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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Judge, by Rebecca West
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Judge
+
+
+Author: Rebecca West
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 24, 2005  [eBook #16125]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+THE JUDGE
+
+by
+
+REBECCA WEST
+
+Author of "The Return Of The Soldier"
+
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+1922,
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+THE MEMORY OF
+
+MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ONE
+
+
+
+
+     "Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of
+     the father."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I
+
+
+It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
+crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it
+as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The
+office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those
+decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of Edinburgh
+New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that opened just
+opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock
+and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the
+southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that
+strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it
+keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the
+cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy
+with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and
+remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms
+beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was
+ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched
+it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
+weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
+the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
+proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
+regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
+bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate
+and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly
+night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of
+dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a
+past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
+And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
+lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and
+said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
+monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
+Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
+of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
+shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
+appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
+look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
+shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
+myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
+the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
+make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
+am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
+succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
+they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
+to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
+themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
+spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
+part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one
+had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it
+its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough
+stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked
+desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was
+nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months
+since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by
+this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in
+Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult
+people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known
+as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.
+Less than that would do: just to see people's faces doing something else
+than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something
+else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got
+people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no
+part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had
+first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too
+comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert
+beginning.
+
+"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this
+rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere
+congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did
+the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time
+she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy
+of the twilight.
+
+Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those
+Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at
+school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville
+had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket
+with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
+they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
+steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
+squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
+delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
+the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
+was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
+and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
+known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
+come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
+terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
+Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
+and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
+flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
+be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
+keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
+terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
+rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
+slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
+the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
+unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
+for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
+after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
+off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
+salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
+channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
+protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
+face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
+his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
+Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the
+Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an
+Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
+disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
+get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
+gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
+fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
+Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
+into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
+to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
+round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
+death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
+the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.
+
+From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
+sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
+when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
+mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
+green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
+Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
+where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
+seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
+had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
+that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
+feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
+had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
+feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
+mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
+beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
+and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
+might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the
+landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed
+ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers
+of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset
+swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and
+lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would
+sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.
+
+She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would
+reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with
+a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to
+see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not
+come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.
+But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light
+again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of
+her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent
+that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in
+Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of
+inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk
+with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She
+thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the
+Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept
+them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay
+white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had
+seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak
+to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though
+there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out
+of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,
+constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild
+capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified
+by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and
+she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their
+nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose
+thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised
+it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching
+vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a
+Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord
+Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed
+out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish
+swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and
+the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the
+aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she
+was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had
+worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather
+pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer
+than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing
+in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had
+two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever
+girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen
+had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She
+was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin
+brown paper out of _Weldon's Fashions_ on to stuff that must not on any
+account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with
+the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her
+shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the
+good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her
+thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had
+always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,
+as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now
+dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in
+Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been
+hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
+wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
+among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
+cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
+wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
+spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
+hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used
+to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the
+housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered
+it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At
+the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these
+accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....
+
+The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly
+on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles
+against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their
+persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the
+representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised
+his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most
+impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,
+and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a
+high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing
+his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right
+of way, and Menzies & Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at
+Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"--that greeting by which Scot links himself
+to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.
+Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth
+he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that
+led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would
+prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the
+respected townsman. He had meant from the first to end with a paunch.
+But now wealth was inalienably his and Beauty could beckon him on no
+strange pilgrimages, his soul retraced its steps and contemplated this
+bright thing as an earth creature might creep to the mouth of its lair
+and blink at the sun. And there was more than that to it. He loved her.
+He had never had enough to do with pitiful things (his wife Elizabeth
+had been a banker's daughter), and this, child had come to him, that day
+in June, so white, so weak, so chilled to the bone, for all the summer
+heat, by her monstrous ill-usage....
+
+He said, "Nelly, will your mother be feared if you stop and take a few
+notes for Mr. Philip till eight? There is a chemist body coming through
+from the cordite works at Aberfay who can't come in the day but Saturday
+mornings, and you ken Mr. Philip's away to London for the week-end by
+the 8.30, so he's seeing him the night. Mr. Philip would be thankful if
+you'd stop."
+
+"I will so, Mr. James," said Ellen.
+
+"You're sure your mother'll not be feared?"
+
+"What way would my mother be feared," said Ellen, "and me seventeen
+past?"
+
+"There's many a lassie who's found being seventeen no protection from a
+wicked world." He emitted some great Burns-night chuckles, and kicked
+the fire to a blaze.
+
+She said sternly, "Take note, Mr. James, that I haven't done a hand's
+turn this hour or more, and that not for want of asking for work. Dear
+knows I have my hand on Mr. Morrison's door-knob half the day."
+
+Mr. James got up to go. "You're a fierce hussy, and mean to be a partner
+in the firm before you've done with us."
+
+"If I were a man I would be that."
+
+"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good
+man comes by."
+
+She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to
+defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,
+but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late. Sometimes
+she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an imaginary
+group of people whom she desired to be with--well-found people who would
+disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and beautiful results;
+who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid social life that had
+been previously nurtured by separate tender intimacies at hearths that
+were more than grates and fenders, in private picture-galleries with
+wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries adorned with big-nosed
+marble busts. She knew that that environment existed for she had seen
+it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League picnic in the grounds of an
+Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the secretary had taken her up to the
+house. They had waited in a high, long room with crossed swords on the
+walls wherever there were not bookshelves or the portraits of men and
+women so proud that they had not minded being painted plain, and there
+were French windows opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on
+an ornate balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many
+flowering trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so
+broad the intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered
+river-bed below. On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few
+unnecessary fires she had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity
+that the books lying on the great round table were mostly the drawings
+of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to
+them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the
+pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee
+that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society
+of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin
+like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and
+whose hair had no short ends round the neck.
+
+But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
+specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had
+chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and
+restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the
+plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh
+to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town
+she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there
+flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad
+in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a
+more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,
+than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a
+string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her
+neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody
+of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the
+Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the
+pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious
+stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down
+into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,
+but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it
+dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
+that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
+since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
+nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by
+the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the
+town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the
+English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade
+unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir
+Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a
+facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on
+the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested
+that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and
+dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of
+which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as
+inadequately represented by Ćneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at
+the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the
+corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace
+ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked
+G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as
+noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the
+Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept
+undisguisedly.
+
+
+II
+
+"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the
+gas and seen that she was crying.
+
+At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to
+this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that
+she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards
+the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in
+it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her
+motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So
+she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"
+
+Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and
+bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way
+she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always
+felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at
+the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman
+whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the
+expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has
+forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,
+but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through
+an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,
+dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed
+by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his
+train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired
+himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on
+her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would
+presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite
+uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially
+conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man
+going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at
+her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it
+radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the
+sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was
+characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He
+had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a
+great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a
+tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day
+when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped
+towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It
+was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked
+her very much.
+
+He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what
+should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"
+
+She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of
+shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh
+accent and always carried an umbrella. He was so like hundreds of young
+men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an
+air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow,
+that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other
+representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the
+impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity,
+for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his
+half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So
+she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are
+awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he's a
+doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and
+going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy. I don't
+know what's the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and
+see new people. This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw
+the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit
+heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was near
+turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go
+hang!"
+
+They were both law-abiding people. They saw the gravity of her case.
+
+"Not that I want the Pentlands. Dear knows I love the place, but I want
+something more than those old hills. I want to go somewhere right far
+away. The sight of a map makes me sick. And then I hear a band play--not
+the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott's poetry, which I never
+could bear, but a band. I feel that if I followed it it would lead me
+somewhere that I would like to go. And the posters. There's one at the
+Waverley station--Venice. I could tear the thing down. Did you ever go
+to Italy, Mr. Philip?"
+
+"No. I go with the girls to Germany every summer."
+
+"My patience!" said Ellen bitterly. "The way the world is! The people
+who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany. And I--I'll die if I don't
+get away."
+
+"Och, I often feel like this," said Mr. Philip. "I just take a week-end
+off at a hydro."
+
+"A hydro!" snorted Ellen. "It's something more like the French
+Revolution I'm wanting. Something grand and coloured. Swords, and people
+being rescued, and things like that."
+
+"There's nothing going on like that now," he said stolidly, "and we
+ought to be thankful for it."
+
+"I know everything's over in Europe," she agreed sadly, "but there's
+revolutions in South America. I've read about them in Richard Harding
+Davis. Did ever you read him? Mind you, I'm not saying he's an artist,
+but the man has force. He makes you long to go."
+
+"A dirty place," said Mr. Philip.
+
+"What does that matter, where there's life? I feel--I feel"--she wrung
+her inky brown hands--"as if I should die if something didn't happen at
+once: something big, something that would bang out like the one o'clock
+gun up at the Castle. And nothing will. Nothing ever will!"
+
+"Och, well," he comforted her, "you're young yet, you know."
+
+"Young!" cried Ellen, and suddenly wept. If this was youth--!
+
+He bent down and played with the fire-irons. It was odd how he didn't
+want to go away, although she was in distress. "Some that's been in
+South America don't find it to their taste," he said. "The fellow that's
+coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he
+doesn't mean to go back."
+
+"Ah, how can he do that?" asked Ellen unsteadily. The tears she was too
+proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby. "Property in Rio de
+Janeiro! It's like being related to someone in 'Treasure Island.'"
+
+"'Treasure Island!' Imph!" He had seen his father draw Ellen often
+enough to know how to do it, though he himself would never have paid
+enough attention to her mental life to discover it. "You're struck on
+that Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn't so much. My Aunt Phemie was
+with him at Mr. Robert Thompson's school in Heriot Row, and she says he
+was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and
+gossiping with the cabmen on the rank. She wouldn't have a word to say
+to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when
+all the English were licking his boots. I'm not much on these writing
+chaps myself." He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he
+had disposed of art.
+
+"And who," asked Ellen, with temper, "might your Aunt Phemie be?
+There'll not be much in the papers when she's laid by in Trinity
+Cemetery, I'm thinking! The impairtinence of it! All these Edinburgh
+people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once,
+just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of
+Edinburgh!" She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak
+shutter.
+
+Mr. Philip chuckled. When a woman did anything for itself, and not for
+its effect on the male, it seemed to him a proof of her incapacity to
+look after herself, and he found incapacity in women exciting and
+endearing. He watched her with a hard attention that was his kind of
+tenderness, as she sat humped schoolgirlishly in her shapeless blue
+overall, averting her face from the light but attempting a proud pose,
+and keeping her grief between her teeth as an ostler chews a straw.
+
+"He had a good time, the way he travelled in France and the South Seas.
+But he deserved it. He wrote such lovely books. Ah," she said, listening
+to her own sombre interpretation of things as to sad music, "it isn't
+just chance that some people had adventures and others hadn't. One makes
+one's own fate. I have no fate because I'm too weak to make one." She
+looked down resentfully on her hands, that for all her present
+fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on
+her lap, and thought of Rachael Wing, who had so splendidly departed to
+London to go on the stage. "But it's hard to be punished just for what
+you are."
+
+He wondered whether, although she was the typist, there was not
+something rare about her. He could not compare her in this moment with
+his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for
+bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing
+to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with
+which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and
+violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have
+evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than
+that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they
+could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite
+distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she
+was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name
+that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of
+beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed
+for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform
+these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because
+human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. Suddenly he
+wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of
+naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying
+there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh
+his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a
+thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was
+but for participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so
+suspicious of her vividness that he felt furtive and red-eared while he
+searched in the purse of his experiences to find the coin that would
+admit him to her world. The search at first was vain, for most of them
+that he cared to remember were mere manifestations of the kind of
+qualities that are mentioned in testimonials. But presently he gripped
+the disappointment that would buy him her pity.
+
+He said, "I'm right sorry for you, Miss Melville. But you know ... We
+all have our troubles."
+
+She raised her eyebrows.
+
+"I wanted to go into the Navy."
+
+"You did? Would your father not let you?" She said it in her red-headed
+"My-word-if-I'd-been-there" way.
+
+"Aye, he would have liked it fine."
+
+"What was it then?" She leaned forward and almost crooned at him. "What
+was it then?"
+
+His speech became more clipped. "My eyes."
+
+"Your eyes!" she breathed. He suddenly became a person to her. "I never
+thought."
+
+"I'm as short-sighted as a bat."
+
+"They look all right." She frowned at them as though they were traitors.
+
+He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the
+University."
+
+She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how
+sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well,
+well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed
+to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw
+you capped."
+
+"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."
+
+"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw
+your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll
+be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when
+I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"
+
+"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He
+vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he
+asked.
+
+"I did at school--"
+
+"Don't you go to dances?"
+
+She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.
+
+With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he
+could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her
+brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come
+to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his
+own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible
+to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the
+daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,
+the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville
+unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he
+wished he could dance with her.
+
+Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances
+for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to
+enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and
+steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black
+ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about
+with in "La Dame aux Camélias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.
+Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which
+was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,
+just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without
+attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint
+meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse
+his private satisfaction. He was still aware that he was Mr. Philip of
+the firm, so he was not going to tell her that for two nights after he
+had heard the decision of the Medical Examiners he had cried himself to
+sleep, though he was fourteen past. But it was exquisite to know that if
+he had told her she would have been moved to some glorious gesture of
+pity. His imagination trembled at the thought of its glory as she turned
+to him with a benignity that was really good enough, and said
+diffidently, because her ambition was such a holy thing that she feared
+to speak of his: "Still, there are lots of things for you to do. I've
+heard...."
+
+He was kindly and indulgent. "What have you heard?"
+
+Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why,
+that you're going to stand for Parliament."
+
+"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.
+
+"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me
+something safe."
+
+"But what will you do?"
+
+He didn't follow.
+
+"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed
+with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to
+do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are
+you going to do?"
+
+"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence.
+"We've always been Liberals."
+
+"Ach! _Liberal!_" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep
+the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards
+by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed
+again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to
+discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on
+her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her
+clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to
+the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's
+heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.
+
+"It is so. I asked her to do a chop for me, so that I won't need to dine
+on the train...."
+
+"Mercy me! We'll see the fine cook she is!" She ran out to the landing
+(she had never known he was so nice). Mr. Philip found that her absence
+acted curiously as a relief to an excitement that was beginning to buzz
+in his head. Then she came back with the tray, her cheeks bright and her
+mouth pursed, for she and the caretaker had been sandpapering each
+other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil
+a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's
+not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father,
+who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the
+place."
+
+He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment.
+There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was
+putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that
+were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt
+absolutely right.
+
+"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when
+he lunches in?" she said.
+
+"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's
+room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him,
+fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
+Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt
+for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the
+bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went
+back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not
+be, as he put it, _infra dig_. And sure enough, when he entered the room
+a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got
+the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling
+himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and
+she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and
+a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."
+
+He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he
+said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join
+me...."
+
+She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing
+there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was
+behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face
+was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her
+mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping
+quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to
+something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will
+you have some Burgundy?"
+
+She was shocked. "Oh no!"
+
+He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although
+principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to
+it. Instead, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she
+oughtn't to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.
+
+He said, "But it's so pretty!" He could not imagine why he should have
+said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an
+argument that would weigh with her.
+
+She sighed as who makes a concession. "Oh yes, it's pretty!" And then,
+to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose. She was absorbed
+in the red beauty in his glass.
+
+It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing. "You'll have a
+glass?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"You'll surely have a taste?"
+
+"Ah, no--"
+
+"Just a drop...."
+
+Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure
+she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising
+her infinite pleasure.
+
+She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.
+
+He passed her his glass.
+
+"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"
+
+Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink
+it up! Drink it up!"
+
+She raised the glass to her lips and set her head back that the sin
+might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice,
+but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for
+such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind
+cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is
+played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....
+
+"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the glass down on the table. "It's
+horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her
+knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought
+wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth.
+And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at
+school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as
+this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.
+
+Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading
+her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she
+hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of
+the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the
+light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only
+just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he
+marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its
+close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the
+wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably,
+"Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk--!" Again he felt
+that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her,
+walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud
+knocking at the outer door.
+
+
+III
+
+She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked
+as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just
+part of his sea-going air.
+
+He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I
+want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."
+
+"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr.
+Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked
+interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable
+occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself
+she stopped as they went along the passage and begged, "You'll not make
+him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here
+on the very clap of eight."
+
+The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they
+stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a
+customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh,
+certainly; he shall leave on the very clap of eight," he replied
+earnestly.
+
+He spoke without an accent and was most romantically dark. Ellen
+wondered whether Mr. Philip would like him--she had noticed that Mr.
+Philip didn't seem to fancy people who were very tall. And she perceived
+with consternation as they entered the room that he had suddenly been
+overtaken by one of his moods. He had taken up the tray and was trying
+to slip it into the cupboard, which he might have seen would never hold
+it, and in any case was a queer place for a tray, and stood there with
+it in his hands, brick-red and glowering at them. She was going to take
+it from him when he dunted it down on the window-seat with a clatter.
+"What for can he not go on with his good chop?" thought Ellen. "We're
+putting on grand company manners for this bit chemist body, surely," and
+she pulled forward a chair for the stranger and sat down in the corner
+with her note-book on her knee.
+
+"You're Mr. Yaverland?" said Mr. Philip, shooting his chin forward and
+squaring his shoulders, and looking as though his father were dead and
+he were the head of the firm.
+
+"I'm Richard Yaverland. Mr. Frank Gibson said you might be good enough
+to see to my affairs for me. I've got a letter from him...."
+
+Decidedly the man had an air. He slid the letter across the table as if
+he did not care in the least whether anybody ever picked it up and
+retreated into a courteous inattention. She felt a little cross at Mr.
+Philip for not showing that Edinburgh too understands the art of
+arrogance, for opening the letter so clumsily and omitting to say the
+nice friendly thing. Well, if he was put about it was his own fault for
+not going on with the chop, it being well known to all educated persons
+that one cannot work on an empty stomach. If this man would go soon she
+would run down to Mrs. Powell and get her to heat up the chop again. She
+eyed him anxiously to see if he looked the kind of person who left when
+one wanted him to, and found herself liking him for the way he slouched
+in his chair, as though he wanted to mitigate as much as possible his
+terrifying strength and immensity. What for did a fine man like him help
+to make cordite, the material of militarism, which is the curse of the
+nations? She wished he could have heard R.J. Campbell speak on peace the
+other night at the Synod Hall; it was fine. But probably he was a
+Conservative, for these big men were often unprogressive. She examined
+him carefully out of the corner of her eye to estimate the chances of
+his being brought into the fold of reform by properly selected oratory.
+That at least was the character of contemplation she intended, but
+though she was so young that she believed the enjoyment of any sensory
+impression sheer waste unless it was popped into the mental stockpot and
+made the basis of some sustaining moral soup, she found herself just
+looking at him. His black hair lay in streaks and rings on his rain-wet
+forehead and gave him an abandoned and magical air, like the ghost of a
+drowned man risen for revelry; his dark gold skin told a traveller's
+tale of far-off pleasurable weather; and the bare hand that lay on his
+knee was patterned like a snake's belly with brown marks, doubtless the
+stains of his occupation; and his face was marked with an expression
+that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she
+could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not
+hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and
+yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent
+demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly
+satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a
+drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the
+controlled but embarrassed movements of a highly-bred animal approached
+by a stranger, that he knew she was watching him, and she took her gaze
+away. But she had to look again, just to confirm her feeling that
+however fanciful she might be about him his appearance would always give
+some further food for her imagination; and presently, for though she was
+the least vain person in the world she was the most egotistical, began
+to compare the large correctness of his features with the less academic
+spontaneity of her own. "Lord! Why has everybody but me got a straight
+nose!" she exclaimed to herself. "But it's all blethers to think that an
+indented chin means character. How can a dunt in your bone have anything
+to do with your mind?" She rubbed her own chin, which was a little white
+ball, and pushed it forward, glowering at his great jaw. Then her
+examination ended. She noticed that all over his upper lip and chin
+there was a faint bluish bloom, as if he had shaved closely and
+recently but the strong hair was already pressing through again. That
+disgusted her, although she reminded herself that he could not help it,
+that that was the way he was made. "There's something awful like an
+animal about a man," she thought, and shivered.
+
+"Och, aye!" said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset,
+for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by
+exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred
+in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some
+well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property
+in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it
+appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five
+years' lease, which had nearly expired. There was no likelihood of Capel
+requiring any extension of this lease, for he was going back to the
+States. So now Yaverland wanted to sell it. There ought to be no trouble
+in finding a buyer, for it was a famous house. "Everybody in Rio knows
+the Villa Miraflores," he said. She gasped at the name and wrote it in
+longhand; to compress such deliciousness into shorthand would have been
+sacrilege. After that she listened more eagerly to his voice, which she
+perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with
+suppressed laughter. The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a
+straight face than he found in using the flat phrase. And as she
+gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his
+speech slipped the business leash. There were hedges of geranium and
+poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless
+palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the
+courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many
+fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of
+precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house
+was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a
+_rastaqoučre_. "Mhm," said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral
+slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined
+_rastaqoučre_ to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost. She would have
+laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still
+upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he
+would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable
+expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had
+noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and
+cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been "done."
+
+But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland's answer.
+He hadn't the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa. It happened
+this way. He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk! Tchk!" said Mr.
+Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his
+waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the
+atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt
+no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to
+try to show that he wasn't a Jew. Ellen hated him for that. She believed
+in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as
+a propagandist measure. And then he had remembered that a friend of his,
+de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move. Even
+Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he'd given it plenty of fun.
+There had been great times at the villa. His phrases, which seemed to
+have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine
+on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale's snout, and
+hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in
+his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this
+delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that
+time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money
+from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the
+servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a
+sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the
+dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing
+white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the
+Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of
+birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he
+so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and
+were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a
+good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed
+by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment,
+that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about
+somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she
+herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect
+crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a
+piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their
+inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to
+honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed
+towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all
+respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific
+manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "Tits,
+tits, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the
+woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the
+impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers
+Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were,
+as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by
+the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by
+intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the
+cosmic process. It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the
+truth....
+
+Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had
+knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had
+posted to his agents without reading. He had only the vaguest idea how
+much money had changed hands. Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled
+knowingly, "Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in
+Scotland," and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of
+the property: the orange grove, for instance. At that Yaverland was
+silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered
+insolence that he couldn't see why he should, since he wasn't a
+marmalade fancier. "Besides, that's an impossible proposition. It's like
+selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium
+bed...." In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation
+of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed
+under a tooth while one was eating a good cake. She was disturbed and
+wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy
+by talking like that. And the reflection came to her that it would be
+sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever,
+that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected
+of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way. But it
+struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose
+that he would be interested. His talk was in the nature of a monologue.
+He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.
+
+Still, he was wonderful. She did not take it as warning of any coldness
+or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a
+human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are
+pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being
+particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out
+his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have
+no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he
+was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.
+Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the
+Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a
+packet of letters. "They hold the title-deeds and you'll see how things
+are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a
+difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on
+the correspondence?"
+
+"Och, we can send out to a translator--"
+
+A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one
+side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had
+suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many
+moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled
+world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely
+to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river
+just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the
+countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for
+women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was
+improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just
+when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women
+being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there
+had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her
+obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the
+prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm
+and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.
+For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth
+in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering
+innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on
+the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after
+being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a
+gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.
+
+"Mr. Philip," she said.
+
+Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark
+glance on her.
+
+"Mr. Philip," she said. He looked across at her with a blankness she
+took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at
+Skerry's. I took a first-class certificate. Maybe I could manage the
+letters?"
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Yaverland explosively. He appeared to be about to make
+some objection, and then he bit back the speech that was already in his
+mouth. And as he tried to find other words the beauty of her body caught
+his attention. It was, as it happened, very visible at that moment. The
+fulness of her overall had fallen to one side as she sat on the high
+stool, and so that linen was tightly wrapped about her, disclosing that
+she was made like a delicate fleet beast; in the valley between her high
+small breasts there lay a shadow, which grew greater when she breathed
+deeply. He looked at her with the dispassionateness which comes to men
+who have lived much in countries where nakedness offers itself unashamed
+to the sunlight, and said to himself, "I should like to see her run." He
+knew that a body like this must possess an infinite capacity for
+physical pleasure, that to her mere walking would give more joy than
+others find in dancing. And then he raised his eyes to her face and was
+sad. For sufficient reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of
+women, and he knew it was a tragedy that such a face should surmount
+such a body. For her body would imprison her in soft places: she would
+be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than
+births. But her face was haggard, in spite of its youth, with appetite
+for travel in the hard places of the world, for the adventures and
+achievements that are the birthright of any man. "It's rotten luck to be
+a girl," he thought. "If she were a boy I could get her a job at Rio....
+Lord, she has lovely hair!" He perceived sharply that he was not likely
+to be of any more use to her than most men would. All he could do would
+be to avert the humiliation which the moment seemed likely to bring down
+on her.
+
+"Oh, this is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people
+studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful
+too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a
+marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too
+manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the
+reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded
+himself. "It's the language to learn," he said aloud. "It's the language
+of the future. Ever been in Spain, Mr. James?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Philip, "but I was thinking of going there--or mebbe
+Italy--ma Easter holidays." Ellen smiled brilliantly at him, for she
+knew that he had had no such thought till that evening's talk with her;
+she had converted him to a romantic. He caught her eye, only to glare
+coldly into the centre of her smile.
+
+It was Yaverland's opportunity, for he had spent two years as chemist at
+the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of
+talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly
+literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain,
+but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of
+social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance
+them. "The mines are Baird's, you know--Sir Milne Baird; it's a Glasgow
+firm...." "Mhm," said Mr. Philip, "I know who you mean." Detestable,
+thought Yaverland, this Scotch locution which implies that one has made
+a vague or incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence
+of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself
+suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its
+disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater
+willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the
+commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their
+own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by
+Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general,
+which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of
+Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.
+Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad
+political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the
+national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over
+the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.)
+Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few
+difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was
+sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who,
+though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better
+by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself
+Algodonales on the map and calls itself Aooae.
+
+He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.
+
+It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by
+forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,
+as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and
+a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her
+mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed
+through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to
+Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a
+dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt
+attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks
+deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,
+describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow
+decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled
+with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the
+Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius
+Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women
+that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered
+by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He
+was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase
+that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such
+things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,
+advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip
+could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere
+foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the
+country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows
+what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks
+and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and
+carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness passed
+over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as
+though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had
+scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes
+became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader
+streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the
+tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became
+charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The
+people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating
+themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or
+cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.
