“Ah, but there was always just a chance of seeing Madala.”
At that Anita, who had been sitting as steely stiff as a needle in a
pin-cushion, got up, shaking off Miss Howe’s persuasive, detaining hand
and the overflow of her skirts. The cushions tumbled after her on to the
floor.
“As to that,” she said, “and don’t imagine that I haven’t known what you
came for, all of you——”
“Eh?”
Her voice was sharp enough to have recalled anyone and it recalled Mr.
Flood. He returned to the conversation with the air of dragging the
blonde lady after him. She had the manner of one hanging back and
protesting, and laughing still over some secret understanding. “Eh?”
said he. “What’s that about Madala?”
Anita looked from one to another.
“I’m telling you,” she said. “I’ve told you already, I can give you
Madala Grey. Come here and I’ll give you Madala Grey still. That’s what
you want, isn’t it, to be amused? She amused you.”
“She did, bless her!” said Miss Howe.
“It was her brains,” said the Baxter girl.
“A beautiful creature,” said Mr. Flood slowly.
“Not she!” The lady behind him was smiling. “She made you think so. She
made men think so. But how? That intrigued me. Oh, she was prettyish:
but that was all. I used to watch her——”
“Envy?” said he.
“No, not envy,” said that woman slowly. “She was too—innocent—how could
one envy? She didn’t know her own strength. She said—‘Don’t hurt me,’
with a sword at her side.”
“Excalibur.” It came from Mr. Flood. “Magic.”
“No, Madala—just Madala.” Miss Howe sighed. “It’s no good, Anita, you
can’t give us back Madala.”
But my cousin, looking at them, laughed in her turn.
“Madala? You fools! You’ve never had her. But you shall! Oh, wait! My
books are dull, aren’t they? Yet you’ll be here, you know, every month,
thick as bees, to listen to me. A chapter a month, that’s all I’ll give
to you. _I_ don’t write three novels a year. But you’ll come, you’ll
come. Proof? There’s plenty of proof. See here.”
She went swiftly across to the outer room. There was a large carved desk
standing on the little table by the window. She picked it up. It was too
big for her. It filled her arms so that she staggered under the weight.
“Oh, Kent!” she called.
He came back to the foggy room with a visible wrench.
“Here, that’s too heavy for you. Let me.” He took it from her.
“The table—here. Thank you, oh, thank you, Kent.” She veiled her voice
as she spoke to him. “It’s heavy—it’s so full—books—papers——”
He put it down for her and nodded, and was straying away again when she
stopped him.
“Kent! Don’t sit by yourself. We”—her voice was for him alone—“we’re
talking about—her. I was going to show them—Kent, stay here with us.”
He waited while she talked to him. And she talked very sweetly and
kindly. She was the quiet, chiffony little creature again with the
pretty, pure voice. _I_ couldn’t make her out. She looked up at him and
said something too low for me to catch, and then—
“There’s your chair. Isn’t that always your chair?” And so left him and
turned to the table and the box and the others.
But he did not take the saddle-bag near Anita’s own seat. He looked
irresolutely from one to another of the group that watched Anita
fumbling with her keys. He looked, and his face softened, at Great-aunt,
muttering over her needles. He looked at the empty chair beside me. He
looked at me and found me watching him. Then, as I smiled at him just a
little, he came to me and sat down. But he said nothing to me, and so I
was quiet too.
But Anita was busy, hands and eyes and tongue all busy.
“When she married, you know, in that hole-and-corner fashion——” Then, as
if in answer, though nobody had spoken—“Well, what else was it, when
nobody knew?—when even I didn’t know——”
There was a movement in the chair beside me, and turning, I caught the
ending of a glance towards my cousin. A new look, I found it, on that
passive face, a roused and wondering and scornful look that transformed
it. But, even as I caught it, it faded again to that other look of bleak
indifference, a look to know and dread on any creature’s face, a look
that must not stay on any fellow-creature’s face. I knew that well
enough. So I said the first words that came, in my lowest voice, lest
they should hear.
But they were talking. They did not hear.
“I’m sure that Great-aunt knew.” Indeed I thought so. I think that
Great-aunt would always be kind and guessing with a girl. Then I
wondered at myself for daring it and thought nervously—‘He’ll snub me.
He’ll be right to snub me——’
But he looked across at Great-aunt kindly and said, in just such a
withdrawn voice as mine—
“Yes, of course, if ever there was a time when——” Then he half smiled.
