“Where else? I’ve always come here. Every month. It was natural to
come.”
“But now” I said (and I was so urgent with him because of all their talk
that drummed still in my mind like a wasps’ nest)—“I’d go away if I were
you. What good does it do you? They talk. It’s—it’s rather hateful. I’ve
been listening. I’d go.”
“Where?” he said again. And I—
“Haven’t you anyone—at home?”
But as I asked I knew that he hadn’t. He had the look. Oh, he wore good
clothes and I knew he wasn’t poor. But it was written all over him that
he looked after himself and did it expensively and badly. He had, too,
that other look that goes with it—of a man who has never found anyone
more interesting to him than himself. And the queer part was that it
didn’t seem selfish in him—and I’m sure it wasn’t. It was just like the
way a child takes you for granted, and tells you about its own big
affairs, and never guesses that you have your own little affairs too. I
suppose it was a fault in him; but it made me like him. And he talked to
me simply and almost as if he needed helping out; as if he’d been just
anybody. I never had to help out anyone before: it had always been the
other way round. I’d thought, too, that celebrated people were always
superior and brilliant and overwhelming, like Anita and Mr. Flood. But
he wasn’t. He was as simple as A, B, C. I liked him. I did like him. I
felt happier, more at peace, standing there with him than I had felt
since I had been in Anita’s house. I think he would have gone on talking
to me too, if it hadn’t been for the Baxter girl. She spoilt it. She
tilted back her chair, yawning, and so caught sight of us, and laughed,
and leaning over to Miss Howe, whispered in her ear. She was a crazy
girl. At once I got up and came across to them, panic-stricken, hating
her. I had to. I didn’t want him worried, and you never knew what
hateful thing the Baxter girl wouldn’t say, and think that she was
pleasing you.
But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising excitedly in
answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter girl.
“Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of her
promise in _Ploughed Fields_. It’s as good as _Eden Walls_ in matter
and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her
place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been her
master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of pearls, and
she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth solving? Won’t
people read the _Life_ for that if for nothing else? Am I the only
person who has asked what happened to her between her second and her
third books?”
“I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic
has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of
romance.”
“I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we mean
the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She has been
walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in her case, the
all-obscuring fact?”
“She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one thing.
Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.”
“Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief.
“Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was announced——”
“As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.
“—and she’d been so absent-minded I couldn’t get anything out of her. I
thought I knew her well enough to tease her. I had told her all _my_
affairs. So—‘I believe you’re in love,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll get
over it. It’s a phase.’ Was there any harm in that? It was only
repeating what you had said to me about her, you know,” she reminded the
blonde lady. “But she froze instantly. She made no comment. She just
changed the subject. But I felt as if I had been introduced to a new
Madala. I wished I hadn’t said it.”
“You are a little fool, Beryl,” said the blonde lady tolerantly.
“But she _was_ altered,” insisted the Baxter girl. “The old Madala would
have laughed.”
“Yes, she was altered,” said Anita. “Her whole attitude to herself and
her work changed that spring. How she horrified me one day. It was soon
after _Ploughed Fields_ came out, and we were talking about her new
book, at least I was, pumping a little, I confess, and suddenly she
said—‘Anita, I don’t think I’ll write any more. This stuff—’ she had her
hands on _Eden Walls_, ‘it’s harsh, it’s ugly; and so’s _Ploughed
Fields_. Isn’t it?’ ‘It’s true to life,’ I said, ‘that’s the triumph of
it.’ ‘Is it?’ she said. She looked at me in an uneasy sort of way. And
then—‘I’d like to write a kind book, a beautiful book.’ I told her that
she couldn’t, that she was a realist. ‘That’s why,’ she said, ‘I don’t
think I’ll write any more.’ I laughed, of course. Anybody would have
laughed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I mean it. I haven’t an idea in my head. I’m
tired and empty. I think I shall go away for a wander. There’s always
the country, anyhow.’ ‘Well, Madala,’ I said, ‘I think you’re
ungrateful. You’re a made woman. You’ve got your name: you’ve got your
line: you’ve got your own gift——’ ‘Oh, that!’ she said, as if she were
flicking off a fly. I was irritated. It was so arrogant. ‘What more do
you want?’ I asked her. ‘What more _can_ you want?’ She said—‘I don’t
know,’ looking at me, you know, as if she expected me to tell her. I
disliked that mood of hers. One did expect, with a woman of her
capacity, to be entertained as it were, to have ideas presented, not to
be asked to provide them. Then she began, à propos of nothing at all—‘If
I ever marry——’ That startled me. We’d never touched on the subject
before. ‘Oh, my dear Madala,’ I said, ‘you must never think of anything
so—so unnecessary. For you, of all people, it would be fatal. It would
waste your time, it would distract your thoughts, it would narrow your
outlook, it would end by spoiling your work altogether. I’ve seen it
happen so often. It’s terrible to me even to think of a woman with a
future like yours, throwing it away just for the——’ She interrupted me.
‘I wouldn’t marry for the sake of getting married, if you mean that. Not
even for children.’”
“You didn’t mean that, did you, Anita?” said Miss Howe smiling a little.
“Certainly not. But I had always been afraid that she might be tempted
to marry for the adventure’s sake, for the mere experience, for the——”
“Copy,” said Mr. Flood. “I always said so. Yes?”
“‘Oh well, Madala,’ I said to her, ‘you know what I think. I’m not one
to quote Kipling, but—_He travels fastest who travels alone_.’ She
looked at me so strangely. ‘Alone?’ she said. ‘Alone. Its the cruellest
word in the language. There’s drowning in it.’ ‘Well, without conceit,
Madala,’ I said, ‘I can affirm that I have been alone, spiritually, all
my life.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘but you’re different.’ And that,” Anita
broke off, “was what I liked in Madala. She did recognize differences.