+
+He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of
+loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had
+revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to
+the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and
+had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any
+of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and
+the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to
+match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of
+being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone
+into a café and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a
+wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of
+an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who
+had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not
+lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night,
+forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit
+here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl
+who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and
+famined...."
+
+But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay
+account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had
+framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily
+pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the
+long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland
+that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding
+path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly
+in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a
+forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a
+Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and
+asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at
+another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their
+dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers
+of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time there was
+trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was
+treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the
+rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the
+many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to
+the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its
+snowy crest. Ah, such a country!
+
+He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged
+bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation
+settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely
+they're crool. Bullfights and that--"
+
+He could not let that pass. "You don't understand. It's different over
+there."
+
+"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.
+Philip.
+
+"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in
+space...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much
+crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of
+view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other
+and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's
+life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there were the
+horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from
+the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that
+gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,
+rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it
+wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far
+back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified,
+with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your
+unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of
+a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its
+governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence
+till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't
+attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our
+civilisation.
+
+Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the
+experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his
+magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and
+yet was as substantial as any man of action.
+
+Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of
+primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest
+swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The
+echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching
+sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it
+wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found
+his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and
+eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions
+were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy
+over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp
+fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,
+envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he
+was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be
+the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some
+night the position might not be reversed--that it would not be he who
+stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some
+happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That
+was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even
+now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;
+and Ellen thrilled to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to
+a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to
+persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern
+history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the
+visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and
+the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling
+lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times
+existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive
+man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the
+bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were
+the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much
+decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of
+meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and
+dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't
+see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by
+the number of people who never saw.
+
+"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get
+over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."
+
+Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and
+perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk
+in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is
+buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread
+out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.
+Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,
+thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for
+themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they
+repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had
+responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't
+perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this
+fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that
+all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a
+national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns
+sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the
+British Empire--keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and
+blows to mules and dogs.
+
+It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new
+that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He could give them another
+illustration of that. He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a
+flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo--"that's a street,"
+he interjected towards Ellen, "called after a statesman they
+assassinated, they don't quite know why." In the flat there lodged a
+priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning,
+as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an
+automobile and took him away for an hour. Presently he was told the
+story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had
+listened to it as one didn't often listen to twice-told tales, for it
+was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra
+Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the
+Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the
+roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode. The man in the
+automobile had lost his wife. He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he
+had gone through a good deal to get her. When he first met her she was
+another man's wife. He said nothing to her then, but presently the way
+that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the
+Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and
+her husband called him out. The duel was fought on some sandy flat down
+by the river, and the husband was killed. It was given out that he had
+been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who
+had killed him. In another year she was dead of fever. Her husband gave
+great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house
+where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable
+gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad. When he returned
+he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it
+except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say
+Mass over the woman's bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.
+Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years
+since she had died. That was a queer enough story for the present day,
+with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the
+lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it
+was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron. But
+the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the
+automobile. For he was the Marquis d'Italica, the finest Spanish
+aviator, a man not only of the medićval courage one might have guessed
+from the story, but also of the most modern wit about machines....
+
+Yaverland bit his lip suddenly. He had told the story without shame, for
+he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the
+bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman's
+bed may sometimes be an altar. But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and
+his ears were red. Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.
+
+For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen. "I had forgotten
+she was a girl," he thought miserably. "I thought of nothing but how
+keen she is on Spain. I don't know how girls feel about things...." But
+she was sitting warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at
+a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder. She had
+liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made
+her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her
+sex always did. But the rest she had thought lovely. It was a beautiful
+idea of the Marquis's to turn the bed into an altar. Probably he had
+often gone into his wife's room to kiss her good-night. She saw a narrow
+iron bedstead such as she herself slept in, a face half hidden by the
+black hair flung wide across the pillow, a body bent like a bow under
+the bedclothes; for she herself still curled up at nights as dogs and
+children do; and the Marquis, whom she pictured as carrying a robin's
+egg blue enamelled candlestick like the one she always carried up to her
+room, kneeling down and kissing his wife very gently lest she should
+awake. Love must be a great compensation to those who have not political
+ambitions. She became aware that Yaverland's eyes were upon her, and she
+slowly smiled, reluctantly unveiling her good will to him. It again
+appeared to him that the world was a place in which one could be at
+one's ease without disgrace.
+
+He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was
+gripping Mr. Philip's hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his
+face. "Ah, there's one thing," he said quite lightly, though the vein
+down the middle of his forehead had darkened. "You see from those
+letters that a Seńor Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house.
+He's not to have it. Do you understand? Not at any price."
+
+The effect of this restriction, made obviously at the behest of some
+deep passion, was to make him suddenly sinister. They gazed at him as
+though he had revealed that he carried arms. But Ellen remembered
+business again.
+
+"Those letters," she reminded Mr. Philip, "had I not better read them
+over before Mr. Yaverland goes?"
+
+Yaverland caught his breath, then spoke off-handedly. "You're
+forgetting. They don't speak Spanish in Brazil, but Portuguese." And
+added confidentially, "Of course you were thinking of the Argentine."
+
+She was as hurt by the revelation of this vast breach in her omniscience
+as the bright twang of knowingness in her voice had told him she would
+be.
+
+"Yes," she said unsteadily, "I was thinking of the Argentine."
+
+He shook hands with Mr. Philip, and she took him down the corridor to
+the door. She blinked back her tears as he stood at the head of the
+stair and put up his collar with those strange hands that were speckled
+like a snake's belly, for it seemed a waste, like staying indoors when
+the menagerie procession is going round the town, to let anything so
+unusual go away without seeing as much of it as possible. Then she
+remembered the thing that she had wanted to say in the other room, and
+wondered if it would be bold to speak, and finally remarked in a voice
+disagreeable with shyness, "The people up on the Pentland Hills use that
+word you said was in Shakespeare. Snow-broth. When the hill-streams run
+full after the melting of the snows, that's snow-broth."
+
+He liked women who were interested in queer-shaped fragments of fact,
+for they reminded him of his mother. He took pains to become animated at
+her news.
+
+"They do, they do!" Ellen assured him, pleased by his response. "And
+they say 'hit' for 'it,' which is Anglo-Saxon."
+
+He noticed that her overall, which she was growing out of, fitted
+tightly on her over-thin shoulders and showed how their line was spoilt
+by the deep dip of the clavicle, and wondered why that imperfection
+should make her more real to him than she had been when he had thought
+her wholly beautiful. Again he became aware of her discontent with her
+surroundings, which had exerted on her personality nothing of the
+weakening effect of despair, since it sprang from such a rich content
+with the universe, such a confident faith that the supremest beauty she
+could imagine existed somewhere and would satisfy her if only she could
+get at it. He said, with no motive but to confirm her belief that the
+world was full of interest, "You must go on with your Spanish, you know.
+Don't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine
+stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to
+whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young
+girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who
+had landed on his feet.
+
+"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.
+
+He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in
+something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She
+attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first
+excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in
+bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village
+street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the
+ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold
+rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining
+with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a
+yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not
+imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and
+long scrolls.
+
+Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a
+second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on
+his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to
+lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not
+half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up
+your chop, if you'll wait."
+
+"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.
+
+She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and
+winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days
+before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her
+departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes
+came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was
+watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a
+conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was
+standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though
+he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not
+step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was
+set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew
+what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the
+door. Because the thing that he had meant to do seemed foul when he
+looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,
+he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to
+have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that
+had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always
+thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,
+dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with
+such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which
+she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they
+became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until
+it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him
+stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than
+the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was
+making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his
+degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and
+the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then
+she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this
+trouble she had brought on him.
+
+When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.
+Yaverland's a most interesting man."
+
+He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for
+his heart was making him very uncomfortable. He wished some crude
+gesture, some single ugly word, would do it. "You thought him an
+interesting man?" he asked naggingly. "You don't surprise me. It was a
+bit too plain you thought so. I'll thank you not to be so forward with a
+client again. It'll give the office a bad name. And chatting at the door
+like that!"
+
+He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the
+hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the
+needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he
+placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for
+emergencies, a book of court plaster.
+
+"I'm sure I'll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville," he
+said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of
+the door. "Good night."
+
+
+IV
+
+She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.
+
+"It can't hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She
+wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of
+Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered
+the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's
+blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip
+can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm
+a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world
+except the enfranchisement of women and getting on...."
+
+She felt better. "There's nothing in life you can't get the better of by
+thinking about it," she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes
+with her handkerchief. She could easily pass off her tearstains as the
+marks of a bad cold. "It's a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body's
+affliction, but sometimes I'm glad mother's so short-sighted.
+
+"He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how," she thought,
+with a sudden renewal of rage. "Now I should have minded awful if he had
+noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish. It was a
+mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine." But
+indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure
+that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent. She began to
+recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against
+a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a
+marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through
+a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of
+solidification of a sunset. Dreamily she moved to the little house in
+the corner....
+
+It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were
+the man of the house.
+
+"Mercy, Ellen, you're late! I was getting feared!" cried her mother, who
+had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in
+the lock. She liked that sound. Ellen thought herself a wonderful new
+sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been
+surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how
+much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own
+soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend
+her daughter was a son.
+
+"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with
+masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+I
+
+
+Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold _Votes for Women_ in Princes Street,
+and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green
+poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.
+This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for
+it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should
+be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been
+sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as
+there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady
+Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many
+bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had
+lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty
+she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a
+careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the
+passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to
+tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.
+For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds,
+which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the
+black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the
+dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic
+shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because
+the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and
+made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to
+appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the
+people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her
+silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her
+by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the
+height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,
+if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous
+causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous
+old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had
+been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and
+her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel
+women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for
+personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments
+irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung
+scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian
+environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the
+smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant
+ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought
+Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to
+do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."
+
+She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it
+with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're
+mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her
+teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got
+thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad
+as you, my dear, thinking you look like Phyllis Dare with yon wee, wee
+pigtail. You evidently haven't realised that a Scotch girl can't help
+looking sensible. That graceful butterfly frivolity that comes so easy
+to the English, and, I've haird, the French, is not for us. I think it's
+something about our ankles that prevents us." She looked at the girl's
+feet, said "Ay!" in a manner that hinted that they confirmed her theory,
+and turned away, remarking over her shoulder, "Mind you, I admire your
+spirit, setting out to look like one of these light English actresses
+when your name's Davidina Todd." The wind was trying to tear the poster
+from the cord that held it to her waist, the cold was making her sniff,
+and as she gave her back to this flimsy little fool she caught sight of
+a minister standing a yard or two away and giggling "Tee hee!" at her.
+It was too much. She darted down on him. "Are you not Mr. Hunter of the
+Middleton Place United Free Church?" she asked, making her voice sound
+soft and cuddly.
+
+He wiped the facetiousness from his face and assented with a polite
+bob. Perhaps she was the daughter of an elder. Quite nice people were
+taking up this nonsense.
+
+"I heard you preach last Sunday," she said, glowing with interest. He
+began to look coy. Then her voice changed to something colder than the
+wind. "The most lamentable sairmon I ever listened to. Neither lairning
+nor inspiration. And a _read_ sairmon, too."
+
+As his black back threaded through the traffic remorse fell upon her.
+"Here's an opportunity for doing quiet, uncomplaining service to the
+Cause," she reproached herself, "and I'm turning it into a fair picnic
+for my tongue." Everyone was rubbish, and she herself was no exception.
+Her hair was nearly down. And she had to stay there for another hour.
+
+But she determined to endure it; and Richard Yaverland, who afar off had
+formed the intention of stopping and speaking to the girl with the
+poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and
+romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on
+the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come
+into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had
+distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh.
+He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his
+emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being
+and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his
+desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for
+their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it
+was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does
+not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was
+not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and
+kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but
+powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to
+himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying.
+Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I
+must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until
+he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.
+
+And Ellen thought, "Why, here is the big man who has been in Spain and
+South America and has the queer stains on his hands! How big he is, and
+dark! He looks like a king among these other people. And how wonderful
+his eyes are! He is miles away from here, seeing some distant beautiful
+thing. Perhaps that mountainside he told us about where the reflection
+of the sky is like a purple shadow on the snow. A poet must look like
+that when he is thinking of a poem. But--but--if he keeps on staring up
+there he won't see me and buy a paper. I should like to interest him in
+the Cause. And I daren't speak to him." She flushed. Though Mr. Philip's
+claw had not done all the hurt it hoped, it had yet mauled its victim
+cruelly. "That would look bold."
+
+But in the nick of time his eyes fell on her. He gave a start of
+surprise and said in his kind, insolent voice:
+
+"Good morning. So you're a Suffragette."
+
+She was pleased to be publicly recognised by such a splendid person, and
+answered shyly; but caught a glint in his eyes which reminded her that
+she wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of
+the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it
+possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not
+have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had
+given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her
+brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with
+such a pliable profile.
+
+"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the
+change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I
+think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all
+these blighters going by."
+
+"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one
+hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for
+the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark
+Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But
+you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally
+clear and audible speakers. Women are."
+
+"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair,
+or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"
+
+"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff
+that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never
+admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she
+was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment
+someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a
+schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.
+But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen
+past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."
+
+"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded
+it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better
+write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow
+and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of
+person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket
+they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she
+wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get
+it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that
+vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find
+out about this little girl--I who don't care a damn about anything or
+anybody?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she
+had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her
+signature. Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most
+beautiful people who have ever lived. It was like climbing to a towered
+castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called
+"Seaview." She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey
+weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night
+before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female
+creature would have worn. But she had looked even younger then; he
+remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and
+receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a
+party. It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had
+been having in that dreary office could possibly be. And into the pretty
+print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising
+through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little
+solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the
+beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and
+twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he
+had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.
+He looked at her sharply and said to himself: "I wonder...."
+
+Oh, surely not! The note of her face was pure expectancy. As yet she had
+come upon nothing fundamental of any kind. He had no prepossessions in
+favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same
+class as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved. He would have hated
+this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.
+
+There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any
+longer. "Good-bye; I hope I'll see you at the meeting," he said; and
+then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, "and
+look after my villa for me."
+
+"Yes, we'll do that," she said competently, and looked after him with
+smiling eyes. "Oh, he looks most adventurous!" she thought. "I wonder,
+now, if he's ever killed a man?"
+
+
+II
+
+"Is my frock hooked up all the way down?" wondered Ellen, as she stood
+with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall. "Not that I care a button
+about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry
+was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind,
+for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings. She had
+taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling
+up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss
+Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had
+spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her
+grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of
+love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the
+hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and
+up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near
+unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people
+were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as
+herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic
+women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by
+sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were
+making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl's
+penknife and more like a soldier's sword. "I'm being a politikon Zoon!"
+she boasted to herself. She had always liked the expression when she
+read it in _The Scotsman_ Leaders.
+
+And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause
+and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their
+way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a
+viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered
+her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of
+the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a
+heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of
+dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark
+Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved
+swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily
+choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous
+of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to
+say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone
+might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there
+was no doing anything for them.
+
+But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances
+on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a
+peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a
+heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring
+at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against
+his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent
+interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the
+woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of
+the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took
+his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like
+him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."
+
+She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his
+neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and
+oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes
+maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the
+platform. "How long he is looking at them!" she said to herself
+presently. "No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle. I believe such
+men are very susceptible to beautiful women. I hope," she continued with
+sudden bitterness, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will
+take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at
+Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he
+went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed
+otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which
+made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet
+when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his
+attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with
+panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes. She did not permit herself
+irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not
+terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and
+stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently: "What have I to do
+with this man? I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.
+Then I suppose I will have to use them as pawns in my political and
+financial intrigues."
+
+Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman's
+speech. Dr. Munro had just sat down. Her sensible square face looked red
+and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and
+from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what
+she had been doing. This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen,
+who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic
+of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its
+affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the
+bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and
+untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality
+but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet
+this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which
+nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn
+a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered
+activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"
+she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the
+grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the
+doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner
+all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a
+community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly
+be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was
+content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her
+perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous
+and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend
+with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought,
+and her heart turned over with fear.
+
+But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain
+against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very
+far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends
+in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with
+its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its
+shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a
+sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great
+music. Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind
+bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses
+hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying--for
+already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from
+the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her
+followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the
+hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were
+imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and
+how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells,
+huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats, clad in nothing but
+coarse vests because they would not wear the convict clothes, breathing
+the foul sewage-tainted air for all but that hour when they were carried
+up to the cell where the doctor and the wardresses waited to bind and
+gag them and ram the long feeding-tube down into their bodies. This they
+had endured for six weeks, and would for six weeks more. She spoke with
+a proud reticence as to her sufferings, about her recent sojourn in
+Holloway, from which she had gained release by hunger-striking a
+fortnight before.
+
+"Ah, I could die for her!" cried Ellen to herself, wet-eyed with
+loyalty. "If only it weren't for mother I'd go to prison to-morrow." Her
+love could hardly bear it when Mrs. Ormiston went on, restrained rage
+freezing her words, to indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her
+and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous
+education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional
+distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the
+meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind
+her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things
+Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life
+with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views
+confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt
+an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had
+always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were
+sombre, such as deep symphonies of an orchestra, the black range and
+white scaurs of the Pentland Hills against the south horizon, the idea
+that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns
+cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of
+life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the
+field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in
+eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she
+rapturously recognised that same authentic quality.
+
+But what good was it if one woman had something of the dignity of nature
+and art? Everybody knew that the world was beautiful. She sent her mind
+out from the hall to walk in the night, which was not wet, yet had a
+bloom of rain in the air, so that the lights shone with a plumy beam and
+all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock
+was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the
+mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the
+lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that
+would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass
+that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end
+of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's
+pictures--the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a
+fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking
+in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made
+loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at
+the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong
+hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there
+was no question!
+
+But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly
+parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could
+hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the
+Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure
+motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face
+about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like
+that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was
+seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.
+Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride
+up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that
+shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting
+policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could
+not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in
+geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat
+brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and
+she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her
+yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at
+the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones
+lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen
+had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John
+Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anćmia or
+spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within
+themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of
+hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of
+actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to
+assert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts
+were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling
+kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater
+earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of
+establishing their sex. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type,
+who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political
+abasement before the male, a new way of calling attention to what
+otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would
+detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the
+Government and the majority of respectable citizens were on the side of
+this pale, sickly, mad young woman against the brave, beautiful Mrs.
+Ormiston. People were horrible.
+
+And there was Mr. Philip.
+
+Oh, why had she thought of him? All the time that she had been in the
+hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her
+untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for
+her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the
+accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not
+then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that
+anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers
+sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror
+of the event, called massacres. She had begun to know better late last
+Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room after taking down
+some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick,
+ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr.
+Mactavish James's desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom
+that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before
+she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.
+
+"Have you come straight off the train?" it was in her mind to say. "Will
+I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?" But he looked strange. The
+driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the
+shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was
+performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and
+hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his
+breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and
+has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved,
+and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead
+to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the
+clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle
+that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and
+whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one,
+and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this
+accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity,
+and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making
+advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.
+
+"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else
+for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the
+umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously,
+and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no
+need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of
+hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could
+not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit
+he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top
+window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a
+cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her
+alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual
+refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and
+ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's
+all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence
+fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are
+you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in
+typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness
+with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.
+Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always
+made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a
+gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and
+drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made
+him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and
+set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you,
+lassie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her
+shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be
+well spoken of. But there was worse than that--something so bad that she
+would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought
+of it in a harsh, short sentence. _"When Mr. Morrison went out of the
+room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."_
+Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip
+being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I
+will kill him...."
+
+There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had
+finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.
+Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of
+the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.
+Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped,
+but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the
+advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in
+the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call
+sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced
+that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.
+Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument
+between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an
+indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment
+against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried
+mothers.
+
+Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of
+unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of
+woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that
+she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl
+and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had
+only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And
+she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There
+was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the
+world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,
+that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them
+for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she
+came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the
+garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves
+and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's
+houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.
+Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for
+somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was
+the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in
+pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she
+would not know.
+
+Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna
+McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair
+and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about
+married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had
+broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and grass and
+daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by
+the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's
+books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words
+on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was
+wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering
+had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her
+hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove
+her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But
+there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret
+with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was leaning against
+the wall in that dark place beyond the window laughing at her, partly
+because she was such a wee ninny not to know, and partly because when
+she did know the truth there would be something about it which would
+humiliate her. She cast down her eyes and stared at the floor so that
+none might see how close she was to tears. She was a silly weak thing
+that would always feel like a bairn on its first day at school; she was
+being tormented by Mr. Philip. Even the very facts of life had been
+planned to hurt her.
+
+Oh, to be like that man from Rio! It was his splendid fate to be made
+tall and royal, to be the natural commander of all men from the moment
+that he ceased to be a child. He could captain his ship through the
+steepest seas and fight the pirate frigate till there was nothing
+between him and the sunset but a few men clinging to planks and a
+shot-torn black flag floating on the waves like a rag of seaweed. For
+rest he would steer to small islands, where singing birds would fly out
+of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run
+aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long,
+loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while
+he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed;
+at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there
+would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful
+kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away
+from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died
+there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and
+princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern
+face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now
+they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of
+course, but it was a joy to think of him.
+
+She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.
+
+
+III
+
+There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his
+motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this
+ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors
+in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas
+made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd;
+that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was
+coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he
+was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure
+had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the
+half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen
+Melville. The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that
+it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was
+wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the
+eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had
+remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as
+a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her
+profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was
+very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile
+than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was
+something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him
+feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the
+spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other
+beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.
+
+The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping
+reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found
+that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman
+with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand
+and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which
+manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not
+beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had
+she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or
+small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and
+believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious
+pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been
+stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the
+ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far
+forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how
+vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking--as just for the moment that
+the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he
+certainly had thought--that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the
+discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.
+The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a
+cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch
+face--the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the
+world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was
+sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the
+_Gondomar_, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that
+medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from
+Mukden. Harsh things she was saying--harsh things about the decent
+Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London
+for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being
+shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for
+solicitation.
+
+He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the
+Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the
+world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian
+man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the
+celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same
+stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.
+For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag
+to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at
+their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of
+pity.
+
+The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because
+she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection
+of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her
+beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the
+audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in
+which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather
+than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways
+that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly
+and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their
+intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to
+fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict
+with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then
+they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and
+touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was
+neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had
+the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this
+irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,
+half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed
+on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey
+suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was
+vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She
+was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their
+beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from
+the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.
+She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made
+a garden of his soul, had any right to be.
+
+That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at
+grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of
+shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of
+the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as
+she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under
+her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him
+haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he
+nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught
+her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious
+swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.
+
+But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention
+to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way
+she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged
+body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his
+mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was
+one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern
+for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often
+thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by
+those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the
+chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting
+their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the
+tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening
+to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.
+
+The resemblance went no further than this spiritual attitude, for this
+woman was second-rate stuff. Her beauty was somehow shoddy, her purple
+gown the kind of garment that a clairvoyant might have worn, her
+movements had the used quality of photographers' poses. Publicity had
+not been able to change the substance of the precious metal of her soul,
+but it had tarnished it beyond all remedy. She alluded presently to her
+preposterously-named daughters, Brynhild, Melissa and Guendolen, and he
+was reminded of a French family of musicians with whom he had travelled
+on the steamer between Rio and Sao Paulo, a double-chinned swarthy
+Madame and her three daughters, Céline, Roxane and Juliette, who sat
+about on deck nursing musical instruments tied with grubby scarlet
+ribbons, silent and dispirited, as though they were so addicted to
+public appearance that they found their private hours an embarrassment.
+But he remembered with a prick of compunction that they had made
+excellent music; and that, after all, was their business in life. So
+with the Ormistons. In the pursuit of liberty they had inadvertently
+become a troupe; but they had fought like lions. And they were giving
+the young that guarantee that life is really as fine as storybooks say,
+which can only be given by contemporary heroism. Little Ellen Melville,
+on the other side of the hall, was lifting the most wonderful face all
+fierce and glowing with hero-worship. "That's how I used to feel about
+Old Man Guthrie of the _Gondomar_ when I was seventeen," he thought.
+"It's a good age...."
+
+When he was seventeen.... He was not at all sure that those three years
+he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life. It came back to
+him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the
+ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on
+the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open
+sea. The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the
+sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a
+brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a
+sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the
+southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were
+at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen's dreams of land,
+but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith
+Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the
+flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.
+He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the
+island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the
+storms should take him. There were the four crumbling grey towers of
+Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint
+spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling
+white speck which he knew to be his father's tomb. He hated that he
+should be able to see it even from here. All his life that mausoleum had
+enraged him. He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have
+died before his son was a man. He suspected him of creeping into his
+coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his
+son's revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive
+tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.
+
+Eastward, a few fields' length along the ridge, was the belvedere on his
+father's estate. He had not looked at it for years, but from here it was
+so little like itself that he could bear to let his eyes dwell on it. It
+was built at the fore of a crescent-shaped plantation on the brow of the
+hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like
+great green wings spread by a small white bird. And eastward yet a mile
+or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of
+Yaverland's End. Under that thatch was his mother. She would be asleep
+now. Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn. With a
+constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now,
+lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head
+and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn
+across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.
+Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead. At the picture
+he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for
+having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid
+sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on
+the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors. Then he
+recognised the necessity of this adventure. It was his duty to her to go
+out into the world and do great things. He had said so very definitely
+to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.
+So that boy, thirteen years before....
+
+He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to
+do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had
+done nothing and was nothing. He saw his soul as something detached from
+his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and
+acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in
+reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and
+cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the
+woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon
+him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,
+grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her
+distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he
+remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.
+
+"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were
+those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father
+Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation
+were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from
+the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of
+fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were
+the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick
+men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists
+and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the
+strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions
+and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
+They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better
+than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a
+suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.
+"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with
+himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied
+tartly.
+
+There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably
+good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington
+till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of
+adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his
+imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the
+result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women
+about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite
+with heat and that only with concussion--these facts had from his
+earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it
+had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere
+diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had
+read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But
+now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of
+no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the
+special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches
+without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his
+results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors,
+who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to
+work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all
+species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of
+beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings
+of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that
+would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was
+lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had
+felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest
+discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but
+a Spirit.