“Poor old lady! But she’s changed. She used to be so brisk and managing,
more like fifty than seventy. But this year’s aged her. She wanted, you
know, to give some pearls—her own pearls. But pearls spell sorrow. And
Anita would have objected. She told me all about it.”
“She was speaking of them tonight.” We both turned again and looked at
her. She had dropped her knitting, or it had slipped from her knee, and
she sat in her chair staring down at it with a terrible, comical air of
helplessness. Then she caught his eye and forgot the knitting and nodded
at him.
“I think—” I said, “I don’t think she understands. She asked me—she
forgets I’m a stranger. She asked me——” I broke off. I couldn’t say to
him—‘She asked me about Miss Grey and she doesn’t realize that she’s
dead.’ One’s afraid of the brutality of words. But he understood. There
was a simplicity about him that re-assured one. And he never said—‘It’s
Anita’s business. It’s not your business,’ as anyone else might have
done. He just said, once again—
“Poor old lady!” and hesitated a minute. Then he got up and went across
to her and picked up her wools. I don’t think the others noticed him go.
Anita didn’t. She was talking too fast.
“—left a trunk-full of papers and so on. I’d often stored boxes for her.
Somehow it never got sent down. I came across it only yesterday. I
thought to myself that there was no harm in putting things straight. You
know I’m literary executor? Oh yes. She said to me soon after her
marriage, half in joke, that she supposed she had got to make a will—and
what about her MSS.? ‘I can’t have _him_ worried.’ I offered at once.
You see I know so exactly her attitude in literature. There’s a good
deal of unpublished stuff—early stuff. But all in hopeless confusion.
Tumbled up with bills and programmes and one or two drafts of letters—or
so I imagine. She had that annoying habit—that ugly modern habit—of
beginning without any invocation, and never a date. But there’s one
letter—there’s the draft of a letter that’s important from my point of
view.” She broke off with a half laugh. “It sounds a ridiculous
statement to make about Madala Grey of all people, but do you know that
she couldn’t express herself at all easily on paper?”
Miss Howe nodded.
“Do I know? I’ve known her re-write a letter half a dozen times before
she got it to her liking—no, not business letters, letters to her
intimates. A most comical trick. Scribble, scribble, scribble—slash! and
then crunch goes the sheet into a ball, into the grate, or near it, till
it looked as if she were playing snow-balls, and then Madala begins
again—and again—and again. Yet she talked well. She talked easily.”
“Isn’t that in keeping?” Mr. Flood struck in. “She didn’t express so
much herself in her speech as the mood of the moment.”
“As the mood of the companion of the moment more likely,” the blonde
lady corrected.
He nodded agreement.
“But for herself—go to her books.”
“Or her letters—her careful, conscientious letters. But she was careless
about her drafts,” said Anita significantly.
Mr. Flood looked at her curiously.
“What’s up that sleeve of yours, Anita?”
She was quick.
“You shall read it, in its place. But the trouble is——” She hesitated.
She gave the little nervous cough that always ushered in her public
lectures. “We’ve all written books,” she said, “all except you,
Blanche——”
The blonde lady blinked her sleepy eyes.
“You’re all so strenuous,” she purred. “I love to watch you being
strenuous. So soothing.”
“Well, I was going to say, it’s easy enough to end a book, but have you
ever got to the beginning? I never have. One steps backward, and
backward again——”
“I know,” cried the Baxter girl. “Till you get tired of it at last and
begin writing from where you are, but you never really get your foot on
the starting-point, on the spring-board, as you might say.”
“That’s it. Yes, Jasper, I’ve got material up my sleeve, but frankly, I
don’t know how to place it. I don’t know where to begin. The facts of
her life, her conversation, her literary work, her letters—I go on
adding to my material till I am overwhelmed with all that I have got to
say about her. But I don’t want to begin with facts. Facts are well
enough, but think how one can twist them! I want the woman behind the
facts. I want the answer to the question that is the cause of a
biography such as mine is to be—the question—‘What was Madala Grey?’ Not
who, mark you, but further back, deeper into herself—‘_What_ was Madala
Grey?’”
“Why, a genius,” said the Baxter girl glibly.
Anita neither assented nor dissented.
“Ah—” she said, frowning, “but that’s not the beginning either. At once
we take our step backward again—‘What is genius?’”
“Isn’t talent good enough?” said Mr. Flood acidly.
