wearied me. It seemed to me that they sparked and fizzled and
whirred with the sham life of machinery: and like machinery they
affected me. For at first I could not hear anything but them, and then
they confused and tired me, and last of all they faded into a mere
wall-paper of sound, and I forgot that they were there, save that I
wondered now and then, as stray sentences shrilled out of the buzz, that
they were not yet oppressed into silence.
For there was grief abroad—a grief without shape, without sound, without
expression—a quality, a pulsing essence, a distillation of pure pain.
From some centre it rayed out, it spread, it settled upon the room,
imperceptibly, like the fall of dust. It reached me. I felt it. It
soaked into me. I ached with it. I could not sit quiet. I was not drawn,
I was impelled. _Dead_—the dull, bewildered voice was still in my ears.
_That_ I heard. But it was statement, not appeal. It was not his
suffering that demanded relief, but some responding capacity for pain in
me that awoke and cried out restlessly that such anguish was unlawful,
beyond endurance, that still it I must, I must!