+
+But now none of these things mattered. He was caught in the net of life
+and nothing that was above it was of any use to him; as well expect a
+man who lies through the night with his foot in a man-trap to be
+comforted by the beauty of the stars. The only God he could have any use
+for would be the kind the Salvationists talk about, who goes about
+giving drunken men an arm past the public-house and coming between the
+pickpocket and Black Maria with a well-timed text. There was nothing in
+Science that would lift him out of this hell of loneliness, this
+conviction of impotence, this shame of achievementless maturity. He
+perceived that he had really known this for a long time, and that it was
+the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his
+day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to
+be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage
+at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine
+movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared
+at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break
+the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly
+over the commercial uses that were to be made of his work. What was the
+use of sweating his brains so that one set of fools could blow another
+set of fools to glory? Oh, this was hell!...
+
+The detestable blonde was now holding the platform in attitudes such as
+are ascribed to goddesses by British sculptors, and speaking with a
+slow, pure gusto of the horrors of immorality. For a moment her
+allusions to the wrongs of unmarried mothers made him think of the proud
+but defeated poise of his mother's head, and then the peculiar calm,
+gross qualities of her phrases came home to him. He wondered how long
+she had been going on like this, and he stared round to see how these
+people, who looked so very decent, whom it was impossible to imagine
+other than fully dressed, were taking it. Without anticipation his eyes
+fell on Ellen and found her looking very Scotch and clapping sturdily.
+Of course it must be all right, since everything about her was all
+right, but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying
+to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was
+just the final proof of how very much all right she was. Only a girl so
+innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical
+presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and
+made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind
+was white as her hair was red.
+
+He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was
+powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no
+good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that
+makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men
+act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an
+end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that
+these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women
+whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most
+casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's
+entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he
+was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her
+honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but
+would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their
+responsibilities.
+
+Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten
+how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a
+transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio;
+back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner
+at old Hermes Pessôa's preposterous house, that was built like--so far
+as it was like anything else on earth--the Villa d'Este mingled with the
+Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an
+end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the
+guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old
+Pessôa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so
+that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to
+the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed
+out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling
+that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the
+brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood
+six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that
+smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red
+dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this
+mad new house, in this mad new society. He had pulled one out and lain
+back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was
+beating violently. He hated being there, but he had to make sure. Much
+rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of
+those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay. "Then
+marriage is right," he said to himself. "Where there is real love one
+wants to go to church first."
+
+Others who had wearied of the party drifted down to this recess of
+peace. An elderly Frenchman with a pointed black beard, and a slim, fair
+English boy with tears on his long eyelashes, sat themselves down in two
+of these great chairs, with a bottle of wine at their feet and one
+glass, from which they drank alternately with an effect of exchanging
+vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all
+never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the
+Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally,
+mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not
+grieve. It is always thus when one forgets the Church."
+
+There came later another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who
+sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of
+elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him
+alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson
+brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the
+high windows, black with the outer night but streaked and oiled with
+reflections of the inner feast. Opposite there hung a Bouguereau, which
+irritated him--nymphs ought not to look as if they had come newly
+unguented from a _cabinet de toilette_. Below it stood an immense
+Cloisonné vase, about the neck of which was tied a scarlet silk
+stocking. He remembered having seen it there on his last visit six
+months before. She must have been an exceptionally careless lady. Out
+here there were many ladies who were careless of their honour, but most
+of them were careful enough about tangible possessions like silk
+stockings. A fresh outburst in the babel at the other end of the room
+did not make him turn round, though the French banker had cried in an
+ecstasy, "_Tiens! c'est atroce!_" and had bounded up the hall. He sat
+on, hating this ugly place of his delay, while the Frenchman and the boy
+kept up an insincere, voluptuous whisper about God and the comfort of
+the Mass....
+
+At last he rose to his feet. It was a quarter to twelve, and time for
+him to go. He went up the hall, treading on lobster claws and someone's
+wig, and looking about him for a certain person. He could not see him
+among the group of revellers that stood in the space before the large
+folding-doors, and for a minute a hand closed over his heart as he
+feared that for once the person whom he sought had gone home before
+morning. But presently he saw a long chair by the wall, and on its
+cushions a blotched face and a gross, full body. He bent over the chair
+and whispered, "De Rojas, de Rojas!" But the fat man slept. Hatred
+gushed up in him, and a joy that the night was secure, and he passed on
+to the folding-doors. But from the little group that was gathered round
+the table, which before the dinner had supported the Winged Victory that
+now lay spread-eagled on the floor, there stepped Pessôa. He bade him
+good-night and thanked him for a riotous evening, but perceived that
+Pessôa was waving a cocked revolver at him and saying something about
+Léonore. What could he be saying? It appeared incredible, even to-night,
+that he should really be saying that every departing guest must kiss
+Léonore's back and swear that it was the most beautiful back in Brazil.
+
+He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see
+how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor Léonore.
+She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her
+breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled
+down to her waist so that her back was bare. Such a broad, honest back
+it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood
+as a model for Millet's "Angelus." She looked over her shoulder and
+smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy.
+They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had
+gone with hopes of having a good night's rest for once, since Hermes was
+giving a stag-dinner. They had not even given her time to wipe off all
+the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples,
+or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some
+white snippets of the _Jornal de Commercio_. She bore no malice, the
+good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she
+likes to stay there: still, men are men, and mad, so what can one
+expect?
+
+He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one
+woman. He flicked the revolver out of Pessôa's hand and flung it through
+the nearest window. The thick glass took a little time to fall.
+
+"My friends will wait on you in the morning," Pessôa had spouted, and he
+had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to Léonore, and
+kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she
+smiled sleepily, and said in English, "Go on, you bad man!" She spoke so
+slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a
+foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost
+that had found a lodging in her broad mouth. Then the men fell back to
+let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the
+Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple
+livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass
+of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays
+of light which were pollutions of the moonlight. He thought of that
+blotched face, that gross, full body.... It was a night of strong
+moonlight. He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where
+the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness. Palms stood up
+glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight
+fantasy of form. The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas'
+villa gleamed like the spears of heroes. He stared between them at the
+red façade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there.
+The thought struck him with terror. If she were not waiting for him the
+moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his
+heart-beat turn to stillness.
+
+Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores. This was his house. Yet he
+entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall
+that enclosed his own gardens. The magnolias stood blazing white on the
+lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the
+poising fireflies' weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a
+smoke. He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but
+he did not dare to go out into the light. He passed the door that led
+from his to de Rojas' garden, which had been made when a father and son
+had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up
+because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours. If it had not been
+unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty.... He stood in
+the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple,
+not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his
+mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if
+Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to
+him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her
+to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the
+summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw
+the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his
+woman in his arms, finding her lips....
+
+It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember
+nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its
+ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He
+knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it
+meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved
+Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the
+magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.
+Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her
+fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go
+on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable
+of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to
+remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything
+that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan
+a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan
+to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy
+if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind
+himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.
+Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real
+to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest
+had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a
+blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these
+Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.
+
+He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that
+last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one
+she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this
+unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour
+should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out
+their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two
+children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting
+each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and
+unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his
+comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church,
+who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her
+not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two
+tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only
+promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought
+of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her
+were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.
+
+Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest
+of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They
+stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from
+the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon
+immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of
+life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the
+courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that
+questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated
+brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats
+that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars
+because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately
+because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality
+that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet
+surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who,
+if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either
+bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it,
+but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film
+of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one
+could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a
+chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came
+to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could
+laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with
+speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this
+woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing
+satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.
+He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite
+lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen
+Melville.
+
+He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.
+
+
+IV
+
+When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at
+him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set
+eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she
+was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the
+face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she
+couldn't come it over _him_. And he asked if he might see her home.
+
+She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some
+tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air
+of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you
+stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian
+Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park
+Square out by the Meadows!"
+
+"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.
+
+"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a
+queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I
+suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit
+down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the
+takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought
+R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has
+paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so
+full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured
+velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal
+for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a
+minute."
+
+He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became
+melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to
+summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place
+were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood
+about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on
+the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown
+surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would
+jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left
+higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And
+doubtless, if there is a beneficent Providence that really picks the
+world over for opportunities of kindliness, halls which are habitually
+let out for political meetings are allowed means of relieving their
+feelings which are forbidden to other collections of bricks and mortar.
+But he mustn't say that to Ellen. To her political meetings were plainly
+sacred rituals, and in any case he was not sure whether she laughed at
+things.
+
+She called to him from the doorway, "I'm through, Mr. Yaverland!" She
+was wearing a tam-o'-shanter and a mackintosh, which she buttoned right
+up to her chin, and she looked just a brown pipe with a black knob at
+the top, a mere piece of plumbing. He thought it very probable that
+never before in the history of the human race had a beautiful girl
+dressed herself so unbecomingly. But that she had done so seemed so
+peculiarly and deliciously amusing that as he walked by her side he
+could hardly keep from looking at her smilingly in a way that would have
+puzzled and annoyed her. And outside the hall, when they found that the
+mist, like a sour man who will not give way to his temper but keeps on
+dropping disagreeable remarks, was letting down just enough of itself to
+soak Edinburgh without giving it the slightest hope that it would rain
+itself out by the morning, he caught again this queer flavour of her
+that in its sharpness and its freshness reminded him of the taste of
+fresh celery. He asked her if she hadn't an umbrella, and she replied,
+"I've no use for umbrellas; I like the feel of the rain on my face, and
+I see no sense in paying three-and-eleven for avoiding a positive
+pleasure."
+
+By that time Ellen was almost sure that he was smiling to himself in the
+darkness, and was miserable. It was a silly, homely thing to have said.
+"Ah, what for can he be wanting to see me home?" she thought helplessly.
+"He is so wonderful. But then, so am I! So am I!" And as they went
+through the dark tangle of small streets she turned loose on him her
+enthusiasm for the meeting, so that he might see that women also have
+their serious splendours. Hadn't it been a magnificent meeting? Wasn't
+Mrs. Ormiston a grand speaker? Could he possibly, if he cared anything
+for honesty, affirm that he had ever heard a man speaker who came within
+a hundred miles of her? And wasn't Mrs. Mark Lyle beautiful, and didn't
+she remind him of the early Christian martyrs? Didn't he think the women
+who were forcibly fed were heroines, and didn't he think the Liberal
+Governments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times?
+"Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only
+give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy
+barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed
+little things about her. She had had very little to do with men,
+perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not
+naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft
+and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do.
+Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as
+though she trod on grass.
+
+Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you
+must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's
+fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with
+herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she
+was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear
+infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.
+
+To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could
+listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My
+mother's keen on the movement."
+
+"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she
+speak, or organise?"
+
+"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a
+little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary
+gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his
+mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland
+was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the
+stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and
+weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived
+as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the
+darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the
+infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor
+souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which
+disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It
+makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there
+in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any
+more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be
+continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware
+that those questions existed. He simply noted that she was being happy.
+Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each
+other, going home in the rain.
+
+They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like
+shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope.
+"Edinburgh's a fine place," he said. "It can handle even an asphalt
+track with dignity."
+
+"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from
+it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman
+want to go wandering about the world?
+
+From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you
+a sailor?"
+
+"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."
+
+Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"
+
+"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he
+was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she
+thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of
+men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a
+channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man
+who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his
+head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a
+mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the
+reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked
+like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She
+wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her,
+which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that
+even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were
+passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything,
+when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that
+softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel
+anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for
+there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that
+was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of
+soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors. If she lived
+near here she must be very poor. But without embarrassment she turned
+to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and
+pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by
+the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained
+window, to be a very mean little house. "The Square's through here," she
+said. "Come away in and I'll find you a membership form for the Men's
+League...."
+
+Beyond the archway lay the queerest place. It was a little box-like
+square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat
+houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its
+shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its
+neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews. They sent out in front
+of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a
+paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a
+lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as
+a terrier shakes a rat. Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued
+bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins. On the
+fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public
+park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by
+garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and
+beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with
+that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night. He,
+too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible
+that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole
+business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were
+sleeping in these little houses. They were probably poor little people,
+for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one
+lighted window. And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in
+the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he
+had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner
+house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon,
+the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the
+door and invited him in with something of an air.
+
+"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness,
+"Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out
+light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said,
+"What's that you say, Ellen?"
+
+"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a
+minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client
+from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find
+him a membership form."
+
+She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and
+fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew
+she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to
+carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a
+little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it
+were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr.
+Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit."
+A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook
+his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a
+large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured
+by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that
+someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too
+gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had
+not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as
+well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare
+bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet
+once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a
+fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip,
+though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no
+present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.
+The aged are terrible--mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which
+none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered
+round them.
+
+She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had
+been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes
+and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so
+dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself.
+The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the
+wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so
+unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather
+upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big
+steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse
+climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by
+signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers
+Bibles--engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and
+there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn
+from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand
+dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered
+somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.
+
+The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if
+he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had
+been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite
+she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made
+when they heard that his work lay among high explosives. And Ellen's
+rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper
+stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, "Ellen, it
+beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy
+girl about the house!" and Ellen exclaimed, "Och, drat the thing, it
+must be upstairs!" and ran out of the room with her face turned away
+from them.
+
+They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises
+overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on
+the floor. "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly. She began
+to look him over with a maternal eye. "For all you've been six months in
+the North, you've not lost your tan," she said.
+
+"Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America," he answered.
+Their eyes met and they smiled. In effect she had said, "Well, you are a
+fine fellow," and he had answered, "Yes, perhaps I am."
+
+"I like a man to travel," she went on, tossing her head and looking
+altogether fierce Ellen's mother. "I never go into the bank without
+looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on
+their high stools." She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat
+him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the
+mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a
+sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him. "I hope
+you don't think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all
+alone. It's not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for
+this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused. I'm not much of a
+companion to her. I'm getting on, you see. She was my youngest."
+
+"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only
+child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.
+
+"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was
+born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and
+I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as
+the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot
+of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he
+was taken ill."
+
+He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."
+
+"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his
+age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I
+knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New
+Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of
+the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed
+by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There
+was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and
+disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back
+of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave
+birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was
+disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her
+protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very
+meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had
+been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she
+was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody
+would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.
+Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional
+people who are old or not perfectly happy.
+
+"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he
+knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naďve and
+touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as
+he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now
+that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming
+into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.
+
+"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex
+for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that
+most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent
+people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother
+was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"
+
+It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on
+a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin
+dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed. Only the continued calm of Mrs.
+Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through
+the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial
+human activity.
+
+"Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger," said Mrs. Melville. "We
+hardly hear it now. You see, they've turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs
+on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they
+make with their feet. It's not a nice place. 'Gentlemen a shilling,
+ladies invited,' it says outside. Still, we don't complain, for the
+noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent."
+
+This was a masterpiece of circumstance. By nothing more than a thin wall
+which shook to music was this little home divided from a thick-aired
+place where ugly people lurched against each other lustfully; and yet it
+had been made an impregnable fort of loveliness and decency by this
+virtuous ageing woman, whose slight silliness was but a holy abstinence,
+a refusal to side with common sense because that was so often concerned
+in cruel decisions, by this girl who was so young that it seemed at the
+sight of her as if time had turned back again and earth rolled unstained
+by history, and so beautiful that it seemed as if henceforth eternity
+could frame nothing but happiness. The smile of Ellen had made a faery
+ring where heavy-footed dancers could not enter; her gravity had made a
+sanctuary as safe as any church crowned with a belfry and casketing the
+Host. And he, participating in the safety of the place, pitied the men
+behind the shaking wall, and all men over the world who had committed
+themselves to that search for pleasure which makes joy inaccessible.
+They had chosen frustration for their destiny. Because they desired some
+ecstasy that would lighten the leaden substance of life they turned to
+drunkenness, which did no more than jumble reality, steep the earth in
+aniline dyes, tinge the sunset with magenta. Because they desired love
+they sought out women who, although dedicated to sex, were sexually
+cancelled by repeated use, like postage-stamps on a much re-directed
+letter, who efficiently went through the form of passion, yet presented
+it so empty of all exaltation that their lovers left them feeling as if
+they were victims of a practical joke.
+
+And here, not half a dozen yards from some of these seekers, was one who
+could bring to these desires a lovelier death than they would meet on
+the dirty bed of gratification or the hard pallet of renunciation.
+Because the untouched truth about her could give ecstasy one would not
+lose the power of seeing things as they are, and she made one forget the
+usual sexual story. Although she was formed for love and the intention
+of being her lover was now a fundamental part of him, she was so busy
+with her voice and body in playing quaint variations on the theme of
+herself that he did not mind how long might be the journey to their
+marriage. She was more interesting than any other person or thing in the
+world. She was going to have more interesting experiences; because her
+unique simplicity comprehended a wild impatience with lies she would
+have a claim on reality that would give her unprecedented wisdom. Now he
+could understand why saints in their narrow cells despise sinners as
+dull stay-at-homes.
+
+And when she burst into the room again he saw that all he had been
+thinking about her was true. It might be that everybody else on earth
+would see her as nothing but a red-haired girl in an ill-fitting blue
+serge dress with an appalling tartan silk vest, but still it was true.
+
+"Here you are," she said, "you put your name _there_." She bent over him
+as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how
+magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.
+
+Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor
+old lady was yawning behind her knitting. He rose and said good-bye,
+wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how
+he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that
+he came for love. If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and
+daughter how easy it would have been! The elder woman's eyes would have
+crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her
+daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they
+contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle
+hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have
+stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty,
+very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if
+to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she
+knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything. But here was
+Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would
+drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that
+warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she
+would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh
+inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people
+delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored
+them because they were difficult.
+
+"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the
+courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw
+that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the
+evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an
+honoured guest. They were dear people.
+
+As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open
+the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have
+been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings,
+which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to
+picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the
+coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a
+tea-biscuit.
+
+"You seem to admire Burns," he said.
+
+"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of
+the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."
+
+"That's a proposition he never butted up against--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.
+You're one of Time's revenges...."
+
+She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with
+pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully
+wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some
+disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to
+stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a
+queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some
+nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness
+beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it
+could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had
+second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that
+something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.
+"Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man
+being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in
+the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony
+transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this
+glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes
+blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be
+subject to death.
+
+"Good-night," he said. He did not know why her breath had failed and why
+she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was
+doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were
+beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on
+till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful. "Good-night," he
+said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path
+simply that they might speak to each other again. "You must shut the
+door. You're letting in the rain and cold."
+
+"No," she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.
+
+He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married
+and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his
+marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+I
+
+
+When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from
+a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry's College, and sat down
+in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the
+kitchen, "Ellen, I've got the grandest surprise for you!"
+
+These fanciful women! "And what's that?" she cried back tolerantly,
+though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees. She thought
+she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had
+sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing.
+But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and
+ask like a little anxious mouse, "You're sure you've not said anything,
+dear? You're sure you've been a careful girl with your work, dear?" and
+would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating
+misfortune. "Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post
+we must just manage." So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though
+that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.
+
+"Away into the dining-room and see what it is," said Mrs. Melville,
+coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand. She had put on her brighter
+shawl, the tartan one.
+
+"You look as we'd been left a fortune," said Ellen.
+
+"No fear of that. If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred
+pounds that's all we can expect. But there's something fine waiting for
+you. Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come. Now!"
+
+She flung open the door.
+
+"Roses!" breathed Ellen. "Mother--roses!"
+
+On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled
+with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long
+held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection
+joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars.
+Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of
+the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have
+jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed
+her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. The flowers
+were beautiful in so many ways. They were beautiful just as roses,
+because "roses" is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white
+because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose
+has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first
+white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that
+dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled,
+attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in
+stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a
+faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.
+
+They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against
+the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.
+
+They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers. They were an outburst
+of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to
+anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here
+though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an
+immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very
+enjoyably if one had the money to buy things. It really was worth while
+struggling to get on....
+
+"Mother, where did they come from?"
+
+"Ah!" said Mrs. Melville waggishly.
+
+"Och, tell me! I don't imagine you went out and pawned the family
+jewels. Och, do tell me! Come on!"
+
+"A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist's, this morning. I could
+have fallen down when I opened the door. And the wee brat of a boy tried
+to convey to me that he wasn't used to coming to such a place. He wore a
+look like a missionary in Darkest Africa. They were left for Miss
+Melville, mind you. Not for your poor old mother. And they're from Mr.
+Yaverland. Yon's his card sticking up against your grandmother on the
+mantelpiece."
+
+Ellen's hands, outspread over the roses, dropped to her side.
+
+"I would have thought he had more sense," she said sulkily. "If he'd
+money to burn he should have sent this lot to the infirmary."
+
+"Och, Ellen, are you not pleased?"
+
+"What's the man thinking of to fill us up with flowers as if we were an
+Episcopal church on Easter Sunday?"
+
+"Ellen, you've no notion of manners. Gentlemen often send flowers to
+ladies they admire. When your Aunt Bessie and I were girls many's the
+fine present of flowers we got from officers at the Castle."
+
+"I've neither time nor taste for such things. It makes me feel like a
+hospital. He'll be sending us new-laid eggs and lint bandages next. The
+man's mad."
+
+"Ellen, you're a queer girl," complained. Mrs. Melville. "If this
+argy-bargying about votes for women makes you turn up your nose at bonny
+flowers that a decent fellow sends you I'm sorry for you--it's just
+tempting Providence to scorn good mercies like this. I'll away and take
+the fish-pie out of the oven."
+
+It was strange that as soon as her mother had left the room she began to
+feel differently about the roses. Of course they were very beautiful;
+and they were contenting in a quite magic way, for besides satisfying
+her longing for pretty things, they seemed to have deprived of urgency
+all her other longings, even including her desire for a vote, for
+eminence of some severe sort, for an income of three hundred pounds a
+year (which was the most she believed a person with a social conscience
+could enjoy), for a perpetual ticket for the Paterson Concerts at the
+MacEwan Hall, and for perfect self-possession. She felt as if these
+things were already hers, or as if they were coming so certainly that
+she need not fret about them any more than one frets about a parcel that
+one knows has been posted, or concerning some desires, as if it did not
+matter so much as she had thought whether she got them or not.
+Especially that dream of being one of a company of men and women whose
+bodies should be grave as elms with dignity and whose words should be
+bright as butterflies with wit struck her as being foolish. It was as
+idle as wanting to be born in the days of Queen Elizabeth. What she
+really wanted was a friend. She had felt the need of one since Rachael
+Wing went to London. Surely Richard Yaverland meant to be her friend,
+since he sent flowers to her. But she wished the gift could have been
+made secretly, and if he came to pay a visit she should be quite alone.
+For no reason that she could formulate, the thought of even her mother
+setting eyes on them together seemed a threat of disgrace. She wished
+that they could be standing side by side at the fire in that five
+minutes when it is sheer extravagance to light the gas but so dark that
+one may stare as one cannot by day, so that she might look at what the
+driving flamelight showed of his black, sea-roughened magnificence. At
+her perfect memory of him she felt a rush of exhilaration which left her
+confused and glad and benevolent.
+
+"Mother, dear," she said, for Mrs. Melville had come back with the
+fish-pie, and was bidding her with an offended briskness to sit forward
+and eat her meal while it was hot, "they're the loveliest things. I
+can't think what for I was so cross."
+
+"Neither can I. There's so little bonny comes our way that I do think we
+might be grateful when we get a treat."
+
+"I'm sorry. I can't think what came over me."
+
+"Never mind. But, you know, you're sometimes terribly like your father.
+You must fight against it."
+
+They sat down to supper, looking up from their food at the roses.
+
+"Mother, the gas is awful bad for them. Carbonic acid is just murderous
+to flowers."
+
+"I was thinking that myself. It was well known that gas was bad for
+flowers even when I was young, though we didn't talk about carbonic
+acid. But if you don't see them by gaslight you'll never see them, for
+it's dark by five. They must fall faster than they would have done."
+
+"Och, no! I'd rather you had the pleasure of them by day, and let the
+poor things last. I must content myself with a look at them at
+breakfast."
+
+"Nonsense! They're your flowers, lassie. But do you not think it would
+do if we brought in the two candles and turned out the gas? It'll be a
+bit dark, but it isn't as if there were many bones in the fish-pie."
+
+And that is what they did. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for then
+there was a bright soft light on the red and white petals, and a drapery
+of darkness about the mean walls of the room, and a thickening of the
+atmosphere which hid the archness on the older woman's face, so that the
+girl dreamed untormented and without knowing that she dreamed.
+
+"Ah, well!" sighed Mrs. Melville after a silence, with that air of irony
+which she was careful to impart to her sad remarks, as if she wanted to
+remove any impression that she respected the fate that had assailed her.
+"I don't know how many years it is since I sat down with roses on the
+table."
+
+"I never have before," said Ellen.
+
+
+II
+
+It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the
+declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park
+Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the
+careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had
+meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when
+the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every
+time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood
+red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew
+more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he
+wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that
+he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused
+consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present
+course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in
+open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There
+was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his
+love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man
+commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research.
+Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh
+he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her
+youth could hold.
+
+But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter;
+and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was
+in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and
+exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was
+larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like
+that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of
+sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her
+something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting
+of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and
+characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great
+pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace
+with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He
+found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a
+complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his
+return in the New Year, which was a breach of her habitual pretence,
+which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for
+that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.
+
+"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her
+as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room,
+which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver
+fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map.
+Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of
+power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just
+finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her
+merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have
+made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin
+leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene
+she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face
+would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness
+would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had
+reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she
+and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along
+the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east
+sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the
+bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she
+had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of
+starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his
+head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.
+
+It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it
+seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because
+he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover
+would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably
+glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet
+suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant
+wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his
+mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to
+Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.
+
+And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else
+happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him
+with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch
+that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten
+minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its
+inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling
+wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood
+spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from
+the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village
+three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be
+need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood
+by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's
+suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was
+disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little
+fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland
+himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known
+from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen
+they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand
+the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay
+among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily
+of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave
+conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell
+spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.
+
+But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when
+it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the
+door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage
+where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He
+shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had
+heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was
+twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of
+his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he
+was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a
+lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but
+went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail
+all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so
+he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out
+into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking,
+lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.
+
+She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she
+stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows
+were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as
+well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the
+marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without
+intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the
+death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac
+and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the
+bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen
+panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their
+coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not
+spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those
+books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft
+voice.