“But does one mean talent?” She was still frowning. “Everyone’s got
talent. I’m sick of talent. But she—she mayn’t be a great one—how she’d
have laughed at being called a great one!—but she makes her dolls live.
And isn’t that the blood-link between the greatest gods and the littlest
gods? Life-givers? Life-makers? Oh, I only speak for myself; but she
made her book-world real to me, therefore for me she had genius. Whether
or not I convince you is the test of whether my life-work, my _Life_ of
her—fails or succeeds.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t trust it to Madala?” said Miss Howe softly.
“Trust what?”
“To convince us.”
She answered, suspicious rather than comprehending, for indeed Miss
Howe’s tone was very smooth—
“What do you mean? _I_’m writing her life.”
Miss Howe was inscrutable.
“Of course you are. Fire ahead. Genius, wasn’t it?”
Anita shrugged her shoulders.
“What’s in a name? It’s the quality itself that fascinates me. I want to
account for it. I want to trace it to its source. Worth doing, isn’t it?
But do you realize the difficulties? Sometimes I feel hopeless. I’ve
known her five years, and her books I know by heart, and I’m only just
beginning to decide whether to call her a romantic or a realist.”
“A realist. Look at _Eden Walls_,” said the Baxter girl.
“A romantic. Look at _The Resting-place_,” said Miss Howe.
Mr. Flood over-rode them.
“Dear ladies, you confuse the terms. It amazes me how people always
confuse the terms. Your so-called realist, your writer who depicts what
we call reality, the outward life, that is, of flesh and dirt and
misery—don’t you see that he is in truth a romantic—a man (or woman) who
lives in a fair world of his own, a paradise of the imagination? Out of
that secure world of his he peers curiously at ours, and writes of it as
we dare not write, writes down every sordid, garish, tragic-comic
detail. Your so-called realist can afford the humour of Rabelais, the
horror of Dostoevsky, the cheerful flesh and blood of Fielding. Why
shouldn’t he be truthful? It’s not his world. Don’t you see? But your
so-called romantic, he lives in this real world. He knows it so well
that he has to shut his eyes or he would die of its reality. So he
escapes into the world of romance, the world of beauty within his own
mind—nowhere but in his own mind. Who is our dreamer of dreams? Shelley,
the realist! Blake jogged elbows with poverty and squalor all his life,
and he was the prophet and the king of all spirits. Don’t you see? And
Goethe—the biographers will tell you that Goethe began as a realist and
ended as a romantic. I say it was the other way round. What did he know
of reality in the twenties? Its discovery was the romantic adventure of
his young genius. But when he was old and worldly and wise—then he wrote
his romances, to escape from his own knowledge. Oh, I tell you, you
should turn the words round. Now take Shakespeare——”
“It’s not fair to take Shakespeare,” said Miss Howe. “It’s the Elephant
and the Crawfishes over again. Let’s keep to the crawfishes! Let’s keep
to our own generation!”
“Well, if I were Anita I should begin by showing Madala as a romantic—as
the young romantic producing the most startlingly realistic book we’ve
had for a decade. Indeed to me, you know, her development is marked by
her books in the sharpest way. It’s the young, the curious, the
observant Madala in _Eden Walls_. The whole book is a shout of
discovery, of young, horrified discovery, of the ugliness of life. It’s
as if she said—‘Listen! Listen! These things actually happen to some
people. Isn’t it awful?’ She dwells on it. She insists on every detail.
She can’t get away from it. And yet she can hardly believe it, that
young Madala. But in _Ploughed Fields_ already the tone’s changing. It’s
a pleasanter book, a more sophisticated book. It interests profoundly,
but it’s careful not to upset one—an advance, of course. Yet I, you
know, hear our Madala’s voice in it still, an uneasy voice—‘Hush! Hush!
These things happen to most people. Pretend not to notice.’ And in the
last book, in the pretty, impossible romance, there you have your
realist full-fledged—‘Shut your eyes! Come away quickly! These things
are happening to _me_!’” He leant back again, folding his arms and
dropping his chin. And then, because Miss Howe was looking at him as if
she were amused—“I tell you I know. I recognize the symptoms. I’m a
realist myself. That’s why I write romantic poetry. Have to. It’s that
or drugs. How else shall one get through life?”
“Jasper!” said the blonde lady. But for once he didn’t turn to her. He
shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t worry. Who’ll believe me?”