She could appreciate. She wasn’t absorbed in herself. She said to me
quite humbly—‘I’m not strong, I suppose; but I don’t suffice myself. I
can’t bear myself sometimes. I can’t bear the burden of myself. Can’t
you understand?’ ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m a modern woman, and
the modern woman is a pioneer. She’s the Columbus of her own
individuality. She must be. It’s her career. It’s her destiny.’ She
answered me pettishly, like a naughty child—‘I don’t want to be a
pioneer.’ ‘You’re that,’ I said, ‘already, whether you want to be or
not.’ Then she said to me, with that dancing, impish look that her eyes
and her lips and her white teeth used to manage between them—‘All right!
If I’ve got to be, I will. But I’ll be a pioneer in my own way. I swear
I’ll shock the lot of you.’”
“_Oho!_” said Mr. Flood with exaggerated unction.
“Exactly!” Anita gave his agreement such eager welcome. “That put me on
the qui-vive. Knowing her as I did, it was a very strong hint. I awaited
developments. Frankly, I was prepared for a scandal, a romance, anything
you please in the way of extravagance. That’s why the Carey marriage,
that tameness, upset me so. It was not what I was expecting. Really, I
don’t know which was more of a shock to me, _The Resting-place_ or the
marriage. Hardly had I recovered from the one when——”
“Oh, _The Resting-place_ was the shock of my life too.” He giggled. “I
mourned, I assure you that I mourned over it. That opening, you
know—‘There was once’—And the end again—‘So they were married and had
children and lived happily ever after.’ Pastiche! And then to be invited
to wade through a conscientious account of how they achieved it! Too bad
of Madala! As if the poor but virtuous artist’s model weren’t a drug on
the market already! And the impecunious artist himself—_stooping_, you
know! Oh, I sat in ashes.”
Miss Howe clapped her hands.
“Jasper, I love you. I _do_ love you. Did she pull your leg too? Both
legs? She did! She did! Oh, there’s only one Madala!”
Mr. Flood’s vanity was in his cheeks while she rattled on.
“Darling Jasper, I thought better of you! Can’t you see the whole
thing’s a skit? Giving the jampot public what they wanted! Why, it’s
been out a year and they’re sucking the spoon still. It’s the
resting-place! Ask the libraries! Oh, can’t you see?”
“If it is parody,” said Mr. Flood slowly, “then, I admit, it’s unique.”
“What else? You’ll not deny humour to her?”
“I do!” the blonde lady nodded her head. “Once a woman is in love she’s
quite hopeless.”
“I don’t see how parody could be in question,” Anita broke in. “Anybody
reading the book carefully must see that she’s in earnest. That’s the
tragedy of it.”
“The literary tragedy?”
“Not only literary. The psychological value is enormous. It’s not art,
it’s record. It’s photography. That happened. That happened, tragically,
to Madala. Oh, not the trimmings, of course, not the happy-ever-after.
But to me it’s perfectly clear that that lapse into _Family Herald_
romance has had its equivalent in Madala’s own life. I’ve always felt a
certain weakness in her character, you know—a certain sentimentalism.”
“In the author of _Eden Walls_?” said Miss Howe contemptuously.
“No, dear lady! But in the author of _The Resting-place_.” Mr. Flood had
recovered himself.
“Skit, I tell you, skit!” she insisted. And they continued to bicker in
undertones while Anita summed up the situation.
“No, my theory is this—Madala Grey met some man——”
“Carey?” asked Mr. Flood, dividing his allegiance.
“No, Carey comes later. There was—an episode——”
“Episodes?” he amended.
“Possibly. But an episode anyhow, that I place myself at the end of the
_Ploughed Fields_ period. It may have been later, it may have been the
following summer while she was working at _The Resting-place_. I’m open
to conviction there. But an episode there must have been. In _The
Resting-place_ she wrote it down as it ought to have happened.”
“Why ought?”
“Well, obviously it didn’t happen or she wouldn’t have become Mrs.
Carey.”
“The gentleman loved and rode away, you mean?”
“Something of the sort. Something went wrong.”
“I see.” Miss Howe was interested. “It’s a theory, anyhow. And then in
sheer savage irony at her own weakness——”
“Not a bit. In sheer weak longing——”
“I see. If your theory is correct—I don’t know what you base it on——”
“Internal evidence,” said Anita airily.
“Then I can imagine that _The Resting-place_ was a relief to write. Poor
Madala!”
“And then,” concluded Anita triumphantly, “then appears Carey, and she’s
too worn out, too exhausted with her own frustrated emotions to care
what happens. The book’s in her head still, and she her own heroine. He
appears to her—I admit that it’s possible that even Carey might appear
to her—as a refuge, a resting-place.”
“Yes, but you don’t like Mr. Carey,” said the Baxter girl. “But if
Madala did? Isn’t it possible that in Madala’s eyes——? Why shouldn’t the
hero be Mr. Carey himself?”
Anita’s eyes were bright with the cold anger that she always showed at
the name.
“My good girl, you know nothing about John Carey, or you’d rule that
out. Have you ever seen him? I thought not. And yet you _have_ seen him.
All day. Every day. When you talk of the man in the street, whom do you
mean? What utterly common-place face is in your mind? Shall I tell you
what is in mine? John Carey. Ordinary! Ordinary! The apotheosis of the
uninspired! Oh, I haven’t any words. Look for yourself.” She rummaged
furiously in the half-opened desk and flung out a fading snapshot on a
mount. “There he is! That’s the thing she married!”
“What’s he doing in your holy of holies?” Mr. Flood’s eyes seemed to
bore into her desk.