+
+For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and
+dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled
+his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It
+must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the
+hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that
+this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she
+had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew
+followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet
+three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued
+scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his
+arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He
+held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to
+the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But
+I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face
+away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to
+talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a
+thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so
+far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded
+the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly,
+glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if
+you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had
+slept....
+
+And she was going through a bad time like that now.
+
+When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not
+greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not
+reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any
+particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this
+afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.
+But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist
+desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of
+the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He
+certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so
+wonderful as he had remembered her.
+
+But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to
+solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the
+Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the
+white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast
+of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the
+summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by
+his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to
+Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up
+to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous
+thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her
+immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly
+conscientious woman would have gone on selling _Votes for Women_ for at
+least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her
+mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because
+after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the _Scotsman's_
+report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an
+impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed
+even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock
+came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told
+herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there
+had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew
+nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the
+other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of
+him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.
+
+The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much
+lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and
+pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea,
+though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want
+any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation
+to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or
+cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but
+always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill.
+The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically
+irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the
+right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it
+all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how
+he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious
+and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of
+phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative
+gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word
+contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually
+turned on the rest of the world....
+
+But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by
+candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her
+mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less.
+"But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That
+was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious
+and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an
+excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of
+course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll
+keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop
+you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."
+
+He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had
+given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their
+stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in
+their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the
+fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented
+them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering
+murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at
+all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed
+that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very
+pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the
+wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers,
+and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had
+been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of
+tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period
+of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention,
+which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.
+
+But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift.
+They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them
+wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall
+and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic
+("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to
+her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and
+laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by
+those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of
+the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey
+into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the
+happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a
+magical power to give each other the things they wanted.
+
+But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed
+perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the
+frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.
+
+"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."
+
+"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"
+
+She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last
+instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if
+anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy
+and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh
+evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of
+malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr.
+Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her,
+things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark
+thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."
+
+"Ju--?"
+
+"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that
+Cćsar was much addicted to."
+
+When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had
+put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the
+mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the
+glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the
+coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,
+evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while
+her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as
+if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same
+time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would
+come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures
+of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she
+should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden
+tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to
+be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on
+the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to
+add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she
+smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one
+beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,
+and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it
+became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into
+a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or
+say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because
+he perfectly knew what she did not.
+
+One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of
+shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed
+to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to
+each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an
+exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that
+his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But
+there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it
+killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was
+inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an
+exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light,
+and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a
+richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold
+her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail
+substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out
+like comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to
+crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set
+out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of
+course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world
+was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the
+table, and she seemed very real.
+
+She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I
+can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her
+pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched
+a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go
+on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went
+and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the
+path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the
+evening as if it were a refuge from him.
+
+But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had
+a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes
+and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a
+trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their
+appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about
+George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had
+he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the
+privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat _ss. Glory_ with
+Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her
+that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of
+London, and not a few came from the special schools for the
+feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper
+that makes a good boxer.
+
+So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was,
+he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other
+place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops
+that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took
+the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its
+narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked
+briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed
+at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other
+trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their
+slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was
+aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent
+than going home to supper.
+
+It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering
+black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the
+midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east
+wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy
+quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much
+aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a
+marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that
+resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and
+circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a
+shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an
+iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a
+wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as
+though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of
+a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever
+seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's
+carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled
+to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the
+price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that
+he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen,
+and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such
+occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy
+texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness
+in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was
+plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual,
+intellectual energy.
+
+In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put
+in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that
+hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like
+a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under
+the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.
+Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage,
+for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it
+seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his
+white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however,
+in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was
+the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary
+life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that
+magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life. The old man
+seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said,
+"If that's the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately."
+Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not
+so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations. But after they
+got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his
+mind: "Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?"
+
+"Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay."
+
+They had come to the end of Ellen's shopping list and she was taking him
+home through St. Patrick's Square. "Look at that lighted window, where
+they've got a blue blind! That's where de Quincey stopped!" she said
+excitedly, and he answered, "Oh, is it?... I say, why did the old chap
+offer to give you change in halfpence?"
+
+"Well, to-morrow's Sunday, you see."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't. I'm stupid. Why do you want halfpence more on
+Sunday than on any other day?"
+
+"Why, for the plate. For the collection. In church. But we always put in
+threepenny-bits. Mother's picked up a lot of English ways. What's taken
+you?" She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her
+that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly
+English taunt that the Scotch are mean. "Och, you don't understand," she
+began to stammer hastily. "I didn't mean that exactly."
+
+And then a hot rage came on her. Why should she make excuses for her own
+people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to
+giggle? Wasn't he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences
+in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness,
+which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to "come it over"
+her? She said acidly, "I'm glad you're amused. I suppose you don't do
+such things in England?" and at his laughing answer, "I don't know; I've
+never been to Church in England. But I shouldn't think so," her
+neatly-brushed and braided temper came down. She came to a sudden stop.
+They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of
+tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had
+none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate
+with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs
+she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping
+from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of
+her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side
+lest he should drop any parcels.
+
+He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that
+it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his
+mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as
+she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were
+held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that
+English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers,
+and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were
+no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the
+implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than
+the English, had defended a larger country....
+
+He woke up at that. He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for
+though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry. She was
+running away from him, but in a circle.
+
+"Scotland bigger than England!" he jeered. "Think of the map! Bigger
+than England!"
+
+She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round
+dismayed hole. But she was not to be beaten. "I was alluding to its
+surface," she said coldly. "It being such an elevated country, there
+must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking
+hardly any space on the map. Consequently I was correct in saying that
+Scotland is bigger than England." She drew breath to go on, but her lips
+began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she
+began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined
+her. They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their
+laughter, from which they did not wish to move. They were standing quite
+still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other's faces,
+trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the
+strong moonlight. It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not
+quite know what to do with it. They did not even know whether to be
+grave or gay. It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue
+and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its
+merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.
+
+But indeed they had no choice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I
+didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person
+all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."
+
+"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an
+expense."
+
+He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur
+the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last
+manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face,
+which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high
+cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I
+didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said
+could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that
+wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of
+tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all
+delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and
+self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to
+acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance,
+accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a
+boy.
+
+And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that
+Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of
+wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she
+should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of
+course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and
+turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these
+desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would
+look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward
+tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the
+ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that
+she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be
+able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would
+prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men
+are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or
+persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which
+he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of
+everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body
+to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in
+spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though
+that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly
+disliked that obligation.
+
+She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And
+Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig.
+Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands
+yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs
+hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The
+water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."
+
+"Take me there, Ellen."
+
+"Would you like to come? Let's go next Saturday. I've got the whole day
+off. Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I've been
+doing. It'll be lovely. I've had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing
+went to London. But would you truly care to come? It's just moors.
+You'll not turn up your nose at it?"
+
+"Anywhere I went with you I'd like."
+
+She started and began to walk on. It was as if the sheet of tissue had
+grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it. Although he
+went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he
+found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly
+answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by
+its collar. Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so
+eagerly? And ought he to have called her by her Christian name? Of
+course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to
+do it. When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a
+light in the dining-room window and said, "Mother's home before us."
+
+She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her
+life. For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed,
+and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because
+soon they would no longer be alone together. Perhaps something like fear
+would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with
+victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of
+timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to
+star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how
+even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily
+contriving their immediate marriage. For there was a steely quality
+about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive
+purpose.
+
+It was apparent to him, when they went in, that Mrs. Melville understood
+what was going on, for she threw him a glance which was not quite a wink
+but which clearly suggested that had she been just a common body it was
+conceivable that she might have winked. As soon as they were alone he
+told her that he loved Ellen, that he wanted to marry her, that he had
+plenty of money, that he was all right, that they must marry at once.
+She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had
+tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her
+with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of
+moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the
+walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and
+the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob
+like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and plainly trusted him, but
+at the same time she was pitifully alarmed. "Mercy me! you've not been
+long.... Well, you've caught a Tartar and no mistake. Never say I didn't
+warn you.... But you'll let the bairn bide for a wee bit longer! She's
+but a bairn!"
+
+It was as if she quite saw that a husband was necessary for Ellen, and
+wanted her to have one, and at the same time believed that any husband
+would inevitably bring her pain. He set it down as one of the despondent
+misinterpretations of life that the old invent in the depression of
+their physical malaise, and answered, reassuringly, insincerely, "Yes,
+yes, I'll wait...." But why should they wait? They were going to be
+radiantly and eternally happy. It might as well begin at once.
+
+
+III
+
+"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed
+at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping
+from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she
+had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland
+an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing
+that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the
+village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and
+now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by
+daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke
+and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the
+upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men
+working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural
+disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of
+the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them,
+laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do;
+there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had
+seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought
+tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to
+the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person
+who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic
+hues.
+
+But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there
+had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the
+trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in
+face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward
+was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a
+slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black
+hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields,
+set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road
+dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate
+frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of
+clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines
+against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride
+and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of
+mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its
+immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it
+was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and
+it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he
+had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood
+showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather,
+and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of
+response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under
+changing skies even as the seas.
+
+Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting
+towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the
+coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly,
+"Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity,
+and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which,
+when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs
+and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind
+was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of
+wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a
+track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously
+between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old
+lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her
+bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes
+had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a
+new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed
+on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted
+everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country,
+these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.
+
+"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a
+voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up
+to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed
+a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind
+without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was
+glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the
+hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at
+his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her
+velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler
+that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big
+for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of
+large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of
+flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort
+of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the
+slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she
+would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music
+heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of
+his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the
+whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the
+range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would
+tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine
+what manner of place it would be--whether there would be grass or
+heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.
+
+"Well, it's no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if
+we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes," said Ellen. "We'd
+best step forward. I'm glad you like the place. I love it. And this bit
+of the road's bonny. When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the
+ploughman's cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one
+day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four. And if
+you'll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as
+bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians. The poor things
+ran like the wind when they saw us. I wish we could have explained we
+meant no harm, for I suppose it's the one time in the day when they
+count on having the world to themselves."
+
+"I've felt like that about a jaguar," he said. "Came on it suddenly, on
+a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina. It had been tidying up a
+monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy. Lord, the sick fright
+in its eyes when it saw me. I'd have given anything to be able to stand
+it a drink and offer to see it home."
+
+"Och!" she murmured abashed. "Me talking about rabbits, and you
+accustomed to jaguars. I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit
+except to look down your nose at it. But we can't rise to jaguars in
+Scotland. But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt."
+
+"I've seen a red deer too," he said, "when I was motorcycling up to Ross
+this summer." It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across
+the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and
+then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, "The sunset was
+on it. It looked the colour of your hair."
+
+"Well, if it did," she cried with sudden petulance, "pity me, that has
+to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast's back. Och,
+come along! Let's run. I like running. I'm cold. There's a bonny bridge
+where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir. Let's run." And for a
+hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then
+stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath. "I don't like
+this," she said half laughingly. "I've a poor envious nature. I'm used
+to running everybody else off their feet, and here you're holding back
+to keep with me. I feel I'm being an object of condescension. We'll
+walk, if you please."
+
+Yaverland said, "Oh, what nonsense! I was just thinking how rippingly
+you ran."
+
+"Havers!" she replied. "You were thinking nothing of the sort. You were
+wondering what for I carried an iron-monger's shop in my pocket. But
+yon rattling's just a tin with some coconuts I've in it that I made last
+night and slipped in in case you'd like it, rubbing up against my
+protractor."
+
+"But why in Heaven's name," Yaverland asked, "do you carry a protractor
+about with you?"
+
+"Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch,
+and I just keep a protractor handy."
+
+Yaverland stopped. "Ellen," he said, "I haven't known you very long."
+There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, "I
+may call you Ellen, mayn't I? This modern comradeship between men and
+women...." "Och, yes," beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic
+catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her
+pure enthusiasms for his own purposes. Sometimes he was conscious of a
+detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not
+respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but
+he could not take back the insincerity. "As I say, I haven't known you
+very long. But may I ask you a favour?"
+
+"Surely," said Ellen.
+
+"Turn out your pockets."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"I want to see what's in 'em."
+
+"Well," said Ellen resignedly, "there are worse vices than
+inquisitiveness. Both pockets?"
+
+"We'll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor,
+please."
+
+"It's too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you'll have to
+take them from me as I get them out. Well, there's the protractor, and
+there's the coconut ice. Have a bit? Ah, well, I notice that
+grown-up--that people older than me don't seem to care for sweeties
+before their dinner. I wonder why. And there's a magnetic compass I
+picked up on George the Fourth Bridge. There's a kind of pleasure in
+finding the north, don't you think? And--fancy this being here! I
+thought I'd lost it long ago. It's a wee garnet I found on the beach at
+Elie. I was set up all the afternoon with finding a precious stone. I
+would like fine to be a miner in the precious stone mines in Mexico. If
+I was a boy I would go. And the rest's just papers. Here's notes on a
+Geographical Society lecture on the geology of Yellowstone Park I went
+to last spring. Very instructive it was. And here's a diagram I did when
+I was working for the Bible examination on the Second Book of Kings--the
+lines of the House of Israel and the House of Judah drawn to scale on
+square paper, five years to a square and set parallel so that you can
+see which buddy was ruling on the one throne when another buddy was on
+the other. I came out fifth in all Scotland. And this is a poem I wrote.
+It's not a good poem. The subject was excellent--reflections of an
+absinthe-drinker condemned to death for the murder of his mistress--but
+I couldn't give it the treatment it desairved. No, you will _nut_ see
+it. I'll just tear it up. There. It'll do the whaups no harm scattering
+over the moor, for they've no ćsthetic sensibilities. But I shouldn't be
+surprised if you had, though I've heard that the English don't care much
+for art. I'm not much good at the poetry, but I have the grace to know
+it, and so I've just given it up. I make my own blouses, though I know I
+can't equal the professional product that's sold in the shops, because
+it comes cheaper. But with the Carnegie library handing out the
+professional product for nothing, I see no reason why I should write my
+own poems. That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the
+other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen
+gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole
+in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real
+nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it
+can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after
+all."
+
+"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.
+
+"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No
+wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the
+English if they're all as easily amused as you."
+
+"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like
+a boy."
+
+"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing
+before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were
+nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because
+she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?
+Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!
+And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I
+came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A
+bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!
+Is it not just fine?"
+
+Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he
+perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than
+anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as
+bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.
+He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,
+and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,
+represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing
+for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody
+fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and
+swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her
+soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this
+country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like
+her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that
+stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was
+fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills
+around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with
+some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and
+utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a
+glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the
+very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into
+shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue
+that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the
+hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not
+unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.
+
+But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort
+which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt,
+some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it
+could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden
+from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and
+jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy
+might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible
+lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating
+of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat
+under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the
+thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see
+if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the
+south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and
+said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."
+To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone
+spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.
+
+There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn
+floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an
+invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.
+But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than
+anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy
+and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight
+squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her
+balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky,
+the stern grey stream, the amber grasses that shook perpetually in the
+stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the
+water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.
+
+There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened
+every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a
+windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the
+Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy
+confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its
+yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this
+brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it
+an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath
+the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a
+kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will
+that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall
+from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.
+Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should
+sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow
+lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined
+in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of
+whitish grasses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the
+unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake
+perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It
+suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed passion of malice. It was
+like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in the log
+bubbles slowly floated up through the dark water, wavered a little under
+the glassy surface, and then popped up and made a dirty trail of spume.
+That was like the way Mr. Philip sat in the dark corner beyond the
+fireplace and showed by the way the whites of his eyes turned about that
+something bad had come into his mind, and let a space of silence fall so
+that one thought he was not going to say it after all, and then it would
+come out suddenly, cool and as mean as mean could be and somehow
+unanswerable.
+
+With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver
+birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless
+on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of
+malice. Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed
+with the grassy rottenness beside the whitish grasses. It had had no
+chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that
+although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time
+when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and
+stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave
+him the chance to make a fool of her. It was all right to be here on the
+Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and
+work under Mr. Philip. She could not go on like this. She would have to
+kill herself. She would jump over the Dean Bridge. Mother would just
+have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.
+
+Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the
+rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you
+talk about? Aren't you still pals?"
+
+Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's
+gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on.
+She's never written since the first month."
+
+"Probably she's having hard luck."
+
+"Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside
+her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.
+She's not a bit like me."
+
+"But that's just what you look like."
+
+"Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as
+the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the
+presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the
+disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with
+success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to
+her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face
+and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he
+followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.
+
+When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and
+taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her
+breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she
+said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."
+
+"Why don't you cut yours off then?"
+
+"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she
+answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun
+that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all
+right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere
+nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little
+child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while
+yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl
+was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from
+womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He
+would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right
+angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds
+marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her
+scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman
+smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from
+a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning
+herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult
+love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by
+some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and
+they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.
+
+He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before
+her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary
+austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he
+recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she
+still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss
+her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when
+she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands
+roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as
+children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was
+a woman the passion between them was so strong that the delight of
+touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to
+support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that
+they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and
+invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was
+what he had to say....
+
+It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He
+could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening
+of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great
+height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He
+found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul
+shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let
+his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the passing moment
+as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from
+a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that
+rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life
+because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a
+relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black
+regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt
+of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to
+brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did
+not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness
+than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever
+known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.
+And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness,
+the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race
+among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.
+She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of
+women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon
+her lips.
+
+Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you,
+she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think
+that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in
+the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless
+moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South
+America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her
+mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was
+too young.
+
+There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was
+with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long
+way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the
+whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two
+servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes,
+the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down
+on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that
+distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the
+whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all
+human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young
+girl.
+
+The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin
+along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked
+by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited
+to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder
+of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where
+there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely
+perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the
+clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on
+either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain
+herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated
+animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the
+extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on
+ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her
+pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor,
+her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so
+greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight
+over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he
+wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course
+he never had. There was no one in the world like her.
+
+"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried
+back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun
+to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown
+waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with
+an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in
+the hills where the Logan Burn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark
+polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee
+one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose--was it
+not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into
+his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"
+
+"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here
+than anywhere else in the world."
+
+"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted,
+uninterested in the loving things that he had said.
+
+"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."
+
+"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for
+adventure, "I will go there some day...."
+
+That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern
+himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train
+of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it
+like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the
+waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled
+by a ready, embarrassed murmur from her.
+
+"I can't...."
+
+He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had
+been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly:
+
+"Why not? You've got nailed boots."
+
+But she continued to stand stiffly on a rock by the edge of the red
+pool, and stared over his head at the spray and repeated, "I can't."
+
+He wondered from her blush if in his ignorance of girls he had done
+something to offend her, and turned away; but she misunderstood that,
+and cried fierily:
+
+"Och, I'm not feared! I've done it twenty times. But I took a vow. Oh,"
+she faltered, suddenly the youngest of all articulate things, "you'll
+laugh at me!"
+
+"I won't!" he answered fiercely and gripped one of her hands.
+
+"It was like this," she said, looking round-eyed and dewily solemn like
+a child in church. "Climbing up there used to be a great pleasure to me.
+I used to come here a lot with Rachael Wing. And then I heard Victor
+Grayson speak--oh, he is a wonderful man; he seemed hardly airthly; you
+felt you had to make some sacrifice. I made a vow I'd never climb it
+again till I had done something for the social revolution. And I've not
+done a thing yet."
+
+They exchanged a long, confiding look, a mutual pressure of their souls;
+but before he could say something reverently sympathetic she had uttered
+a sharp exclamation, and was looking past him at the waterfall, which a
+sudden gust of wind had blown out from the rock like a lady's skirt. "If
+we were climbing that now, yon spray would be on our faces, and I love
+the prick of cold water!" she burst out. "Whatever for did I make that
+daft-like vow? A lot of good it's like to do the social revolution! I
+really am a fool sometimes!"
+
+Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if
+he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite
+exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal
+they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to
+him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.
+She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the
+early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her
+beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her
+soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of
+her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have
+been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional
+languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces
+expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about
+the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so
+busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the
+lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave
+naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing
+the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more
+certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing
+with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of
+the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough
+stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made
+him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead
+for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had
+come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the
+loch.
+
+"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this
+bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig.
+The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a
+gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a
+good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies."
+But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him,
+though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black
+wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile
+long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of
+desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art;
+one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist
+divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human,
+grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so
+thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked
+like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this
+there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that
+it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of
+hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing
+that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no
+ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its
+graveyard.
+
+"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on
+Bell's Hill--do you see it?--told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising
+up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most
+interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit
+of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in
+Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"
+
+He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own,
+and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said,
+"A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what
+cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears
+came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the
+Scotch is your one accomplishment."
+
+But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between
+them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a
+sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical
+changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call
+his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This
+was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world
+became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a
+dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long
+steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and purple leaves looked like
+snips of painted tin; and the Glencorse Burn on the other side of the
+field was overhung by bare trees of gold. Every window of the farmhouse
+across the valley was a loophole of flame; and here it was evident, from
+the passing of a multitude of figures about the farm buildings and a
+babblement that drove in gusts across the valley, there was happening
+some event that matched the prodigiousness of the strange appearance
+lent it by the sunset.
+
+"There's an awful argy-bargying at Little Vantage," said Ellen, "I
+wonder what's going on."
+
+When they crossed over the burn and turned into the road that led back
+to the farmhouse they found the dykes plastered with intimations of a
+sale of live stock. "Ah, it's a roup! Old Mr. Gumley must be dead, poor
+soul!" And indeed the road was lined with farmers' gigs, paint and
+brass-work blazing with the evening light till they looked like fiery
+chariots that would presently lift to heaven. About the yard gate there
+was a great press of hale farmers, gilt and ruddy from the sunset they
+faced, and vomiting jests at each other out of their great bearded
+mouths; and in the yard sheep with golden fleece and cattle as bright as
+dragons ran hither and thither before the sticks of boys who looked like
+demons with the orange glow on their faces, and who cursed and spat to
+show they would some-day be men. Richard and Ellen had to stand back for
+a moment while a horse was led out; and as it passed a paunchy farmer
+jocularly struck it between the eyes and roared, "Ye're no for me, ye
+auld mare, wi' your braw beginnings of the ringbone!" And there was so
+much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much
+patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the
+incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster
+who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest
+sound of a whimper from Ellen.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.
+
+"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening
+sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was
+something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was
+so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from
+which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is
+like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. "A lot of beefy, red-faced angels
+buying us up and taking us off to their own places without a word to us
+of where we're to go to, and commenting most unfeelingly on all our
+failings...."
+
+"You funny person," he murmured, "you're tired. Probably hungry. Where's
+that cottage you talked about where they'll give us tea?"
+
+"Over yonder," she quavered, "but I'm not wanting any tea."
+
+But just then a gig drew up beside them, driven by an old man and laden
+with a couple of tin trunks and a cornucopia of a woman, who had
+snatched the reins out of the old man's hands. "What's this? A roup at
+Little Vantage! Feyther, what's happened?" The old man shook his head.
+"Feyther, ye niver ken onything." She raised a megaphonic voice.
+"Moggie! Moggie Gumley!" A fat young woman with a soap-shining face ran
+out of the farmhouse. "Wha's calling me? Och, it's you, Mistress
+Cairns!" "Ay, it's me. What's ta'en ye all here? I've been awa' for two
+months keepin' hoose for ma brither Jock while his wife's been in the
+Infirmary wi' her chumer. I didn't think I'd come back to find a roup at
+Little Vantage." "So ye've not haird?" gasped the fat young woman
+delightedly. "Feyther's deid o' his dropsy, and Alec and me's awa' to
+Canady this day fortnight." She panted it out with so honest a joy in
+the commotion, so innocent a disregard of the tragedy of death and
+emigration, that Yaverland and Ellen had to turn away and laugh; and he
+drew her across the road to the cottage.
+
+The door was opened before they got there. "It's me, Mrs. Lawson!" said
+Ellen. "Indeed, I kenned that!" replied the housewife. "I was keeking
+out of the window when you came up the road, and I said to masel',
+'There's Miss Melville, and she'll be wanting her tea,' so I awa' and
+popped the kettle on. Bring your gentleman in. He's a new face, but he's
+welcome. Ye'll pardon the parlour being a' of a reek wi' tobaccy, but
+Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Borthwick cam' in and had a cup o' tea and a bit of
+a crack. They were both bidding at the roup and some business thegither.
+I think Mr. Laidlaw means to buy Cornhaven off Mr. Borthwick and give it
+to his son John, wha's married on a Glasca girl, a shelpit wee thing wi'
+a Glesca accent like skirling pipes played by a drunken piper." They
+watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry
+jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip,
+their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the
+superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them
+they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the
+mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires.
+All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; and farmers
+hawked out their last jests at one another, mounted their gigs and drove
+home; and the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle pattered by, bleating
+and lowing not so heartrendingly.
+
+Ellen rose, went over to the mantelpiece and stroked the china dogs, and
+sat down in an armchair by the fire. "This has been a lovely day," she
+murmured. She joined her hands behind her head and crossed her knees and
+smiled blindishly into the shadow; and his heart turned over in him. All
+his life he would remember her just as she was then: the lovely attitude
+of body that was at once angular and softly sensuous, like a
+blossom-laden branch; the pure pearl colour of her skin, the pure bright
+colours of her hair and eyes and mouth; the passionate and funny, shrewd
+and credulous pattern of her features; and that dozing smile, that
+looked as if her soul had ceased to run up and down enquiringly and was
+resting awhile to enjoy the sweetness that was its own climate. He would
+never forget her as she was looking then. She might turn away from him,
+she might get old, she might die, but the memory of her as she was at
+that moment would endure for ever in his heart, an eternally living
+thing. He was aware, reluctantly enough, for he hated such mystical
+knowledge, and would have given the world to see life as a plain round
+of dicing and drinking and wenching, that real love was somehow a cruel
+thing for women; that the hour when she became his wife would be as
+illimitably tragic as it would be illimitably glorious. But love was
+also very kind to women, since it enabled them to live always at their
+loveliest in their lover's memories, there perpetually exempt from the
+age and ugliness that even the bravest of them seemed pitifully to fear.