The Baxter girl was breathless.
“Oh, but I do. It’s a new Madala, of course. But I believe it explains
her.”
“But the facts of her life don’t agree,” began Miss Howe.
“Ah, Anita’s got to make ’em,” said Mr. Flood languidly. “Isn’t that the
art of biography?”
But Anita was deadly serious.
“You don’t begin far enough back. My spring-board is not—what is Madala?
but—what is genius? How does it happen? Is it immaculate birth? or is it
begotten of accident upon environment? That is to say—is it inspiration
or is it experience? I speak of the divine fire, you understand, not of
the capacity for resolving it into words or paint or stone. That’s
craft, a very different thing. You say that Madala was not a genius in
the big sense—yes, I’ll admit that even, for the argument’s sake—but
even you will concede her the beginnings of it. So my difficulty is just
the same. I’ve never believed in instinctive genius. Yet how can she, at
twenty, have had the experience (that she had the craft is amazing
enough) to cope with _Eden Walls_? Romantic curiosity isn’t enough
explanation, Jasper! Look at her certainty of touch. Look at her detail.
Look how she gets inside that woman’s mind. That’s the fascination of
it. It’s such a document. Now how does she know it? That’s what
intrigues me. Madala and a street woman! Where’s the connection? How
does she get inside her? Because she does get inside her.”
“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady.
“It must be. You should have seen the letters she received! Amazing,
some of them.”
“Anita, they amazed _her_. I remember her getting one while she was
staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said—‘But, Lila,
I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing, she says it’s
true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’ You know, she
was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who had read the book.
But Madala always believed in people. I know she wrote to her. I believe
she helped her. But she never told you much about her doings.”
“Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself is—how
does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her wretched drab of
a heroine thought and felt and suffered?”
“Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the
explanation.”
“It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from
the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal
experience. Not in _Eden Walls_, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re
discussing _Eden Walls_. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the
imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that
imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest rootlet
of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing. But the
older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less he
trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination flags
and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—as the
recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions. It’s only
the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do you think that
Madala did? Look at _Eden Walls_. Remember what we know about her. Can’t
you see that the skeleton of _Eden Walls_ is Madala’s own life? Consider
her history. She leaves what seems to have been a happy childhood behind
her and sets out on adventure—very young. So does the woman in _Eden
Walls_. The parallel’s exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the
_Breckonridge_ of the novel are the same place. The house, the lane, the
country-side, she doesn’t trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s
adventure is ushered in by calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist
transmuting the mere physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to
the woman in _Eden Walls_. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the
sense of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of
something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official
emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that show
that she was depending on her experience rather than on her imagination,
fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case? Then, in America,
she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere existence. So does the
woman in _Eden Walls_. Madala does not go under. The woman in _Eden
Walls_ does. It’s the first real difference. But I maintain that in
reality the parallel still continues, that, in imagination, Madala did
go under over and over again: that she had ever in front of her the
‘suppose, suppose,’ that, in drawing the woman in _Eden Walls_, she is
saying to herself—‘Here, but for the grace of God, go I.’ And then, you
know, when you think of her, hating that big city, saving up her
pennies, and coming home at last in a passion of homesickness (if it was
homesickness—sickness anyhow), can’t you see how it makes her write of
that other woman? It’s the gift, the genius, stirring in her: born, not
immaculately, but of her own literal experience. Jasper’s right—you can
always make facts fit if you think them out: and because I possess that
underlying shadow-work (I admit it’s no more) of fact to guide me in
deciphering her method in the first book, therefore, in the second book
and the third book, I find it safe to _deduce_ facts to cover the
stories, even when I don’t possess them. I consider that I’m justified,
that _Eden Walls_ justifies me. Don’t you?”
“It’s plausible,” said Mr. Flood thoughtfully.
“Oh, it’s convincing,” said the Baxter girl reverently. “I feel I’ve
never known Madala Grey before. What it will be when you get it into
shape, Miss Serle——”
“In fact,” said Miss Howe, “there’s only one drawback——”
“And that?” said Anita swiftly.
“Only Madala’s own account.”
“She never discussed her methods,” said Anita sharply.
“Just so! You’re not the only person who’s—pumped. I remember seeing her
once surrounded, in her lion days. I remember her ingenuous
explanations. She did her best to oblige them—‘Honestly, I don’t know.