+
+Yet, of course love was not so kind to every woman. No one remembered
+his mother as he would remember Ellen. He began to ponder what his
+mother must have been like when she was that age, and it marked a
+certain difference between him and other men, that he was grudgingly
+surprised that the girl he meant to marry was as beautiful as his
+mother. Certainly, he reflected, with a bitter, gloating grief, Marion
+Yaverland must have been beautiful enough to deserve a lodging in some
+man's memory. She must have been brilliantly attractive in the obvious
+physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit
+must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he
+suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that
+other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which
+showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark,
+silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.
+
+There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant
+that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come
+back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had
+grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that
+climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull,
+and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her
+hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then
+spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and
+cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality
+flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had
+not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her
+lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who
+stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good
+repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on
+the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the
+unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their
+cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from
+her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble
+that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost
+strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands
+over her face.
+
+Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the
+clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to
+catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."
+
+Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we
+must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its
+intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that
+almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her
+arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her
+red hair. But when they got into the lane outside she hurried towards
+the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath
+sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run,
+although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See,"
+he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't
+anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware
+that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he
+asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it
+possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark?
+He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she
+had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit
+that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of
+matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her
+ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of
+discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for
+the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of
+self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no
+witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened
+with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them
+between sleeping and waking.
+
+It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely
+impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal
+ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.
+It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things
+which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer
+sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy
+shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He
+perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way
+she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her
+hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver
+with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her
+hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of
+fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated
+with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in
+women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's
+life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of
+worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee
+contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt
+for those other women.
+
+The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and
+lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats,
+who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the
+soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen.
+"And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat
+extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and
+found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.
+Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to
+which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength
+too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the _Gondomar_ had been
+scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a
+cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with
+inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all
+right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an
+hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the
+station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone
+that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half
+asleep."
+
+The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take
+a seat in it while he got the tickets. But she did not. Its carriages
+were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those
+burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want
+to take that train. She would have liked to turn back with him through
+the dark avenues into the Pentlands. The sunset, which had somehow been
+as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before
+the kind, sleepy darkness, undisturbed there in the valley by the
+wee-est cottage light. It would be good to lie down for the night on the
+heather of some ledge on the hillside where one could hear the Logan
+Burn talking as it ran from the fall, and to look up and see Mr.
+Yaverland sitting in that nice slouching way he had, a great black shape
+against the stars. But that was a daft idea. She was annoyed for
+thinking of anything so foolish, and when he came out and chid her for
+standing about on the windy platform she found nothing on her lips but a
+cross murmur.
+
+That did not really matter, for one could not hurt grown-up people. They
+were always happy. Everybody in the world was happy except her. Without
+doubt he would think her quite mad if he knew that she was in the grip
+of a depression that seemed to be wringing misery out of her body and
+brain as one wrings water out of a bathing-dress, so when they got into
+the train she turned away, muttered yawningly that she was very tired,
+and buried her face in the crook of her arm so that he might think she
+slept. It puzzled her that she felt so disappointed. What had she
+expected to happen to-day that hadn't happened? Everything had been
+lovely. Mr. Yaverland had talked most interestingly, and the hills had
+been very beautiful. She was ashamed of all those tears that she shed
+more frequently than one would have expected from an intending rival of
+Pierpont Morgan, but these present tears filled her with terror because
+they were so utterly irrational. Irrational, too, was the sudden picture
+that flashed on her mind's eye of Mr. Philip sitting in the opposite
+corner of the carriage, screwing up his dark face with mocking laughter.
+"Mr. Philip is driving me mad," she thought to herself. "Some day soon
+I'll find myself in Morningside Asylum, sticking flowers in my hair and
+flattering myself I'm Queen Victoria. But I will not go mad. I am going
+to get on. I am going to be great. But am I? I think I am not." Her face
+made a wet contorted mask against her sleeve, and a swallowed sob was as
+sharp in her throat as a fishbone; and there struck through her like an
+impaling sword a certainty which she could not understand, but which was
+surely a certificate that there was to be no more happiness, that even
+if Mr. Philip ceased to persecute her she would still be hungry and
+tormented.
+
+Perhaps if she could go to some new country she would escape from this
+misery. She saw a sky like stretched blue silk, stamped with the black
+monograms of palms; a purple bay shaped like a shell and edged with a
+white embroidery of surf. Surely such fair weather killed with sweetness
+such coarse plants as her stupid gloom, as the foul weather here killed
+with its coarseness all sweet-flowering southern plants. She turned to
+Yaverland to ask him if he could help her to find work abroad, but she
+became aware that she was in the grip of an unreasonable emotion that
+prevented her from this. It was as horrible to her to see the coldly
+logical apparatus of her mind churning out these irrational conclusions
+as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in
+drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery
+would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed
+disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery
+unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the
+way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level
+save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that
+he was standing over her, and her heart almost stopped. He said, "I
+think we're just coming into Edinburgh." There was no reason why she
+should feel chilled and desolate when he said that. She must be going
+out of her mind.
+
+And he, since she had shown by the simplicity of her movements that she
+was not afraid of him, was quite happy.
+
+He could see the picture of himself sitting beside the sleeping child as
+if it were printed in three colours on glossy paper. But he was a little
+troubled lest she had walked too far, and as they went up the stone
+steps from the station to Princes Street he bent over her and asked in a
+tone of tenderness that he enjoyed using, "Are you tired?"
+
+"Oh, very tired," said Ellen, drooping her head, and aping a fatigue
+greater than anything she had ever felt in all her young life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I
+
+
+Mr. Philip was crossing Princes Street when he saw them standing in the
+white circle under the electric standard by the station steps. The
+strong light fell on them like a criticism, and it seemed to him brazen
+the way they stood there being so handsome that the passers-by turned
+about to stare at them. Doubtless, since folks were such fools, they
+were whispering that the two made a fine pair. Surely it was the vilest
+indecency that there, under his very eyes, that great hulking chap from
+Rio bent his head and spoke to Ellen, and she answered him?
+
+"She's standing there making herself as conspicuous as if she were a
+street girl!" he screamed to himself, and other shouts filled his ears,
+and he became aware that a cursing driver had pulled up his horse a foot
+away and that the loafers at the kerb were lifting jeering cries. He
+charged it one more offence to Ellen's account that she had caused him
+to make a fool of himself, and vowed he would never think of her again,
+and ran among the people to see where she had gone. Yaverland was
+leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now
+nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did
+not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and
+a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet
+treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised
+with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this
+was anybody but Ellen--Ellen, who was far different from every other
+woman in the world and more desirable. She slowly turned, as if her
+spirit had felt this rage at the fact of her running at her heels, and
+wished to have it out with him. He gripped his stick and raised a hand
+to hide his working mouth, and waited for the moment when she would see
+his face, but it did not come.
+
+The man Yaverland had put out his great ham of a hand and hailed a cab.
+When Mr. Philip tried to stop a cab he usually had to run alongside it,
+and often the driver was most impudent, but this swaggering bully
+checked the thing on the instant, and handed in Ellen and drove off in
+style as if he was a duke with his duchess in their own carriage. What
+did they want in a cab anyway? He followed the black trundling square on
+its spidery wheels as it turned round by the Register House to cross the
+North Bridge, and imagined the fine carryings on they were doubtless
+having in the dark in there. He called Ellen a name he had not thought
+of before.
+
+There was nothing to be done about it. He stood for a while at the
+railing of that strange garden of concrete walks and raised parterres
+and ventilating-shafts that lies at this end of Princes Street, built on
+the roof of the sunk market. Its rectilinear aspect pleased him. It was
+not romantic, the gates were locked, and one could be sure that there
+were no lovers trysting there. Presently he moved along towards the West
+End, keeping still on the side of the street where there were no men and
+girls prancing about and grinning at each other like dirty apes under
+the lights, but only empty gardens with locked gates. What had those two
+been doing? They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very
+long journey it must have been dark before they started. They had been
+in the country alone together when it was quite dark. There came to him
+memories of sounds he had once heard when walking through a twilit wood,
+the crackling of twigs, a little happy cry of distress, and again the
+crackling of twigs; he had been compelled by something, which was not
+specially in him but was a part of the damned way life went, to stand
+and listen, though he knew it was not decent. He saw before him Ellen's
+face lying white on her spilt red hair, and it added to his anguish that
+he could not see it clearly, but had to peer at this enraging vision
+because he could not make out what her expression would be. He had seen
+her look a thousand ways during these last few weeks when she had kept
+on drawing his attention to her with her simpering girl's tricks, but he
+could not imagine how she would look then. It seemed as if she were
+defying his imagination as she defied him every day in the office, and
+he turned his mind away from the matter in a frenzy, but began soon to
+wonder what those two had been doing. They had come in by train. Unless
+they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before
+they started....
+
+He knew he must not go on like this, and looked round him. He had passed
+the classic portico of the Art Gallery and was walking now by the wilder
+section of the gardens, where the street lights shone back from the
+shining leaves of bushes and made them look like glazed paper, and with
+their glare made the trees behind seem such flat canvas trees as they
+set about the stage at theatres when there is need for a romantic glade
+for a lovers' meeting. How often had Ellen met Yaverland?
+
+He ran across the road. It would be better among the people. It was not
+so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were. Everybody
+in the world was happy except him. No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were
+just bursting with merriment in that cab. Would they be at home yet? She
+would be telling him all the office jokes. Well, she might, for all he
+cared. He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip
+Hop-o'-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn't give a straw for it. He
+stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to
+bottom of its window with strings of actresses' photographs, and stood
+there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an
+exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that
+indicated the glittering facades of these charmers' smiles, the milky
+smoothness of their bean-fed femininity. Ah, these were the really fine
+women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin
+slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne. Who
+would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the
+world?
+
+But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so
+beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she
+insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who
+had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience
+that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such
+as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller
+than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He
+hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and
+began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his
+mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness
+of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of
+contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and
+what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social
+contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still
+until one had finished swearing at her.
+
+But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that
+Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would
+have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she
+had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in
+Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among
+the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one
+can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside
+the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found
+it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so
+ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage
+of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen
+without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one
+did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at
+one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He
+had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side
+of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she
+took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an
+iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.
+Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not
+been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office
+fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and
+a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had
+fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men. She had been a
+cruel beast. For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might
+have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering
+things so loud. Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to
+those depths.
+
+He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the
+decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense
+to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved
+accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could
+not come to harm. But that would not alter the fact that he had once
+come to harm. As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw
+that a "To Let" board had been put up since the morning. He wondered why
+the Allardyces were leaving it. He had been at school with the boys. He
+and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school
+sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy. He
+remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy
+sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved
+in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all
+behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see
+them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his
+body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh,
+giving him a cold, pure feeling. Well, he was not a boy any longer. The
+Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that;
+nothing would be the same again....
+
+The solidity of his father's house, the hall into which he let himself,
+with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting
+of his mother's father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him
+feel better. He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most
+respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset
+about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the
+dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with
+deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings. There was a very
+handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights
+and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on
+the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table. "Mhm!" he sighed
+contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the
+whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.
+
+The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He
+put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was
+immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red
+hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He
+met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak
+to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so,
+but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.
+
+There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from
+top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a
+bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which
+contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary,
+which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a
+manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.
+Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a
+stranded whale, reading the London _Law Journal_ and breathing
+disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when
+in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip
+came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the
+entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr.
+Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking
+this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He
+sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather
+than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only
+sons. But he went at it.
+
+"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."
+
+Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the
+faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"
+
+"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just
+seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from
+Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."
+
+"What for should they not?"
+
+"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of
+night."
+
+"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn
+over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet.
+Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs
+we shouldn't be long."
+
+"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He
+forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like
+that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."
+
+At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were
+still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a
+good girl, Philip," he said.
+
+The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those
+inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew,
+where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and
+unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any
+mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial
+tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were
+his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.
+There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his
+urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the
+onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If
+she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her,
+father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"
+
+Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the
+discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could
+surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned
+towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to
+Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up
+at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a
+word."
+
+It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father,
+thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office
+discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he
+said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He
+ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had
+always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her
+conduct....
+
+
+II
+
+The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk
+was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was
+sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and
+staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance
+entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue
+overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and
+the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk
+hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at
+anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in
+Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she
+had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew
+she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still
+knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be
+looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting
+Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the
+desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella
+Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like
+the hand of a young man.
+
+But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose
+the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention
+began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony,
+the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay
+athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when
+I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every
+room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a
+caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it
+like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan
+is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my
+own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I
+keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with
+a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the
+progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright
+head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his
+thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.
+
+"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not
+like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both
+very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be
+sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she
+was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I
+had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh
+that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin
+who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a
+suitable marriage."
+
+He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which
+although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have
+behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors
+which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the
+gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could
+turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he
+had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns'
+love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to
+passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had
+persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the
+high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny
+warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening
+years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety
+darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in
+moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been
+to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been
+to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could
+reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her
+who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady
+young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all
+his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.
+
+But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away
+when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to
+marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered
+how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head
+and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she
+forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to
+make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after
+all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed
+himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a
+time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she
+had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark
+eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though
+tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her
+cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such
+modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a
+capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If
+she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would
+have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had,
+although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his
+first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm,
+and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But
+Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.
+
+His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses
+that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been
+the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking
+over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had
+risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear
+her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest
+pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though
+quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl
+must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that
+proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her
+sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things
+were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had
+been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be
+young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and
+know no after-life.
+
+No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one
+depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and
+orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must
+settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is
+quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely
+with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us.
+But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He
+rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs
+with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.
+
+And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were
+going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had
+waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when
+Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had
+gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any
+way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited
+her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She
+had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say
+good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the
+dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look
+that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face,
+which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with
+interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive
+glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts,
+and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some
+imagination that had given him pleasure.
+
+She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from
+him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it
+was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The
+only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking
+walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her
+mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though
+everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy
+terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was
+just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress
+her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said
+courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all
+night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become
+ringing proclamations of indifference.
+
+Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that,
+though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see
+one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a
+telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had
+asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead.
+Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet
+very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely
+action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil
+to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an
+infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by
+which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which
+he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her
+hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as
+if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so
+that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would
+draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think
+so malignantly of one who had been so kind--so much kinder than anybody
+else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she
+knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that
+Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago
+she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she
+saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex,
+her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her
+that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of
+madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her
+cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the
+quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way
+with derision, of Mr. Philip.
+
+He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"
+
+Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity
+he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told
+him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is
+nobody ready to give me work."
+
+He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"
+
+She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale,
+and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that
+she should have to live in this world where everyone was either
+inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers
+that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them
+at once."
+
+For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and
+at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an
+ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate.
+A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and
+said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude,
+but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his
+hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands
+from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had
+need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were
+doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could
+just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But
+it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"
+
+Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway
+under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the
+strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied
+that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you
+please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to
+speak to you this afternoon?"
+
+"He usually does," replied Ellen.
+
+"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial
+an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth
+puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held
+in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily,
+making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about
+to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign
+of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to
+it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt
+at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to
+be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered
+at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have
+come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"
+
+She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her
+still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the
+trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had
+dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me?
+Whoever's been complaining--and no doubt if your clients once began at
+that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock
+gun--it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm
+practically infallible."
+
+"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing.
+"Perhaps we might call it your play."
+
+He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick
+whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn
+near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making
+wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in
+darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown
+indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his
+features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything
+about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head
+because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with
+all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville,
+a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have
+been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on
+Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist
+chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving
+away. I won't tell you"--he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and
+became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before
+he speaks of evil--"what the client made of it all." And then he bent
+again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in
+an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous
+sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but
+which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and
+she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a
+satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she
+continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this
+misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her
+crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.
+
+But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had
+spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the
+serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her
+tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her
+face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled
+surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably
+precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that
+if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out
+of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to
+a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was
+defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to
+destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it
+was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble
+and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same
+persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and
+planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his
+efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count
+that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety
+was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me
+to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk
+the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my
+time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as
+if she was playing a jig.
+
+He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously,
+"The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now,
+if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through
+her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a
+misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which
+falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the
+recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of
+foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was
+the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could
+effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it
+was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being
+nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had
+talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed
+him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently
+to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his
+shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into
+a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of
+madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that
+in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing.
+For of course it could not be so.
+
+Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my
+wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as
+men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of
+craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no
+mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned
+page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that
+it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always
+gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she
+had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of
+Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in
+her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,
+which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting
+any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt
+in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the
+side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic
+lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding
+bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a
+lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the
+client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes
+Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it
+was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and
+another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and
+flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,
+the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with
+waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and
+tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy
+like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for
+his dealings with his wife's money....
+
+But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one
+thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.
+"Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I
+spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a
+shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months
+to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think
+she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping
+undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were
+just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had
+had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out,
+though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because
+the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a
+quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to
+her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with
+her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her?
+They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man
+on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she
+hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his
+lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she
+rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was
+suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if
+there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string
+was snapping separately.
+
+"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself
+remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the
+world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise.
+"There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to
+sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so
+you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just
+for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had
+been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine,
+which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly
+unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series
+of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the
+dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way,
+and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the
+heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood
+arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by
+the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up
+again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee
+men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought
+proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the
+tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood
+such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.
+It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically
+and mentally.
+
+She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.
+But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on,
+masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of
+that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in
+strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with
+extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running
+red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every
+way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than
+she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast
+for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.
+
+Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate
+adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges
+and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would
+take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women,
+hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage,
+who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try
+to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she
+perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.
+When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would
+have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the
+mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house
+on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a
+furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private
+system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a
+key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in
+one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With
+perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the
+garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as
+monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with
+weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick
+his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor;
+he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands
+of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the
+white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the
+creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken
+roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and
+dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark
+ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience.
+Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....
+
+All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or
+had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step
+was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not
+look up from the table.
+
+"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."
+
+She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he
+had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been
+talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size
+that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other
+hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought
+she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she
+said mournfully.
+
+"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put
+in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly?
+I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let
+me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not
+know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked
+with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage
+on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his
+cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence.
+"Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box
+as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian
+and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must
+be sickening for something."
+
+"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger
+stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her
+hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with
+eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a
+woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish
+James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity
+with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with
+pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and
+purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point
+and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his
+chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant
+occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and
+distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this
+creditable pity.
+
+"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."
+
+She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."
+
+"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could
+also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into
+the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love
+may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing
+under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets
+describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy,
+and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it
+deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is
+just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just
+luck....
+
+"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."
+
+Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a
+client."
+
+He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away.
+All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle
+things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on
+doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which
+did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr.
+Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the
+long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The
+girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of
+life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus
+assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed,
+quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and
+at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a
+child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could
+not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and
+tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell
+you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes
+among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"
+
+"Och, you make fun of me--!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger
+stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not
+bite it.
+
+"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing
+seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish
+pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion,
+until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and
+got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this
+delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little
+of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that
+fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a
+wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that
+particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has
+no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."
+
+Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure
+as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say
+that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad,
+though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking
+arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a
+great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling.
+"The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars
+and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled
+brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but
+wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It
+flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat
+and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see
+what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must
+admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are
+on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would
+not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she
+started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish
+tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger
+stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to
+gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger
+when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back
+for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll
+have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the
+colour...."
+
+While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers,
+the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and
+rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over
+a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds.
+When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of
+soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick
+to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being,
+and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was
+completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life
+was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now
+she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair,
+which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the
+weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable
+women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the
+same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her
+coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that
+people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions
+that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to
+have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.
+
+To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you
+women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with
+the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a
+fine piece in the _Scotsman_ this morning about one of your Suffragettes
+standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would
+think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing
+slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra
+ladylike, I'm sure."
+
+"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith--"
+
+"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he
+sits for Fife."
+
+"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady,
+who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's _Votes for Women_.
+She's a beautiful girl."
+
+"I doubt it, Nelly."
+
+"I'll bring the photo then!"
+
+"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully,
+watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married
+if she is so beautiful?"
+
+"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen,
+admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I
+heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder,
+yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters
+have to be carried out on stretchers."
+
+"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James,
+and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her
+speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.
+
+"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite
+enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while
+we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the
+Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my
+teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't
+admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."
+
+"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his
+eyes on her face.
+
+"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she
+answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her
+arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had
+begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking
+of Yaverland.
+
+She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with
+a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with
+which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off
+her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise,
+and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and
+began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly
+justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it
+until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It
+is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an
+unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is
+performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by
+dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words
+sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance
+and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was
+not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this
+fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his
+mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual
+in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and
+watch his typist dancing.
+
+But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away
+her breath.
+
+She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass,
+and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful
+lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is
+always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as
+soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the
+window-seat and smiled back at the old man.
+
+"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as
+the great Dr. Johnson says."
+
+But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make
+time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was
+just a rude old thing."
+
+"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."
+
+"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked
+with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and
+indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in
+your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion
+drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs.
+Thrale when the poor body married again."
+
+"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a
+substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."
+
+"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way
+they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And
+hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if
+they were blunt wise ones--that's not sense. And if it were, what's the
+good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on
+your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you
+dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it.
+One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There
+are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get
+romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on
+the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people--masked
+Touaregs--"
+
+"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a
+pairfect salad of foreign pairts."
+
+It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both
+sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and
+etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I
+should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal
+spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go
+there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and
+went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de
+Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house
+where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.
+"And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the
+big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens,
+and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats.
+I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?--if I would wear dead
+things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be
+nice, however rich I was--ways that don't affect me very much, so that
+they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I
+always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and
+jaguars. And--"
+
+"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your
+heart to a keeper at the Zoo."
+
+"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you
+needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he
+steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the
+crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was
+working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some
+other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He
+is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come
+natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said
+nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."
+
+"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling
+stones gather no moss, I've heard."
+
+Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of
+money. He can beat you even at your own game."
+
+Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking
+round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it
+contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And
+what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."
+
+"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.
+
+He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his
+stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not
+do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.
+"He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."
+
+She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."
+
+Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched.
+The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the
+day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if
+they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned
+unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked
+sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away
+from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the
+prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any
+appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling
+intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a
+conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was
+morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain,
+that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For
+Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed
+possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion
+in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two
+establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so
+satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to
+take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things
+he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going
+to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their
+good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece
+of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him
+to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity
+of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness
+which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside
+the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives
+himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked
+back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the
+little helpless working-girl.
+
+He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and
+offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give
+you pleasure when I bought them."
+
+One would always get her that way.
+
+Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove.
+"Oh, Mr. James!"
+
+"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've
+been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"
+
+"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."
+
+"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am
+too free with my tongue."
+
+"Oh, Mr. James!"
+
+"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go
+your own way--"
+
+"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at
+the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as
+sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the
+spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you
+are very beautiful."
+
+She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"
+
+"Aye," he said, "beautiful."
+
+For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand
+on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were
+focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity
+that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a
+little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.
+
+"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.
+
+"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National
+Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing?
+I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an
+actress. Tell me, which am I like?"
+
+"You're like both. That's where you score."
+
+She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"
+
+"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."
+
+She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she
+were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if,
+indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.
+
+"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.
+
+"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on
+straight?"
+
+"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've
+never looked at yourself before."
+
+She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up
+and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.
+
+"Are you not beautiful?" he said.
+
+"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and
+stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done
+something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In
+evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux
+Camélias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan--a big fan of
+ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost
+gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that
+is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I
+suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the
+plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I
+not?"
+
+"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James,
+"and her you'd better with your tongue."
+
+"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't
+matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like
+Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's
+merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I
+am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure
+I'll do?"
+
+"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.
+
+She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual
+mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh
+dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay.
+"What nonsense we're talking! Do--for what? It's all pairfectly
+ridiculous--as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so
+physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too
+quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit,
+abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but
+abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the
+mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit
+buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She
+stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she
+were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than
+they had ever been before, because she was holding them with
+consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her
+frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in
+silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with
+a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that
+there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat
+of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and
+then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding
+herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were
+clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.
+
+"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half
+from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to
+this interesting suffering of hers.
+
+Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on
+her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's
+very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"
+
+Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're
+talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice
+sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"
+
+She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief.
+"Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell
+back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking,
+shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head
+fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she
+pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this
+office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had
+November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She
+pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if
+she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"
+
+"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.
+
+She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had
+boasted about something that could not come true, that would be
+horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only
+the young can feel.
+
+Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had
+to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating
+silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."
+
+At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot
+at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy,
+and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her
+chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her
+hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression.
+She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a
+schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had
+married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her
+manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was
+trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her
+mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She
+caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this
+pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the
+window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if
+the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a
+negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the
+bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of
+wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what
+it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid
+on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she
+must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark.
+Surely it's time I was away home?"
+
+There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past
+four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James
+cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a
+bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so
+terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing
+his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella
+Kingan suffered thus?
+
+"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the
+hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and
+tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried,
+she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things
+always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as
+she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not
+alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.
+Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the
+blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in
+this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac
+words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their
+brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose,
+that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting
+strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the
+bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.
+At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed
+with hate. He had brought all this upon her.
+
+And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring
+endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as
+to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the _tempo
+rubato_ and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no
+more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the
+wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....
+
+She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his
+presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent
+accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie?
+Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."
+
+"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the
+doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all
+right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was
+not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well
+be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and
+forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!"
+she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm
+doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"
+
+He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"
+
+"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into
+the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door
+of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran
+down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.
+
+
+III
+
+More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been
+crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she
+had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights
+in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a
+cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture
+does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and
+called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called
+that her mother had that morning said something about spending the
+afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again,
+"Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out
+angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at
+the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was
+perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to
+her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the
+caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff
+tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking
+queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she
+had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to
+the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the
+breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and
+carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in
+digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her
+heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible
+derider.
+
+"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped.
+"Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up
+the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human
+beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get
+myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the
+Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a
+time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk
+and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing
+at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she
+had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the
+larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam
+her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had
+always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being
+chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it
+liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being
+glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an
+exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that
+flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a
+violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was
+silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common
+and precious too.
+
+She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken
+with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the
+touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that
+she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not
+grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully,
+putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my
+strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what
+they've lost...."
+
+The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her
+buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she
+knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only
+because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to
+leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures
+of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp
+brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no
+more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and
+moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the
+plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of
+departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was
+the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could
+imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name
+were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.
+
+Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather
+than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she
+meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare
+plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when
+they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running
+up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River
+Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark
+glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green
+fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss
+that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep
+river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory
+tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat
+and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river,
+overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel,
+weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached
+ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff
+movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired
+merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of
+its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows
+leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were
+somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to
+notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one
+need! Ah, but it was now.
+
+If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be
+impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall
+across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers
+because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of
+the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought
+of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so
+rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled
+with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart.
+She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight,
+that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world
+and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this
+moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster
+the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put
+on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and
+greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks.
+She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....
+
+Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it
+was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived
+there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate
+opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and
+apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed
+deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door
+and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet;
+her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if
+there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.
+
+His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was,
+and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither
+greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down
+into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her
+eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels
+standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver
+rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as
+they had always looked on any night.
+
+"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand
+closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of
+the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.
+
+"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love
+you."
+
+Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.
+
+"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till,
+feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're
+getting wet! Darling, let us go in."
+
+When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark,
+and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze
+he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of
+escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But
+he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and
+drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his
+hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat
+across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call
+me little? I am not little!"
+
+He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his
+fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and
+yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and
+terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not
+know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have
+countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich
+colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going
+to be of some high kind of glory.
+
+He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love
+me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she
+listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he
+pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel
+of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of
+women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to
+make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists;
+they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills
+or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and
+pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face
+wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was
+beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his
+passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the
+sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me,"
+was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She
+held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find
+that she too was whispering.
+
+"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to
+love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle
+tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She
+loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to
+see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she
+loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts
+the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had
+confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep
+way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told
+you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without
+touching you. Please ... please...."
+
+Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on
+her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had
+ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never
+thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when,
+between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was
+going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her)
+as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit
+water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on
+marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer,
+soft as the south wind....
+
+But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard,
+interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her
+mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever
+after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more
+subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms
+still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the
+strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage,
+of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things.
+Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another
+on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would
+always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not
+quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it
+was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was
+so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of
+his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish
+that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a
+little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an
+ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.
+
+A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become
+linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed
+under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose
+convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and
+depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose
+unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was
+as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung
+herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her
+happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there
+little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had
+always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became
+more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became
+less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of
+lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of
+his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity:
+"Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."
+
+They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The
+clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little
+room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.
+
+Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.
+
+"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball
+of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've
+ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself
+about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he
+was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down
+through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you
+... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his
+fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily
+and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood
+between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking
+the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy café table; men bent forward on
+their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men
+who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their
+graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a
+horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the
+filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which
+it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely
+necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk
+at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous
+heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.
+
+"Ellen--you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that
+comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that
+doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed
+you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And
+yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to
+say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could
+beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to
+watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's
+all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved,
+that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped
+dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as
+your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I
+am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."
+
+He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first
+night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart
+pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.
+
+"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic.
+I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love
+God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them
+to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has
+no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear
+prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and
+women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like
+it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which
+he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But
+there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love
+changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves
+up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some
+woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary
+women. _Vin Ordinaire._ Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female
+stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the
+spell--you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are
+the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for
+just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."
+
+He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so
+great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that
+nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he
+feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity,
+since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this
+richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it
+made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for
+lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it
+had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to
+look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of
+his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his
+inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to
+make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against
+fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick
+sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more
+lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so
+little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself
+nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic
+change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his
+life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same
+revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though
+within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no
+reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover;
+but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of
+disloyalty to some fair standard.
+
+He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as
+an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been
+blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a
+severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an
+accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped
+unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth
+and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as
+if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to
+justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which
+showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of
+those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful
+interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely
+things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to
+him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a
+thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her
+again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me!
+I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested
+love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a
+lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the
+sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"
+
+She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her
+gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you
+think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're
+not miserable, are you?"
+
+"Sometimes. I have been lately."
+
+"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong--and
+victorious! But why?"
+
+"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."
+
+"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of
+organisation," she gravely told him.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken
+particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to
+the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there,
+and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you
+go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do,
+although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of
+having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what
+it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of
+one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes
+one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come
+again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on
+to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he
+had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were
+thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The
+sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers.
+You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that
+in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you
+that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a
+garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what
+you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their
+branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they
+grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very
+edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look
+past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you.
+Dearest, when can we get married?"
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a
+wife?"
+
+He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep
+two."
+
+She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't
+divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston
+say so."
+
+He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I
+could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of
+things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"
+
+"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...."
+She looked down, weighing grave things.
+
+"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I
+will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to
+make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let
+you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and
+whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."
+
+She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her
+lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.
+
+"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure
+about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got.
+Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole
+worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls,
+stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of
+disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect
+surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was
+not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with
+precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with
+the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of
+organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for
+his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman
+fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who
+had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before
+the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her
+quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at
+last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory
+that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were
+stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of
+her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he
+went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money.
+Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great
+commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one
+considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure
+science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied
+science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got
+her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that
+sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex
+at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."
+
+She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?"
+she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why
+isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"
+
+"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of
+being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money.
+I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the
+conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's
+game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge--the same kind
+of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a
+person by being with them all the time and loving them very much.
+Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the
+pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But,
+dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to
+marry me."
+
+"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am
+marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will
+know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if
+you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."
+
+"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't
+you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am!
+Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if
+he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were
+still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of
+which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any
+case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you,
+how little I deserve you."
+
+"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd
+been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself
+to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his
+eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer,
+living in a house with you, won't it?"
+
+He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling
+her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was
+outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had
+hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to
+him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the
+light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so
+real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as
+terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a
+helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again--for he knew she
+did not like him to say it!--such a little thing. He remembered, with a
+sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had
+sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the
+human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how
+he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated
+Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for
+the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men
+sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the
+way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some
+special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that
+lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.
+He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi'
+our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to
+see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was
+evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a
+world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest
+you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon
+day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed
+succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.
+
+Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality,
+felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met
+her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in
+the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old
+men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white.
+"What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow
+to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish
+James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry.
+"Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew
+well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll
+have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had
+thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on
+perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland
+sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the
+narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.
+
+It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its
+days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as
+some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had
+arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid
+fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks,
+Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house--he rolled his tongue round
+the loneliness repellently--had neither sent the cheque on to her nor
+asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called
+Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of
+property"--it was evident that he admired such--saw a prospect of
+getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing
+well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was,"
+and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and
+alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an
+eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.
+
+"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day,
+looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable
+unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find
+out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was
+abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and
+geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing
+standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what--she
+called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!--I kenned there was not her like
+under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her
+on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been
+amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing
+aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her
+mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court
+on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which
+she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that
+keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like
+to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?"
+Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her
+fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate
+about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here,
+as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable
+air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry
+laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a
+nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its
+troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."
+
+Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad
+concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie
+alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been
+overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man.
+Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion
+that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He
+had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it
+stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her
+disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could
+pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could
+step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he
+savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the
+sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must
+be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money?
+Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking
+of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had
+risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike
+because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've
+been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by
+the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching
+his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity.
+Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his
+back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the
+world.
+
+Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her
+delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought
+of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her
+live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its
+primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more
+experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine
+white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny
+had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to
+miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be
+played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a
+rôle. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very
+clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His
+heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have
+been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of
+concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this
+before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he
+wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of
+eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that
+his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life
+to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out
+loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow
+wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in
+gratitude, and found her looking at him.
+
+"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking
+that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking
+down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."
+
+The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to
+take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh
+goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him
+from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on
+her bosom. "I want--I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be
+good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a
+religion.
+
+They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee
+and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one
+foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then
+she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands
+behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr.
+Gladstone!
+
+Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird,
+appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen!
+And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr.
+Yaverland into the parlour!"
+
+"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a
+guilty little girl.
+
+Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an
+instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never
+do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to
+marry me."
+
+Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice
+at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at
+the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on
+the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he
+noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful
+to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her
+life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must
+live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent
+allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.
+
+Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far
+as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."
+
+Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet
+about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because
+now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!
+
+"Let me marry her soon," he said.
+
+She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had
+said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."
+
+"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.
+
+She became tragic.
+
+"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house
+at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you.
+Obviously you can't stand this climate."
+
+She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together
+having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well.
+I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into
+memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always
+practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man
+than anyone has allowed."
+
+They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its
+honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly,
+"Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went
+out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."
+
+"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland--maircy me, what shall I call
+you now?"
+
+"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."
+
+"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one
+would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing!
+Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I
+wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take
+Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."
+
+"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly.
+It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R--Richard, will you take her
+into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not
+hear?"
+
+"Ellen dear!"
+
+"Away now!"
+
+"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the
+best tablecloth after the mending--and there's nothing but cod-roes, and
+you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away,
+dear--you'll make Richard feel awkward--"
+
+Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she
+knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.
+
+
+IV
+
+He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to
+her three times.
+
+_"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute
+of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the
+sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red
+hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds,
+and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the
+most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every
+moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a
+waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now
+I do--that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima,
+you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you;
+we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd
+light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your
+beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my
+lovely red-haired Ellen...."_
+
+And she had written to him twice....
+
+_"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what
+you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the
+library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping
+her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as
+hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically
+nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Shelley and Byron. But
+their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please
+come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did
+you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling
+there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of
+life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not
+believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there
+must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one
+another. Do please come soon...."_
+
+Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and illustrated papers for
+the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.
+Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought
+Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three
+dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he
+saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind
+deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out
+to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw
+extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women
+living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the
+lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.
+Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that
+Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and
+unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the
+door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an
+amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant
+hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of
+the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a
+fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons
+convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase
+creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out
+at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her
+face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in
+lank, curved strands about her shoulders.
+
+She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a
+crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.
+They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."
+
+"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I
+knocked that it was diphtheria she had."
+
+"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with
+wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd
+again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to
+think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in
+her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed
+her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick
+away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the
+staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses.
+"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."
+
+"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."
+
+"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.
+Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."
+
+"That be damned."
+
+"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled
+into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered
+in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"
+Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than
+any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her
+so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked
+so wee!"
+
+"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her
+so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his
+maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him,
+and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of
+the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no
+sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family
+now. You might have let me do that!"
+
+"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you
+see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's
+no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have
+been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was
+her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme
+poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury
+but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the
+beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've
+told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six
+weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all
+the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful
+tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call
+on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her
+mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the
+slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and
+gathered her closely to him.
+
+"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.
+
+"You look very beautiful."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."
+
+"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck
+with a large horn button anything but decent."
+
+"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm
+past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother
+her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning
+for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for
+my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like,
+though doubtless it would do me good to know."
+
+"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back
+the first thing in the morning."
+
+"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness.
+("Ye've got--ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me
+feel all--all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me
+up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully
+before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appetite even when the
+Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work
+against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just
+Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you!
+There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that
+mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her
+terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was
+sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years
+ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot
+think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The
+doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry.
+She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You
+go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the
+kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have
+heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."
+
+"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of
+Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go
+off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."
+
+"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come
+with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like
+a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal
+Family."
+
+"But why must you go out?"
+
+"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they
+give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and
+every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health
+Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill,
+friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,'
+'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be
+amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for
+worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."
+
+"But, my God, can't you telephone?"
+
+"No, of course not. They can't do that in these institutions. They'd
+have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But
+it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I
+never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the
+old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful
+thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although
+she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!"
+She passed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging
+down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the
+table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with
+milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that
+was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great
+grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing
+and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress
+in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just
+wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she
+never got one. Illustrated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing
+intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a
+great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages,
+clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I
+expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."
+
+Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in
+her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't
+I go and look at this board?"
+
+"No. I want to go myself."
+
+"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some
+place in Princes Street."
+
+"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying
+good-night to Mother."
+
+They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on
+to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.
+She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and
+stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring
+noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just
+lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently
+she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must
+go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing
+in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird
+might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with
+gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose
+you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you
+can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to
+turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not
+handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped
+her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going
+to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there,
+shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.
+
+"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."
+
+"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's
+easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But
+mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his
+letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets
+old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be
+able to keep it up?"
+
+She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her
+parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh
+Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of
+deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the
+persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious
+gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It
+was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.
+
+He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things
+much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll
+be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet
+there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for
+you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I
+have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ...
+I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...
+something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it
+communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.
+
+They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.
+He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that
+to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she
+was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and
+trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found
+pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind
+region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth
+in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such
+fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.
+
+At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they
+made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it
+travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of
+Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of
+coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since
+there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their
+minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church
+like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is
+doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than
+precious stones.
+
+So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women
+are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern
+women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of
+languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North
+was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their
+bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such
+sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him
+for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so
+sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme
+passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would
+provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he
+had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen
+during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been,
+he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising
+things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen
+would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he
+realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and
+therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by
+telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for
+he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which
+pain surely could not live.
+
+"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it
+you were thinking of saying?"
+
+He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell
+you about myself."
+
+She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her
+heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will
+know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything
+disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted
+that till you met me you were a bad character."
+
+"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother
+and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it,
+and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor
+little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old
+story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with.
+We've got our own lives to lead, thank God!"
+
+She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted,
+and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something
+that you ought to tell me!"
+
+He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm
+illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, God,
+it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She
+probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his
+deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence
+there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him
+want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't
+married to each other...."
+
+"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's
+silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand
+gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the
+others twit you with it?"
+
+Oh, God, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when
+they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."
+
+"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is
+always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."
+
+He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage
+meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable
+they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman
+in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she
+herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to
+cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to
+have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that
+everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards
+it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If
+she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that
+solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred
+saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which
+was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking
+of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not
+married to my father...."
+
+But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch
+of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel
+of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of
+physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before
+hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either
+not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had
+reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers,
+and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a
+merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and
+undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might
+have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so
+wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There
+appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps
+the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which
+represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff
+and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a
+little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She
+wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth
+and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what
+is she like?"
+
+"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she
+was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity
+as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday
+papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that.
+Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as
+tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea
+of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was
+saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite
+uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might
+have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at
+once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of
+himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the
+Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell
+her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he
+could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned
+his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt
+himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar
+reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to
+his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not
+marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least,
+on her side it was love! On his ... on _his_...."
+
+"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was
+trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow
+it's making it happen all over again...."
+
+This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was
+using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when
+he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for
+the argument of phantom passions in her room, and she opened her eyes
+suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him
+grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand,
+but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly,
+I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the
+ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that
+stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was
+not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found
+fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of
+course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion
+became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel
+of his Ellen.
+
+"Forgive me," he murmured.
+
+"Of course I forgive you."
+
+"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"
+
+"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."
+
+"That's a brave undertaking!"
+
+They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've
+always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing
+I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest
+collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used
+to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her
+tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge.
+Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth
+when it is nearly all bookshops?"
+
+She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her
+breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she
+slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they
+were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with
+drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this
+street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed
+with windows broken or hung with rags.
+
+"Isn't this the High Street?"
+
+"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a
+fine Saturday morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the
+Highlanders drilling."
+
+"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"
+
+"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most
+likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only
+taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He
+said I would be just a fule to worry."
+
+He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops
+that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm.
+"You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this
+awful part."
+
+"Is this it?"
+
+"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her
+number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon
+in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"
+
+After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your
+mother's number was?"
+
+"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that
+white dog!"
+
+His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"
+
+
+V
+
+A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the
+sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and
+they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced
+over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her
+being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her
+mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone
+arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness
+through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel
+drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a
+piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the
+gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to
+Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the
+residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good
+omens.
+
+When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with
+ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told
+herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining
+their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one,
+that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of
+an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that
+her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had
+seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away
+from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen
+behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud
+consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the
+same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the
+danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for
+the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and
+of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that
+fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the
+words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was
+that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds
+employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a
+position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a
+nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she
+perceived that he was going to do something which he should have
+delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and
+his office to these two strangers.
+
+As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm
+in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that
+the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the
+little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was
+definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits
+made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth,
+were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that
+followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the
+pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on
+lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they
+passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass
+and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran
+into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind,
+private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone;
+down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of
+different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making
+among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.
+
+This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and
+some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people
+should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and
+the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who
+carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could
+be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:
+"You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on
+the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'
+happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty
+without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted
+itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more
+that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the
+speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in
+the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her
+mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably
+well and wearing the moiré blouse that she had given her for her
+birthday.
+
+"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door
+that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place
+of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk,
+and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a
+prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not
+see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and
+turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she
+still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being
+rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the
+four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through
+the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind
+but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their
+appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking
+at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they
+saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout
+absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that
+displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now
+convinced her that mother was dying.
+
+There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose
+vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat
+and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall
+and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and
+looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there
+was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin
+body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door
+to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad,
+comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and
+gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly
+come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet
+struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from
+their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work
+if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to
+be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh
+to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to
+that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its
+being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and
+the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising
+doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the
+end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one
+moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which
+dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful
+light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour
+of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman
+parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.
+It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where
+mother was lying.
+
+She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the
+better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She
+wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary
+movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the
+extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.
+"Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."
+
+The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in
+a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence
+and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical
+terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary
+language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary
+dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run
+a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go
+into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see
+her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was
+hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large
+window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs,
+and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a
+richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several
+sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known
+neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather
+enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she
+would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her
+popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable
+but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and
+minimally furnished as this room.
+
+Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of
+stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the
+screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron
+bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen
+but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to
+have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of
+the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was
+for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two
+glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever
+been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and
+about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth,
+there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the
+slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked
+for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end
+of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that
+sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense
+glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some
+inmost branch of a large tree.
+
+"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"
+
+From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to
+make her lips meet, and speak.
+
+"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be
+with you. You needn't speak."
+
+But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so
+remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths
+commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She
+whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."
+
+Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes
+towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.
+At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his
+lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not,
+and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and
+knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He
+said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be
+poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and
+under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.
+Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she
+dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no
+attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be
+together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with
+Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon
+her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It
+struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and
+inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come
+to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the
+stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in
+fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose
+wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great
+glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.
+
+There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though
+attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the
+exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had
+greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy
+pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!"
+She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about
+life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning
+the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother
+dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they
+had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother
+dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made
+a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that
+she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's,
+patted it.
+
+All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and
+spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint
+pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using
+it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure
+would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want
+all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all
+yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed
+from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and
+thither at the call of speculation, told them consoling things. The
+mother's flesh, touching the daughter's, remembered a faint pulse felt
+long ago and marvelled at this splendid sequel, and lost fear. Since the
+past held such a miracle the future mattered nothing. Existence had
+justified itself. The watchers were surprised to hear her sigh of
+rapture. The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in
+the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to
+embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first
+best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.
+
+There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of
+giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup
+of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange
+because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that
+she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to
+first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had
+played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the
+_Student's Song Book_, and they had had several glasses of Stone's
+Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly
+berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a
+wonderful faculty for bursts of gaiety, pure in tone like a blackbird's
+song, which brought out whatever gladness might be latent in any person
+or occasion. As twelve chimed out they had stood in front of the
+chimneypiece mirror and raised their glasses above their heads, singing,
+"Auld Lang Syne" in time with the dancers on the other side of the wall,
+who were making such a night of it that several times the house had
+seemed likely to fall in.
+
+When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses,
+Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I
+was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at
+yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had
+held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome
+mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his
+honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got
+another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms
+like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered
+by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow,
+uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy
+with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been
+greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all
+have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember
+ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much
+admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing
+...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly
+twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of
+an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which,
+since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads
+if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the
+hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are
+about work that springs from ćsthetic principles different from their
+own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of
+laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked
+at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was
+somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had
+been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the
+night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.
+
+She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's
+face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any
+gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little
+tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin
+time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling
+every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.
+It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth
+thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and
+on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if
+she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone
+yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into
+a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her
+lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow
+teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the
+tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and
+the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to
+kiss, even though one loved her so much.
+
+Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very
+beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom
+Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited
+girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women
+in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was
+sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl
+in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French
+artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at
+Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a
+portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New
+York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for
+though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more
+out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing
+at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt
+I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to
+his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing
+that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it
+down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed
+Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the
+tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink
+roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had
+often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and
+say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh
+at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."
+
+It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those
+strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred
+Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan
+collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working
+with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was
+intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius,
+and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred
+Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the
+shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a
+diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and
+her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her
+skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and
+setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how
+more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and
+confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile
+of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound
+strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way
+that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick
+silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of
+allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.
+
+Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring
+face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard
+again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but
+immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long
+grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had
+had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt
+was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some
+relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a
+professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred
+to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to
+New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman
+jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased,
+deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she
+had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed
+that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed
+that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She
+remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had
+gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror
+and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a
+woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice
+arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs
+singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").
+
+Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding
+the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done
+to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was
+unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the
+eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be
+tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed
+that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had
+simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that
+she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.
+This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature
+behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had
+thought there were three fixed species of people--the young, the
+middle-aged, and the old--and she had never before realised that young
+people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this
+arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this
+humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind
+passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer
+the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly
+when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as
+if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm
+against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping
+streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news
+that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her
+knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.
+
+She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in
+and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and
+staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen
+perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her
+mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with
+speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach
+into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that
+was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother,
+because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.
+
+Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is
+to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way
+the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never
+have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at
+her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the
+recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and
+had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had
+found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom,
+with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown
+her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she
+had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph
+Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your
+father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure
+Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her
+head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was
+horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the
+nurse proof of proper feelings.
+
+She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with
+her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her
+face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor
+and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that
+the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not
+look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by
+diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the
+mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she
+looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient
+performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like,
+all through life--a good child. She had always walked as if someone in
+authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her
+toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had
+become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she
+had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a
+road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been
+lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were
+innocent.
+
+"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and
+there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted
+feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared
+occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly
+at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny
+darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little
+rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial
+bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go anywhere for a
+good sunset!"
+
+There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had
+watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring
+torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that
+slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers
+that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers'
+weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation.
+The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in
+a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and
+above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had
+winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled
+about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key
+of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady
+awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had
+stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from
+their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and
+fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of
+bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a
+sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her
+own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"
+
+For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen
+remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night,
+though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green
+glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on
+its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not
+suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village
+that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no
+pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal
+with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was
+untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the
+way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of
+beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in
+Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed
+with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their
+quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that
+be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.
+
+But when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery
+ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is
+a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people
+smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and
+when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at
+the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of
+pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in
+pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been
+rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and
+could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any
+bright scrap of that beauty she adored.
+
+Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth
+with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her,
+and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle
+on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a
+handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into
+the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was
+not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops,
+trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very
+poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had
+stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love:
+indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have
+taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were
+harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder
+and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she
+felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from
+companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and
+pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to
+linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the
+free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of
+love.
+
+She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the
+Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin
+projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look
+wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By
+neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of
+negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to
+send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before
+lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of
+little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until
+they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last
+saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not
+quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in
+disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this
+neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said
+to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning
+them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.
+
+How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as
+anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to
+Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had
+broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the
+picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?
+Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical
+presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with
+concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow
+forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow,
+repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ...
+and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of
+telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which
+he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the
+sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious
+charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all
+other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation
+on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection
+of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke,
+too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which
+he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore
+uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with
+his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he
+looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always
+overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner
+for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her
+hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then
+bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly
+administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece
+of female imbecility.
+
+Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she
+guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she
+whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you
+quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and
+showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had
+burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands
+with a fierce, jubilant pressure.
+
+How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool.
+That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she
+could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish,
+but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast
+imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that
+was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give
+its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she
+take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real
+wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She
+had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than
+most professed romantics do.
+
+Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to
+Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses
+and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house.
+He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised
+him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at
+losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but
+I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella."
+At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are
+such a wee darling!"
+
+And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all
+Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things?
+It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though
+it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than
+them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she
+undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good--even divinely good. Life
+had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that
+it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant
+demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child,
+and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her
+hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love
+that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than
+that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a
+little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings
+arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often
+too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest
+possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking
+of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a
+miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!"
+she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother
+got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles?
+Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her.
+It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round
+hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman
+was being allowed to die without having been happy.
+
+"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the
+universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find
+that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she
+cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until
+the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed
+the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold
+hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and
+when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen,
+whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just
+enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.
+
+Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his
+eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.
+
+"Richard, she's going!"
+
+He could find no consolation to give her but a close, unvoluptuous
+embrace. They stood silent, looking at the fire. "Is it not strange,"
+she whispered, "that people really die?"
+
+Richard did not in the least participate in this feeling. He merely
+looked at her with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone
+should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer
+to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not
+tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him,
+though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might
+see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he
+merely bent to kiss her.
+
+"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had
+disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."
+
+But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister
+of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of
+anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he
+should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a
+spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen
+mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it
+was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never
+scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it?
+What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen,
+and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was
+so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."
+
+The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said
+gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."
+
+She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said
+wistfully.
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"May I kiss her?"
+
+"Please don't. It isn't safe."
+
+"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you
+ready?"
+
+As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to
+that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the
+upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all
+you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went
+to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"
+
+"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying
+place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of
+death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in
+electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a
+beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and
+dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.
+
+Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across
+the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in
+sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate
+the plot of the universe. This was a catchment area that drained the
+whole city of terror; and how small it was! Certainly terror was among
+the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking
+they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being
+children of this age, and conscious of humanity's grievance, they
+thought of Him without love. But it was one of the least frequent and
+the most impermanent of His moods. All the people one does not know seem
+to be quite happy. Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally
+closed the story of Mrs. Melville's life, and had to the end shown her
+no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future. It might
+well be that no other life would ever be so grievous. Therefore it was
+with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were
+provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out
+through the iron gates.
+
+The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation. Before
+them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded
+tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the
+hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs;
+and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse
+stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white
+overalls worked among bare trees. Through this grim landscape they
+stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived
+without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going
+to be so glorious.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Now that they had taken the tickets at Willesden, Ellen felt doubtful of
+the whole enterprise. It was very possible that Richard's mother would
+not want her. In fact, she had been sure that Richard's mother did not
+want her ever since they left Crewe. There a fat, pasty young man had
+got in and taken the seat opposite her, and had sat with his pale grey
+eyes dwelling on the flying landscape with a slightly sick, devotional
+expression, while his lips moved and his plump hands played with a small
+cross inscribed "All for Jesus" which hung from his watch-chain.