One just sits down and imagines.’ And then—‘That’s quite easy. But it’s
awfully difficult writing it down.’ That’s the explanation, Nita. A
deliberate, even unconscious self-exploitation is all nonsense. Madala’s
not clever enough.”
“Not clever enough!”
“No. You’re much cleverer than she was. You have twice her brains. You
can’t think, Anita, what brains you’ve got. You’ve got far too many to
understand a simple person. I don’t agree, you know, with ‘genius.’ I
can’t throw a word like that about so lightly. But as far as it went
with Madala, it was the same sort of genius that makes a crocus push in
the spring. Your theory—oh, it’s plausible, as Jasper says, but don’t
you see that it destroys all the charm of her work? It’s the innocence
of her knowledge, the simplicity of her attitude to her own insight that
to me is moving. She touches pitch, yet her fingers are clean. It’s her
view of her story that arrests one, not her story, not her facts, not
her mere plot.”
“No, the plot is conventional, I’ll grant you that. She was always
content with old bottles.”
“Yes, and when the new wine burst them and made a mess on the carpet,
Madala was always so surprised and indignant.”
Mr. Flood giggled.
“Pained is the word, dear lady—surprised and pained. Do you remember
when _Eden Walls_ was banned?”
“I don’t suppose she talked to you about it, Jasper,” said Miss Howe
sharply.
“I? I was never of her counsels. But I got my amusement out of the
affair. Dear, delightful woman? She behaved like a schoolgirl sent to
Coventry. I remember congratulating her on the advertisement, and she
would hardly speak to me. But it suited her, the blush.”
“_Wasn’t_ it an advertisement!” said the Baxter girl longingly.
“If one could have got her to see it,” said Anita. “But no, she insisted
on being ashamed of herself. She said to me once that the critics had
‘read in’ things that she had never dreamed of—that it made her doubt
her own motives—that she felt dirtied and miserable. And yet she
wouldn’t alter one of those scenes. Obstinate! She could be very
obstinate.”
“Oh, which scenes?” The Baxter girl stuck her elbows on the table and
her chin in her fists. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, then, Miss Serle, did
you—? did she come to you in the early days? Did you help her too?”
“My daughter—very kind to young people!”
It was a mere mutter, but I recognized the swing of the phrase. Anita
didn’t. She was busy with the Baxter girl.
“I don’t say that there would be no Madala Grey today if I——”
“_But_——” said Mr. Flood.
“_But_—” said Miss Howe, “she’s Anita’s discovery. We’re never to forget
that, are we, darling?”
“Oh, I knew that,” said the Baxter girl, trying to be tactful. “But
_Eden Walls_ was written before you knew her, wasn’t it? I understood—I
didn’t know, I mean,” she explained to them, “that Miss Serle
had—blue-pencilled——”
“I did and I didn’t.” Anita laughed, as if in spite of herself. “I
confess I thought at the time that it needed revision. Mind you, I never
questioned the quality, but I knew what the public would stand and what
it wouldn’t. Of course, I didn’t want the essentials altered. But there
were certain cuts——However, nothing would move her.”
“That’s funny. She never gave me the impression that she believed in
herself so strongly.”
“Oh, her _pose_ was diffidence,” said the blonde lady.
“But she didn’t believe in herself. It was obvious. When I went through
her MS. and blue-pencilled, she was most grateful. She agreed to
everything and took the MS. away to remodel.”
“And then?”
“I heard nothing more of her—for weeks. Finally I wrote and asked her to
come and see me. She came. She was delightful. I had told her, you know,
about the _Anthology_ the first time I met her. I remember that I was
annoyed with myself afterwards. I’m not often indiscreet. But she had
a—a knack—a way with her. I hardly know how to describe it.”
“One told her things,” said the Baxter girl.
“Just so. One told her things. And she had brought me a mass of
material—some charming American verse (you remember? in the last section
but one) that I had never come across. She had been reading for me at
the British Museum in her spare time. I confess I was touched. We
talked, I remember——” She sighed reminiscently. “It was not until she
made a move to go that I recollected myself. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘and how
about _Eden Walls_?’ She fidgeted. She looked thoroughly guilty. At last
it came out. She hadn’t altered a line. She had tried her utmost. She
had drafted and re-drafted. She had finally given it up in despair and
just got work in some obscure newspaper office—‘a most absorbing
office!’ But there—you know Madala when she’s interested—was
interested——”
“Don’t,” said Miss Howe softly.