+Presently he had settled down to rest with his hands folded on his lap,
+but had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his
+waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the
+air. "Mother will laugh when I tell her about that," she said to
+herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead
+six weeks.
+
+This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the
+blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her
+stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers
+henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender
+intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her
+inflexibly honest ćsthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's
+letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever,
+because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word
+written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white
+paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But
+their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come
+like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not
+wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject
+of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was
+really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who
+was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them
+merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were
+strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old
+people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running
+Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her
+as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise
+his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in
+favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it
+to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to
+have been economically independent all the days of her life.
+
+It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical
+ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way
+they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack
+and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that
+they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of
+Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career
+became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which
+had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with
+illegitimacy. She prefigured her swarthy and obese.
+
+She got out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told
+to do. The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through
+which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and
+tarnished darkness. She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed
+and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along
+the ground, and who seemed to be seeking so urgently for cabs and
+porters because their meagre lives had convinced them that here was
+never enough of anything to go round. If she and her mother had ever
+come to London on the trip they had always planned, she would have been
+swinging off now to look for a taxi, just like a man; and when she came
+back her mother would have said, "Why, Ellen, I never would have thought
+you could have got one so quickly." Well, that would not happen now.
+She would have grieved over it; but a train far down the line pulled out
+of the station and disclosed a knot of red and green signal lights that
+warmed the eye and thence the heart as jewels do, and at that she was as
+happy as if she were turning over private jewels that she could wear on
+her body and secrete in her own casket. She was absorbed in the sight
+when she heard a checked soft exclamation, and turning about had the
+illusion that she looked into Richard's eyes.
+
+"I am Richard's mother. You are Richard's wife?"
+
+Ellen repeated, "I am Richard's wife," feeling distressed that she had
+said it, since they were not yet married, but aware that to correct it
+would be trivial.
+
+It was strange to look down instead of up at those dark eyes, those
+brows which lay straight black bars save for that slight piratical
+twist, with no intervening arch between them and the dusky eyelids. It
+was strange to hear Richard's voice coming from a figure blurred with
+soft, rich, feminine clothes. It was strange to see her passing through
+just such a moment of impeded tenderness as Richard often underwent.
+Plainly she wanted to kiss Ellen, but was prevented by an intense
+physical reserve, and did not want to shake hands, since that was
+inadequate, and this conflict gave her for a minute a stiff queerness of
+attitude. She compromised by taking Ellen's left hand in her own left
+hand, and giving it what was evidently a sincere, but not spontaneous
+pressure. Then, turning away, she asked, "What about your luggage?"
+
+"I've just this suitcase. I sent the rest in advance. Do you not think
+that's the most sensible way?" said Ellen, in a tone intended to convey
+that she was not above taking advice from an older woman.
+
+Mrs. Yaverland made a vague, purring noise, which seemed to imply that
+she found material consideration too puzzling for discussion, and
+commanded the porter with one of those slow, imperative gestures that
+Richard made when he wanted people to do things. Walking down the
+platform, Ellen wondered why Richard always called her a little thing.
+His mother was far smaller than she was, and broad-shouldered too, which
+made her look dumpy. Her resemblance to Richard became marked again
+when they got into the taxi, and she dealt with the porter and the
+driver with just such quiet murmured commands and dippings into pockets
+of loose change as Richard on these occasions, but Ellen did not find it
+in the least endearing. She was angry that Richard was like that, not
+because he was himself, but because he was this woman's son. When Mrs.
+Yaverland asked in that beautiful voice which was annoyingly qualified
+by terseness as her letters had been, "And how's Richard?" she replied
+consequentially, with the air of a person describing his garden to a
+person who has not one. But Mrs. Yaverland was too distracting to allow
+her to pursue this line with any satisfaction. For she listened with
+murmurs that were surely contented; and, having drawn off her very
+thick, very soft leather gloves, she began to polish her nails, which
+were already brighter than any Ellen had ever seen, against the palms of
+her hands, staring meanwhile out of absent eyes at the sapphire London
+night about them, which Ellen was feeling far too upset to enjoy.
+
+There was a tormenting incongruity about this woman: those lacquered
+nails shown on hands that were broad and strong like a man's; and the
+head that rose from the specifically dark fur was massive and vigilant
+and serene, like the head of a great man. Moreover, she was not in the
+least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up
+the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest
+to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry
+them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where
+one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had
+felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever
+happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from
+the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs
+which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running
+slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which
+makes people perform dramas. And everything about her threatened that
+her performances would be too strange.
+
+She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a
+brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her
+in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not
+Edinburgh. The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the
+yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into
+shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.
+They had stopped outside a florist's, in whose dismantled window a girl
+in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of
+chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls
+almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a
+Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open
+street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding
+herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of
+being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an
+occasion of public rejoicing.
+
+Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind
+plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy _brise-bises_ that were as a
+ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a
+divine shamelessness. It couldn't happen up there. There were simply not
+the people to do it. It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged
+men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, "Catch me
+bringing you here again, Elspeth. It's a nice thing to have your dinner
+with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you
+take," and because young men would as constantly have turned to young
+women with the gasp, "I'm sure I saw father passing," it would have been
+a failure. But here it was a success. The sight was like loud, frivolous
+music. And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up
+to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white
+squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy
+and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of
+gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense
+than the North.
+
+She wanted to sit there quietly, savouring the scene. But Mrs. Yaverland
+said in her terse voice: "I've taken rooms at the Hapsburg for to-night.
+I thought you'd like it. I do myself, because it's near the river. You
+know, we're near the river at Roothing." Ellen could not longer turn her
+attention to the spectacle for wondering why Mrs. Yaverland should
+speak of the Thames as if it were an interesting and important relative.
+It could not possibly be that Mrs. Yaverland felt about the river as she
+felt about the Pentlands, for elderly people did not feel things like
+that. They liked a day's outing, but they always sat against the
+breakwater with the newspaper and the sandwich-basket while one went
+exploring; at least, mother always did. Trying to insert some sense into
+the conversation, she asked politely, "Do you do much boating?" and was
+again baffled by the mutter, "No, it's too far away." Well, if it was
+too far away it could not be near. She was tired by the long day's
+travel.
+
+But the hotel, when they alighted, pleased her. The vast entrance hall,
+with its prodigality of tender rosy light, the people belonging to the
+very best families who sat about in monstrously large armchairs set at
+vast intervals on the lawny carpets, were not in the least embarrassed
+by the publicity of their position and shone physically with well-being
+and the expectation of pleasure; the grandiose marble corridors, the
+splendid version of a lift, and the number of storeys that flashed past
+them, all very much the same, but justifying their monotony by their
+stateliness, like modern blank verse, made her remember solemnly her
+inner conviction that she would some day find herself amid surroundings
+of luxury.
+
+The necessity of looking as if she were used to and even wearied by this
+sort of thing weighed heavily on her, for she felt that it was almost
+dishonour not to express the solemn joy this magnificence was giving
+her. So she stood in the fine room to which Mrs. Yaverland took her, and
+after having resolved that the minute she was left alone she would touch
+the magnificent crimson velvet roses that stood out in high relief all
+over the wallpaper, she felt that she could not graciously withhold
+praise from this which was to be her own special share of the splendour.
+She moved shyly towards Mrs. Yaverland, who had gone to the window and
+was looking down in the night, and said shyly, "This is a very fine
+room," but, she knew, too softly to reach such markedly inattentive
+ears. She stood there awkwardly, feeling herself suspended till this
+woman should take notice of her. If her mother had been with her they
+would have had a room with two beds, and would have talked before they
+went to sleep of the day and its wonderful ending in this grand place.
+She sighed. Mrs. Yaverland turned round.
+
+"Come and look at your view," she said, and raised the sash so that they
+could lean out.
+
+Beneath there was a deep drop of the windless, scentless darkness that
+night brings to modern cities; then a narrow trench of unlit gardens
+obscured by the threadbare texture of leafless tree-tops, then a broad
+luminous channel of roadway, lined with trees whose natural substance
+was so changed by the unnatural light that they looked like toy trees
+made of some brittle composition, and traversed by tramcars glowing
+orange and twanging white sparks from invisible wires with their
+invisible arms; at its further edge a long procession of lights stood
+with a certain pomp along a dark margin, beyond which were black flowing
+waters. To the left, from behind tall cliffs of masonry pierced with
+innumerable windows that were not lit, yet gleamed like the eyes of a
+blind dog, there jutted out the last spans of a bridge, set thickly with
+large lights whose images bobbed on the current beneath like vast yellow
+water-flowers. On another bridge to the right a train was casting down
+on the stream a redness that was fire rather than light. On the opposite
+bank of the river, at the base of black towers, barges softly dark like
+melancholy lay on the different harsher darkness of the water, and
+showed, so sparsely that they looked the richer, a few ruby and emerald
+lights. Above, stars crackled frostily, close to earth, as stars do in
+winter.
+
+"That is the river," said Mrs. Yaverland.
+
+She said it as if she desired to be out of this warmth, standing over
+there by the dark parapet marked by the line of lamps close to the
+flowing waters; as if she would have liked all the beautiful bright
+lights to be extinguished, so that there would be nothing left but the
+dark waters.
+
+Ellen went and sat down on the bed. There was a standard lamp beside it,
+whose light, curbed to a small rosy cloud by a silken shade like a
+fairy's frock, seemed much the best thing for her eyes in the room. She
+was sad that in this new life in England, which had seemed so promising,
+one still had to turn for comfort from persons to things. She was aware
+that wildness such as this, such preferences for walking abroad in the
+chill night rather than sitting in warm rooms, for sterile swift water
+rather than the solid earth that bears the crops and supports the
+cities, are the processes of poetry working in the soul. But it did not
+please her in an older woman. She felt that Mrs. Melville, who would
+have been trotting about crying out at the magnificence of the room,
+would have been behaving not only more conveniently, but more decently,
+than this woman who was now crossing the room and not bringing peace
+with her. Her open coat slipped backwards on her shoulders so that it
+stood out on each side like a cloak worn by a romantic actor striding
+across the stage to the play's climax. The ultimate meaning of her
+expression could be no other than insolence, for it gave sign of some
+preoccupation so strong that the only force which could hold her back
+from speaking of it could be contempt for her hearer. Her face was
+shadowed with a suggestion of strong feeling, which was as unsuitable on
+cheeks so worn as paint would have been.
+
+Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down
+on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a
+movement towards intimacy, and said, "I hope you're not very tired."
+When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the
+words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful
+to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either
+affected or hypocritical. For if that wildness were sincere, and not
+some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English
+were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she
+was doing up Ellen's black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and
+condescension.
+
+It was a pity that she was so very like Richard. When they had gone
+downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the
+plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she
+crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way
+in her resentful recognition of that likeness. She was not, of course,
+so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call "very
+striking-looking." Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at
+once so appropriate and so common. She did not allow herself to
+translate it from commonness and admit that it is a phrase that common
+people use when they want to say a woman's face is the point of
+departure for a fair journey of the imagination. It was true that a
+certain rough imperfection was as definitely a part of her quality as
+perfection was of his, and that there ran from her nose to her mouth
+certain heavy lines that could never at any age befall his flesh with
+its bias towards beauty. But everything that so wonderfully made its
+appearance a reference to romance was here also: that dark skin in which
+it seemed as if the customary pigment had been blended with mystery;
+that extravagance of certain features, the largeness of the eye, the
+luxury of lashes; that manner at once languid and alert, which might
+have been acquired by residence in some country where molten excess of
+fine weather was corrected by gales of adventure. But though so close in
+blood and in seeming to the most beloved, this woman could not be loved.
+She could not possibly be liked. But this was an irrational emotion, and
+Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that
+would justify it.
+
+It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were
+brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders
+that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared
+not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift,
+automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a
+polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. It was evidently a
+habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose,
+for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it,
+although the brows were still sleek. She did it, Ellen told herself with
+a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the
+afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead
+and strums on her knee. It was the only expression the occasion allowed
+for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the
+inordinate beauty of her clothes. They were, she said to herself, using
+a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a
+woman of that age. They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental. The
+very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to
+the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the
+effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she
+was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that
+effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so
+conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to
+accept her middle age. And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her
+colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light
+like amber. Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the
+various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she
+wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever
+about clothes. They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase
+that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a
+pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last
+refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their
+own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat
+seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff
+of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and
+yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was
+sensually heavy with its own richness.
+
+And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows.
+Really, it was terrible that Richard's mother should be so deep in crime
+as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of
+public meetings. She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women
+are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power,
+content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing
+and adorning of it. She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to
+produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest,
+hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life.
+And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and
+saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate:
+
+"You won't like anchovies; those things they're helping you to now."
+
+Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion,
+and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had
+betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and
+then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp
+bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion
+did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes?
+When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she
+answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please."
+She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or
+white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip
+had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking
+almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners
+had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear
+travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her
+lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again
+till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door.
+Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes
+to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."
+
+The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been
+substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with
+observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was
+disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her
+eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought
+she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things
+with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a
+dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the
+darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant
+physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the
+palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when
+she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images
+seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in
+bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had
+always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her
+in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands;
+pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being
+carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed
+deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended
+over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered;
+bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy
+gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks
+and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights
+with the colour of romance. It would have roused her fatigued
+imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand.
+She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure,
+and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the
+expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear,
+though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.
+
+She coughed to attract attention, and then sighed. "It's terrible," she
+declared, taking good care that her voice should travel across the
+table, "to see all these people being happy like this when there are
+millions in want."
+
+Marion set down her wine-glass with a movement that, though her hands
+were clever, seemed clumsy, so indifferent was she to the thing she
+handled and the place she put it in, and looked round the restaurant
+with eyes that were very like Richard's, though they shone from
+bloodshot whites and were not so bright as his, nor so kind; nor so
+capable, Ellen felt sure, of losing all brilliance and becoming
+contemplative, passionate darkness. She said in her rapid, inarticulate
+murmur, "They don't strike me as being particularly happy."
+
+Ellen was taken aback, and said in the tones of a popular preacher,
+"Then what are they doing here--feasting?"
+
+"I suppose they're here because it's on the map and so are they," she
+answered almost querulously. "They'd go anywhere else if one told them
+it was where they ought to be. Good children, most people. Anxious to do
+the right thing. Don't you think?"
+
+Ellen was unprepared for anything but agreement or reactionary argument
+from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched
+in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her
+emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very
+horrid. Her young mouth was convulsed. And then she reminded herself
+that it could not be horrid, for all grown-up people like it, and that
+there had never been any occasion when it was more necessary for her to
+be grown-up, so she continued to drink. Even after several mouthfuls she
+did not like it, but she was then interrupted by a soft exclamation from
+Mrs. Yaverland.
+
+"My dear, this wine is abominable. Don't you find it terribly sour?"
+
+"Well, I was thinking so," said Ellen, "but I didn't like to say."
+
+"It's dreadful. It must be corked."
+
+"Yes, I think it must," said Ellen knowingly.
+
+She called a waiter. "Would you like to try some other wine? I don't
+think I will. This has put me off for the night. No? Good. Two lemon
+squashes, one very sweet."
+
+That was a good idea of Mrs. Yaverland's. The lemon squash was lovely
+when it came, and Ellen had time to drink it while they were eating the
+chicken, so that there was no competitive flavour to spoil the ice
+pudding. While they were waiting for that Mrs. Yaverland smoothed her
+eyebrows once again, and gave her nails one more perfunctory polish, and
+opened her mouth to speak, but caught her breath and shut it again; and
+said, after a moment's silence, "I hope I've ordered the right sort of
+pudding. It's so hard to remember all these irrelevant French names. I
+wanted you to have the one with crystallised cherries. Richard used to
+be very fond of it." She looked round the restaurant more lovingly. "He
+liked this place when he was a boy. We used to come here once or twice
+every holiday and go to a theatre afterwards."
+
+But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that: when he opened his
+mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly,
+"Darling, I do love you." He had done it the very night before, in
+Grand-Aunt Jeannie's parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to
+tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his
+father before he was born. "It was not her fault. My father didn't stand
+by her. He was all right about money. But when he heard about the child,
+he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the
+Colonies. And he didn't come back. So she lost her nerve"; and that he
+had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a
+success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland. She was dying
+to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to
+admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had
+probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but
+because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly,
+"Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?"
+
+The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full
+of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason
+delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered. "How you see through
+me, dear!" she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate,
+charged with an astringent form of love. "All that I wanted to say was
+simply that I am so very glad you have come. Perhaps for reasons that
+you'll consider tiresome of me. But Richard has been so much away, and
+even when he's at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the
+time, that I've often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house,
+who'd talk to me occasionally and be a companion. Perhaps you'll think
+it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much
+older. But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.
+You're eighteen, aren't you?"
+
+"Eighteen past," Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain
+compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen. But
+her birthday had been a fortnight ago.
+
+"And I was nineteen when Richard was born. So you see to me a girl of
+eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling
+everything. So I hope you won't mind if I treat you as an equal." She
+raised her wineglass and looked over its brim at the girl's proud,
+solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour,
+bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other
+woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the
+wineglass down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden
+tone. "I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it
+or not. I knew you'd like it. You see, you get very evasive if you've
+ever been in a position like mine. You have to make servants like you so
+that they won't give notice when they hear the village gossip, because
+you must have a well-run house for your child. You have to make people
+like you so that they will let the children play with yours. So one gets
+into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without
+particularly worrying whether it's sincere. But this I find I really
+mean."
+
+As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who
+had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to
+something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well,
+I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant,"
+she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as
+likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to
+say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one
+another."
+
+Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as
+queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the
+girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give
+Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty
+which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his
+unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether
+Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And
+for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a
+courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a
+present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their
+distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for
+her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced
+voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."
+
+"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about
+herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me
+when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was
+afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that
+I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"
+
+"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint
+of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her
+son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at:
+that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the
+table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think
+you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've
+been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been
+hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on
+Richard and you."
+
+The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!"
+she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that
+when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest
+directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my
+nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and
+stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to
+attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving
+badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"
+
+"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us
+cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're
+surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that
+he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"
+
+Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to
+fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid
+women."
+
+Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion
+that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her,
+and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other
+women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.
+"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"
+
+There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of
+archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves
+me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect,
+the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women
+who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he
+can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went
+to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who
+were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds
+with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the
+soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that
+their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I
+will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd
+infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was
+not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he
+takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But
+I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much
+against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the
+world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but
+they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there
+cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are
+hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and
+fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like
+a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any
+character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.
+Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she
+had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free
+speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in
+late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none
+of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason....
+I'll tell you some time...."
+
+The girl was hurt. Marion bit her lip while she watched her crossly pick
+up her spoon and eat her ice pudding as if it was a duty. "This is like
+old times," she essayed feebly. "I've so often watched Richard eat it.
+He went through various stages with this pudding. When he was quite
+small he used to leave the crystallised cherries to the very last,
+because they were nicest, arranged in a row along the rim of his plate,
+openly and shamelessly. When he went to school he began to be afraid
+that people would think that babyish if they noticed it, and he used to
+leave them among the ice, though somehow they always did get left to
+the last. Then later on he began to side with public opinion himself,
+and think that perhaps there was something soft and unmanly about caring
+so much for anything to eat, so he used to gobble them first of all,
+trying not to taste them very much. Then there came an awful holiday
+when he wouldn't have any at all. That was just before he insisted on
+going to sea. But then he came back--and ever since he's had it every
+time we come here, and now he always leaves the cherries to the last."
+She was now immersed in the story she told; she was seeing again the
+slow magical increase of the small thing she had brought into the world,
+and the variations through which it passed in the different seasons of
+its youth, changing from brown candid gracefulness to a time of sulky
+clumsiness and perpetually abraded knees, and back again to gracefulness
+and willingness to share all laughter, yet ever remaining the small
+thing she had brought into the world. With eyes cast down, trying to
+dissemble her pride, lest the gods should envy, she added harshly, "He
+was quite interesting ... but I suppose all boys go through these
+phases.... I've had no other experiences...."
+
+Ellen was longing to hear what Richard was like when he was a boy, but
+she had been stung by that insolent, smiling murmur, and she could do
+nothing with any statement made by this woman but snarl at her. "No
+other experience?" she questioned peevishly. "I thought Richard said he
+had a half-brother."
+
+There was no longer any pride in Marion's eyes to dissemble. She stared
+at Ellen, and said heavily, as one who speaks concerning the violation
+of a secret, "Did Richard tell you that?" Before the girl had time to
+answer cruelly, "Yes, he tells me everything," she had remembered
+certain things which made her stiffen in her chair and keep her chin up
+and use her eyes as if there still flashed in them the pride which had
+utterly vanished. "Oh, yes," she asserted, in that forced voice, but
+very loudly and deliberately. "I have another son. He's a good boy. His
+name is Roger Peacey. You must meet him one day. I hope you will like
+him." She paused and recollected why they were speaking of this other
+son, and continued, "But, you see, I had nothing to do with him when he
+was a boy."
+
+This struck Ellen as very strange. She went on eating her ice pudding,
+but she cogitated on this matter. Why had this second son been brought
+up away from his mother? Surely that hardly ever happened except when
+there had been a divorce, and a husband whose wife had run away with
+another man was awarded by the courts "the custody of the child." Had
+she not talked of this son in the over-bluff tone in which people talk
+of those to whom they have done a wrong? She was possessed of the fierce
+monogamous passion which accompanies first and unachieved love, that
+loathing of all who are not content with the single sacramental draught
+which is the blood of God, but go heating the body with unblessed
+fermented wines; and she glared sharply under her brows at this woman,
+who after losing Richard's father married another man and then, as it
+appeared, had loved yet another man, as she might at someone whom she
+suspected of being drunk. It was true that Richard adored her, but then
+no doubt this kind of woman knew well how to deceive men. Softly she
+made to herself the Scottish manifestation of incredulity, "Mhm...." And
+Marion, for thirty years vigilant for sounds of scorn, heard and
+perfectly understood.
+
+She remained, however, massively and unattractively immobile. There came
+to her neither word nor expression to remove the girl's dubiety. Since
+she had heard such sounds of scorn over so lengthy a period they no
+longer came to her as trumpet calls to action, but rather as imperatives
+to silence, for above all things she desired that evil things should
+come to an end, and she had learned that an ugly speech ricochetting
+from the hard wall of a just answer may fly further and do worse. She
+knew it was necessary that she should dispel Ellen's suspicion, because
+they must work together to make a serene home for Richard, and she
+desired to do so for her son's sake, because she herself was possessed
+by the far fiercer monogamous passion of achieved and final love, which
+is disillusioned concerning mystical draughts, but knows that to take
+the bread of the beloved and cast it to the dogs is sin. She had
+acquired that knowledge, which is the only valuable kind of chastity
+worth having, that night when she had been forced to commit that
+profanation. Shading her eyes while there rushed over her the
+recollection of a pallid face looking yellow as it bent over the lamp,
+she reflected that even if she conquered this life-long indisposition to
+reply, the story was too monstrous to be told. It would not be believed.
+This girl would look at her under her brows and make that Scotch noise
+again and think her a liar as well as loose. So she sat silent, letting
+Ellen dislike her.
+
+She said at length, "Let's go and have coffee in the lounge."
+
+"I'm sure we don't need it," murmured Ellen, as a tribute to the
+magnificence of the meal.
+
+Crossing the room was a terrible business. She hoped people were not
+staring at her because she was with a woman whom they could perhaps see
+had once been bad. No doubt there were signs by which experienced people
+could tell. Richard's presence seemed all at once to have set behind the
+rim of the earth.
+
+They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked
+down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people,
+none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their
+fray with appetite. They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like
+Richard. She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that
+there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze
+of Richard's eyes, set in Richard's mother's face. Doubt left her. Here
+was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance. Here was the
+quality of life she loved. She found herself saying eagerly, that she
+might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such
+strong words as he used: "Yes, Marion?"
+
+"Ellen, when will you marry Richard?"
+
+"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We
+think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."
+
+"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being
+kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."
+
+Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an
+altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I
+feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.
+
+The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied,
+one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing
+at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which
+sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale
+clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a
+lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will
+not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon,
+so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her
+white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had
+stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across
+the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she
+could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like
+doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his
+towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely,
+"No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.
+Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves
+that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by
+the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but
+her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to
+desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she
+exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"
+
+Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would
+not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my
+life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you
+willed with. Let me have mine."
+
+But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy
+people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay
+hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she
+said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced
+herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her
+that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering
+vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to
+be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.
+I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I
+die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of
+me--quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I
+still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.
+You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you
+what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to
+shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my
+throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years
+that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But
+the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He
+lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I
+want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will
+give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for
+him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you
+see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the
+restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast
+mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these
+appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips,
+to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her
+reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and
+stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent
+and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are
+for their sons."
+
+She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that
+Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand
+across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so
+evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl
+was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.
+"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much
+more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I
+knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so
+very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take
+him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew
+he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us
+both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So
+I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's
+twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see
+to it that now he is here he is happy."
+
+Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared
+into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some
+practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered
+about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does
+having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when
+Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading,
+for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it
+always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre
+and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the
+Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life,
+since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever
+beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that
+she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now
+she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now
+she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman
+who had given her Richard.
+
+Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her
+mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under
+the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with
+sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd
+of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving
+by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had
+relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have
+rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of
+Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death
+she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering
+suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by
+anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for
+the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest
+recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had
+occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her
+sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.
+It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving
+her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and
+gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her
+till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with
+his long first kiss.
+
+She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and
+Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar,
+instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look
+at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and
+give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you
+mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at
+Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,"
+and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was
+never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember
+that Hendry escaped the family misfortune--mind you, I know it's no a
+fault--of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the
+dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane
+where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of
+lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the
+pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding
+of a theory.
+
+But those were the fair-weather uses of love. It was in the foul weather
+she would have missed him most. If this woman had not given her Richard
+she would have walked home from the hospital alone and wept by the
+unmade bed whose pillow was still dented by mother's head; she would
+have had to go to the cemetery with only Mr. Mactavish James and Uncle
+John Watson from Glasgow, who would have said "Hush!" when she waved her
+hand at the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and cried,
+"Good-bye, my wee lamb!" Life was so terrible it would not be
+supportable without love. She laid her hand on Marion's where it lay on
+the table, and stuttered, "Oh, it was brave of you!"
+
+The intimate contact was faintly disgusting to the other. She answered
+impatiently, "Not brave at all; I loved him so much that I would have
+done anything rather than lose him."
+
+"You loved him--even then?"
+
+"In a sense they are as much to one then as they ever are."
+
+"Ah...." Ellen continued to pat the other woman's hand and looked up
+wonderingly into her eyes, and was dismayed to see there that this
+fondling meant nothing to her. She was not ungrateful, but for such
+things her austerity had no use. All that she wanted was that assurance
+for which she had already asked. Ellen was proud, and she was a little
+hurt that the way in which she had proposed to pay the debt of gratitude
+was not acceptable, so she held up her hand and said coolly, "I'll marry
+your son when you like, Mrs. Yaverland."
+
+The other said nothing more than "Thank you." Realising that she had
+said it even more than usually indifferently, she put out her hand
+towards Ellen in imitation of the girl's own movement, but did it with
+so marked a lack of spontaneity that it must, as she instantly
+perceived, give an impression of insincerity. "How I fail!" she thought,
+but not too sadly, for at any rate she had got her son what he wanted. A
+man came and stood a little way behind her, looking here and there for
+someone whom he expected to find in the assembly, and she turned sharply
+to see if it were Richard; for always when he was away, if the shadows
+fell across her path or there came a knock at the door, she hoped that
+it was him.
+
+"I am stupid about him," she admitted, settling down in her chair, "but
+if he had come it would have been lovely. What would he think if he came
+now and found us two whom he loves most sitting here silent, almost
+sulky, because we have fixed the time of his marriage? He would not
+understand, of course. When a man is in love marriage loses all
+importance. He thinks that he could wait for ever. He never realises, as
+women do, that it is not love that matters but what we do with it. Why
+do I say as women do? Only women like me who have through making all
+possible mistakes found out the truth by the process of elimination.
+This girl is as unprovident as Richard is. So unprovident that I am
+afraid she is angry with me for insisting that she should put her
+capital of passion to good uses." And indeed Ellen was sitting there
+very stiffly, turning her hands together and looking down on them as if
+she despised them for their cantrips. She wished her marriage had not
+been decided quite like this. Of course she wanted to be married,
+because, whatever the marriage-laws were like, there was no other way by
+which she and Richard could tell everybody what they were to each other.
+But she had wanted the ceremony as secret as possible, as little
+overlooked by any other human being, and she fancifully desired it to
+take place in some high mountain chapel where there was no congregation
+but casqued marble men and the faith professed was so mystical that the
+priest was as inhuman as a prayer. Thus their vows would, though
+recorded, have had the sweet quality of unwritten melodies that are sung
+only for the beloved who has inspired them. But now this marriage was to
+be performed with the extremest publicity before a crowd of issues, if
+not of persons. It was to be a subordinate episode in a pageant the plot
+of which she did not know.
+
+Marion, watching her face, saw the faint twitches of resentment playing
+about her mouth and felt some remorse. "She would be so happy just being
+Richard's sweetheart, if I did not interfere," she thought. "Ah, how the
+old tyrannise over the young...." And there came on her a sudden chill
+as she remembered of what character that tyranny could be. She
+remembered one day, when she was nineteen, waking from sleep to find old
+people round her. She had been having such a lovely dream. On her
+lover's arm, she had been walking across the fields in innocent sunshiny
+weather, and he had been laughing and full of a far greater joy in
+impersonal things than she had ever known him. When he saw gorse in life
+he would repeat the country catch, "When the gorse is out of bloom then
+kissing's out of fashion," but in her dream he laughed to see fire and
+water meet where the gorse grew on the sheep-pond's broken lip. He had
+liked the white cloths bleaching on the grass, and the song the lark in
+the sky twirled like a lad throwing and catching a coin, and the spinney
+on the field's slope's heights, where the tide of spring broke in a
+green surf of budding undergrowth at the feet of black bare trees.
+
+During all the months her child was moving in her body she was visited
+by dreams of spring. This was the best of dreams: it was real. The
+lark's song and Harry's happy laughter were loud in her ears; and she
+rolled over in her bed and opened her eyes on Grandmother and Aunt
+Alphonsine. She looked away from them, but saw only things that reminded
+her how ill she was; the tumbler of milk she had not been able to drink,
+set in a circle of its own wetness on a plate among fingers of
+bread-and-butter left from the morning; they had been told to tempt her
+appetite, but they were betraying that they felt she had had more than
+enough temptation lately; the bottles of medicine ranged along the
+mantelpiece, high-shouldered like the facades of chapels and pasted with
+labels that one desired to read as little as chapel notice-boards, and
+with contents just as ineffectual at their business of establishing the
+right; the jug filled with a bunch of flowers left by some kindly
+neighbour who did not know what was the matter with her.
+
+That raised difficult issues. She turned her eyes back to the old
+people. They looked terrible: Grandmother sitting among her spreading
+skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands
+clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was
+not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering
+her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and
+rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and
+fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were
+an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign.
+Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget
+that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she
+had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons,
+the velvet homes of elfs--reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in
+sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that
+colours have commonly only in twilight.
+
+But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power
+over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry
+her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared,
+and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his
+own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow,
+"Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And
+Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core
+of her soul a _dame de compagnie_; and Grandmother had said, with that
+use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of
+truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come
+back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."
+
+That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true
+that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his
+career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous
+compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to
+have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still
+that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the
+linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her
+agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and
+shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that
+such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been
+sacred to her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that
+it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people
+would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.
+
+Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years,
+inexplicable. Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of
+Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she
+had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild
+she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed
+the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing
+prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink
+apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider. It is not in the nature
+of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and
+since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years
+with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good
+purpose which that tedious companionship had served. The theory of the
+sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by
+merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and
+necessary to the existence of society. But she had so often been
+assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life
+had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those
+doubts. To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been
+to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have
+been better if she had not been born. "Lord have mercy on us all!"
+thought Marion, and forgave her.
+
+It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as
+sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead
+of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which
+the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally. She was the most responsible
+for the defeat of Marion's life. And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not
+malignant of intent. The worst of illicit relationships is the
+provocation they give to the minds that hear of them. When it is said of
+a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public
+ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the
+sober external results of marriage; but when it is said of a man and
+woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact
+of their love. The thought of her niece night after night shut up with
+love in the white belvedere all the long time the moon required to rise
+from the open sea, fill all the creeks with silver, and drain them dry
+again as she sunk westwards, must have been torment to one whose left
+cheek, from the long pale ear to the inhibited mouth, was one scar. That
+scar was an epitome of all that was pathetic and mischievous about the
+poor faint woman, this being formed to be a nun who had not been blessed
+with any religion and so had to dedicate herself to the ridiculous god
+of decorum. "Your aunt," Marion's mother had said to her, "burned her
+face cleaning a pair of white shoes with benzine for me to wear at my
+first Communion. It was a pity she did it. And a pity for me too, since
+I have had to obey her ever since in everything, though I wanted
+neither the white shoes nor the Communion." In that speech were all the
+elements of Alphonsine's tragedy, and therefore most of the causes of
+Marion's. The French thrift that had made her clean the shoes at home,
+and thereby maim herself into something that desired to assassinate love
+whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the possibility that
+the family might have to support a fatherless baby. The affection for
+her sister Pamela which had made her perform these services had enabled
+her to bring up that lovely child through all the dangers of a
+poverty-stricken childhood in Paris, in spite of a certain wildness in
+her beauty which might, if unchecked, have been a summons to disorder;
+and her triumph in that respect had made it the most heartbreaking
+disappointment when the temptations she thought she had baulked for ever
+in Paris twenty years before returned and claimed so easily Pamela's
+child, whom she thought quite safe, since to her French eyes Marion's
+dark brows, perpetually knit in preoccupation with the movements of her
+nature, were not likely to be attractive to men.
+
+That must have added to her bitterness. It must have seemed very cruel
+to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed
+perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its
+hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all
+grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this
+black untidy girl. That would account for the passion with which she
+forced Marion to do the thing she did not want to; and any suspicion
+that she was actuated by a desire to punish the girl for her happiness
+she would be able to dismiss by recollecting that certainly she had
+served her little sister's welfare by crossing her will. Oh, there was
+much to be said for Alphonsine. But all the same, it was a pity that the
+old people had interfered. She had loved Richard so much that it would
+not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from
+the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far
+more than other children receive from both parents. They might have been
+so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.
+
+"But this is different," she said to herself. "They compelled me to
+unhappiness. I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen. It is quite
+different."
+
+But she looked anxiously at the girl. They smiled at each other with
+their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity. But their lips smiled
+guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be
+almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a
+creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted
+with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white
+under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched
+illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey
+houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round
+steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did
+not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only
+as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky,
+stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the
+marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of
+the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue
+of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its
+humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and
+on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.
+
+This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the
+Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow
+or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the
+curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised
+clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at
+their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had
+exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this
+plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and
+effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be
+visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon;
+and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling
+on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything
+happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation
+of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed
+people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the
+present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she
+was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred
+to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she
+smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This
+is Kerith Island."
+
+"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat."
+And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I
+must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's
+fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should
+everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where
+Richard's going to work, though."
+
+"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works
+from our windows."
+
+"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I
+couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the
+works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished
+in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the
+house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about
+him. I suppose I will soon get over it."
+
+"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."
+
+The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now
+across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to
+the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little
+hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse
+turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse
+gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green
+escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose
+again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the
+purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a
+brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform
+of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill
+grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by
+four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the
+fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink
+corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was
+built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a
+footing.
+
+Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an
+elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with
+a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white
+like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and
+receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken
+hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of
+the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there
+fell an orchard.
+
+"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and
+look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could
+see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the
+sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion
+indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the
+things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I
+can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from
+here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of
+coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always
+where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which
+fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller
+boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled
+island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a
+farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.
+
+Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been
+driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for
+to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of
+cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked
+bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine
+rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a
+fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with
+their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped
+behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened
+cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares
+set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its
+furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky
+that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which
+dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look
+brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be
+imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to
+lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to
+suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie
+at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud
+galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company
+beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen
+saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as
+Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there
+was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed
+scepticism concerning the value of all activities.
+
+To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from
+delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had
+up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday
+evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able
+to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of,
+and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with
+pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even
+when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they
+stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from
+her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an
+argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly,
+as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly.
+She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There
+had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down
+platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back,
+facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its
+landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high
+ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding,
+where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath
+esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.
+
+It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet
+the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of
+nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that
+was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the
+great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged
+in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the
+light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its
+brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own
+strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between
+deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the
+stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to
+the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark
+line of the Kentish hills.
+
+It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some
+large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like
+flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now
+flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but
+bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were
+back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it
+were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the
+wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion
+surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed
+out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and,
+walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud,
+followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and
+fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the
+quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a
+solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze
+from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make
+this a memorable star.
+
+Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been
+that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and
+breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy
+impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she
+partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain
+and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as
+uncompromising as mud.
+
+She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea,
+saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I
+could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard
+could still."
+
+Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the
+sky?"
+
+"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings
+living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of
+extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism,
+an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked
+appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her
+impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill
+luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike
+for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the
+station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on
+which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was
+saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard
+was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of
+him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to
+conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than
+the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than
+a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not
+offended.
+
+She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which
+Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level
+crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the
+fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the
+barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant
+posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up
+the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken
+prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the
+direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But
+surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in
+Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was
+written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the
+jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too
+slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the
+housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines,
+there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with
+white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because
+of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want
+to recognise its beauty.
+
+When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest
+of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that
+this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of
+white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the
+other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's
+proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap
+in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of
+those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far
+older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to
+Canfleet--that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland--but it's all
+gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a
+disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between
+low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen
+a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be
+measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike
+her.
+
+Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges
+gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which
+grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively
+deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the
+air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the
+broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places
+of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its
+windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that
+one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by
+pressing their faces close against the glass.
+
+"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her.
+"I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But
+it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the
+house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time,
+so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways
+at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you
+know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did
+them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of
+life, you become most carefully conservative!"
+
+But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch,
+and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said
+hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this
+Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to
+please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion
+greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning,
+Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to
+this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things
+just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to
+replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they
+stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark
+room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak
+settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and
+samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this
+English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The
+Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and
+they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any
+particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it
+was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's
+ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look!
+It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and
+they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide
+windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your
+room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it.
+It's a room I'm fond of...."
+
+They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched
+door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on
+cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted
+green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she
+said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when
+I was a girl; but all the things are new--I got them down from London;
+and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the
+chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window
+that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a
+farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a
+story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was
+as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle
+life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.
+He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very
+capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him
+that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without
+losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie
+in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see
+who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on
+you."
+
+She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched
+the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little
+white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate
+grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and
+looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had
+pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because
+to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been
+sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out
+into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring
+cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the
+yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its
+further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the
+billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained,
+bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of
+purple twigs at each end.
+
+But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when
+it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at
+all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of
+tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the
+Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to
+have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken
+bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the
+puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish
+affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near
+with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?--and them not born at four
+o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and
+yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the
+roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as
+usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran
+forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among
+the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow,
+but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the
+sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow,
+turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that
+the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his
+long upper lip was twitching from side to side.
+
+She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus!
+Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen
+and Grandmother was reading the _Prittlebay Gazette_ in the parlour, and
+she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing.
+Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon
+her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs,
+and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the
+farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing
+the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to
+him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent
+collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not
+point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was
+immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he
+wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with
+the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to
+point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate
+into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his
+face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What
+could it be that he wanted?
+
+She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it,
+pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass.
+Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness
+as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he
+said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when
+she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his
+eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom
+turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It
+was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent
+head followed by his forgotten dogs.
+
+Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited
+by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege
+upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that
+prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she
+liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a
+moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and
+sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey
+flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them
+treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then
+she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a
+bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen
+boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs,
+the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that
+night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come
+home.
+
+It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like
+this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it
+was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid
+that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone
+had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who
+was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite
+extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment.
+The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power
+than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him.
+She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the
+same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice
+everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions
+when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white
+room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each
+with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep,
+bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the
+long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with
+their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in
+sherry.
+
+The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she
+could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white
+cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little
+dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their
+images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very
+cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was
+being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that
+if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke
+disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by
+throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation
+would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm"
+to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement
+exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon."
+Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice
+for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her
+dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his
+notice.
+
+She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary,
+letting our whole lives revolve round a man."
+
+"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint
+that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have
+her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for
+some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who
+was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I
+don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that
+any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"
+
+Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the
+Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said
+stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."
+
+"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent
+things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal
+relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And
+then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the
+world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women
+don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we
+love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful
+with."
+
+Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had
+failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by
+Richard just as much as she loved him.
+
+"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the
+end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up
+petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big
+sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would
+not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak
+about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for
+a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as
+all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.
+She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned
+the meaning of life as one lived it.
+
+So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked
+discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with
+drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great
+armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but
+was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of
+that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression
+was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial,
+though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails
+and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was
+wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles
+of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled
+her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the
+windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly
+happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing
+to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch,
+and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining
+all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all
+this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in
+the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland,
+is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired
+with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in
+John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can
+look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer
+and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your
+first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the
+ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'"
+"Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she
+objected.
+
+But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found
+it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because
+she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in
+the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately
+answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.
+Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too
+poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.
+All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no
+cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and
+unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge
+of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be
+enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns
+or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She
+did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been
+able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories
+of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies
+had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up
+people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to
+till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed
+quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where
+feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing
+seas.
+
+Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised
+that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For
+indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat
+within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth
+spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows
+trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were
+almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning
+below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so
+that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their
+shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried
+to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at
+the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine
+in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see
+him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the
+garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too
+the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified
+green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of
+clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate
+curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills
+beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the
+right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the
+marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple
+statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the
+west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if
+the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.
+
+She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and
+yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite
+intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the
+immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man
+dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with
+a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh
+became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill
+of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one
+wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of
+the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the
+inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the
+public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with
+concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the
+margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of
+the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries
+made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot
+of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more
+necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue
+her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the
+small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it
+was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own
+ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world
+presented by this woman's face.
+
+Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic
+point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his
+own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what
+extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble
+atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind
+associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she
+would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be
+trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able
+to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to
+the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if
+they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem
+heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight
+lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who
+had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more
+agonising than a common tear.
+
+"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic
+tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was
+appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish
+about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in
+an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist
+of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say
+and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her
+repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman
+should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that
+her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible
+in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother
+died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire
+would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent
+and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would
+then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical
+patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins,
+she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as
+inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and
+would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and
+complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of
+excessive living.
+
+Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order
+characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly
+that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the
+aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.
+
+"You look tired," said Marion timidly.
+
+"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just
+tiredness."
+
+"You'd better go and lie down."
+
+"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."
+
+"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at
+the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.
+
+They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily.
+Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all
+was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains
+do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in
+the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting
+on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like
+that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in
+front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her
+looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her,
+and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself
+out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back
+for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser
+of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with
+peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror.
+The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail
+of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing
+Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to
+the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see
+why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of
+her own life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+They went out of the house by the French window of the dining-room, and
+crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in
+which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out
+to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild
+orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an
+orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This
+is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is
+let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was
+always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."
+
+"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following
+was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not
+answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not
+spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was
+so keen on science?"
+
+But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were
+patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need
+adventure...."
+
+"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved
+half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire
+to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard,
+and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that
+Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be
+miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the
+leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the
+leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel
+there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been
+any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"
+
+"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.
+
+"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.
+
+"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she
+paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She
+knew quite well.
+
+It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet
+at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea,
+which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was
+lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened
+pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of
+the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough
+darkness without quality. Yet as they walked down the field-path to the
+floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands,
+was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a
+country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more
+intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt
+as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than
+it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had
+come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though
+he does no more than tell children tales of storms.
+
+And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the
+wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave
+cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious
+food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when
+they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate
+to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the
+sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and
+watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and
+time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound
+of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the
+running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved
+culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and
+the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.
+Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous
+disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.
+
+Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over
+the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.
+Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she
+made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable
+later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the
+marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge,
+buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the
+lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it
+was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.
+Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live
+there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to
+travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.
+
+"Who lives in that little house on the island?" she called out to
+Marion.
+
+"The one on the Saltings? No one. It has been empty for forty years. But
+when I was a child George Luck still lived there. George Luck, the last
+great wizard in England."
+
+"A wizard forty years ago! Well, I suppose parts of England are very
+backward. You've got such a miserable system of education. What sort of
+magic did he do?"
+
+"Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors' wives used to come
+to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look
+in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the
+men were doing at the time." She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen.
+"You see, other women before us have been reactionary."
+
+"Reactionary?" repeated Ellen.
+
+"They have let their lives revolve round men," said Marion teasingly,
+and Ellen returned her laughter. They were both in high spirits because
+of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing
+bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and
+air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in
+love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current
+participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that
+makes man the most ridiculous of animals.
+
+They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line,
+again in the great green platter of the marshes. The sea-wall, which ran
+in wide crimps a field's width away on the other side of the line, might
+have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts
+showing above it. The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the
+sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they
+moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which
+it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually
+that leisurely, wet cry.
+
+"What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing.
+
+"Those are the redshanks. They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he
+will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little
+streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet
+there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks
+queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes
+here now except the men to see to the cattle. Even though the railway
+runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and
+shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New
+Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the
+morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired
+to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
+During the week the children are all at school or too young to go
+further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these
+people here, and they never come."
+
+She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between
+these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically
+night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever
+visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should
+continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like
+lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the
+Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you
+really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to
+be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life
+of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had
+erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless
+for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone
+waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery
+army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and
+white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters
+from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in
+his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.
+
+But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that
+nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as
+unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks
+would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a
+knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in
+which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees
+lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would
+have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as
+possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to
+hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and
+excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys'
+doffing of their caps. There was something at once absurd and menacing
+about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's
+greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to
+have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich
+expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.
+
+To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that
+church up there?"
+
+"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."
+
+"But what's that white thing beside it?"
+
+"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of
+Richard's father."
+
+"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined
+not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in
+the neighbourhood."
+
+"Why?" asked Marion.
+
+"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it
+not?"
+
+"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public
+subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung
+back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard
+had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that
+white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much
+to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who
+seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been
+able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its
+architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement
+and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality
+should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That
+secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from
+remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she
+had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time
+when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for
+the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell
+on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror
+that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than
+hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than
+to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and
+smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not
+to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the
+hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had
+been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and
+found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the
+situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion
+asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the
+unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks
+it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh."
+There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she
+tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable
+with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a
+bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out!
+They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or
+don't they grow up North?..."
+
+They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the
+neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely
+inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a
+geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and
+even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like
+orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard.
+Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours
+which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an
+osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange
+hair of the young plants.
+
+"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult
+to them."
+
+Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a
+look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of
+letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should
+go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah
+Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and
+made it squalid with tin huts.
+
+"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to
+laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and
+had things thrown at them.
+
+It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own
+Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to
+it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the
+Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable
+people...."
+
+"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."
+
+But to that Marion replied, grumblingly and indistinctly, that style was
+the only test of value, and that the fools who put up that notice could
+never do any good to anybody, and then her eyes roved to the path that
+ran down the green shoulder of the escarpment on the other side of the
+valley's neck. "Ah, here's Mrs. Winter. Ellen, you are going to come in
+contact with the social life of Roothing. This is the vicar's wife."
+
+"Is she our sort of pairson?" asked Ellen doubtfully.
+
+"For the purpose of social intercourse we pretend that she is," answered
+Marion without enthusiasm.
+
+They met her on the plank bridge that crossed the stream by which the
+osier beds were nourished, and Ellen liked her before they had come
+within hailing distance because she was such a little nosegay of an old
+lady. Though her colours were those of age they were bright as flowers.
+Her hair was white, but it shone like travellers' joy, and her peering
+old eyes were blue as speedwell, and her shrivelled cheeks were pink as
+apple-blossom. She bobbed when she walked like a ripe apple on its stem,
+and her voice when she called out to them was such a happy fluting as
+might come from some bird with a safe nest. "Why, it's Mrs. Yaverland. I
+heard that you'd gone up to town."
+
+"I came back this morning. This is Miss Melville, whom I went to meet.
+She is going to marry Richard very soon." Marion did not, Ellen noticed
+with exasperation, make any adequate response to this generous little
+trill of greeting. The best she seemed able to do was to speak slowly,
+as if to disclaim any desire to hurry on.
+
+"Oh, how do you do? I am pleased I met you on the very first day." The
+old lady smiled into Ellen's eyes and shook her hand as if she meant to
+lay at her disposal all this amiability that had been reared by tranquil
+years on the leeward side of life. "This will be a surprise for
+Roothing. We all thought Mr. Yaverland would never look at any woman but
+his mother. Such a son he is!" Ellen was annoyed that Marion smiled only
+vaguely in answer to this mention of her astonishing good fortune in
+being Richard's mother. "I hope Mr. Winter will have the pleasure of
+marrying you."
+
+"I'm afraid not," said Ellen with concern. "I'm Presbyterian, and
+Episcopalianism does not attract me."
+
+"Oh dear! Oh dear! That's a pity," said the old lady, with a pretty
+flight of hilarity. "Still, I hope you'll ask us to the wedding. I've
+known Richard since he was a week old. Haven't I, Mrs. Yaverland? He
+was the loveliest baby I've ever seen, and later on I think the
+handsomest boy. Nobody ever looked at my Billy or George when Richard
+was about. And now--well, I needn't tell you, young lady, what he's like
+now. I'm glad I've met you. I've just been up at Mrs. More's."
+
+"Who is Mrs. More?" asked Marion heavily.
+
+"The new people who have the small-holding at Coltsfoot the Brights had
+before. I think he used to be a clerk, and came into a little money and
+bought the holding, and now they're finding it very difficult to get
+along."
+
+"This small-holding business ought to be stopped."
+
+"Why?" asked Ellen peevishly. Marion seemed to reject everything, and
+she was sure that she had seen small-holdings recommended in Labour
+Party literature. "I thought it was sound."
+
+"Not here. Speculators buy up big farms and cut them into small-holdings
+and sell them to townspeople, who starve on them or sell them at a loss.
+The land's wasted for good, and all because it can't be farmed again
+once it's been cut up. To all intents and purposes it's wiped off the
+map. It's a scandal."
+
+"It is a shame," agreed the old lady. "I often say that something ought
+to be done. Well, the poor woman's lost her baby."
+
+"Bad business," said Marion.
+
+"Such a pretty little girl. Six months. I've been up seeing them putting
+her in the coffin. The mother was so upset. I was with her all day
+yesterday."
+
+"I've seen the place," said Marion. "As ugly as one of the Hallelujah
+Army shanties. What this bit of country's coming to! And Coltsfoot was a
+good farm when I was a girl."
+
+"It isn't very nice now certainly. You see, now that the other people
+have failed and gone away, it's difficult for them to get loads taken
+down as there isn't a proper road. Before, they did it co-operatively
+among themselves. But this winter they say they've been without coal
+quite often, and the baby's been ill all the time. I think Mrs. More's
+been terribly lonely. Poor little woman, she's got no friends here. All
+her people live in the Midlands, she tells me. I don't think they can
+afford a holiday, so the next few months will be hard for her, I'm
+afraid."
+
+"Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the
+garden. Annoying to think that that used to be good wheat-land."
+
+"They've never liked the place. They were terrified of losing the child
+because of the damp from the moment it came. She's quite broken by it
+all, poor thing."
+
+Marion began to draw on the ground with the point of her stick.
+
+"Ah, well, you'll be wanting to get on," said the old lady. "Now, do
+bring your future daughter-in-law to tea with us some day. I've got a
+daughter-in-law staying with me now. I should like you to meet Rose. She
+plays the violin very nicely. And we have a garden we're rather proud
+of, though of course this is the wrong time of the year to see it. Yet
+I'm sure things are looking very nice just now. Just look at it! Could
+anything," she asked, looking round with happy eyes, "be prettier than
+this? Look at the sunlight travelling over that hill!" She cast a shy
+glance at Marion, who was continuing to watch the point of her stick,
+and bravery came into her soft gay glance. "It's passing over the
+earth," she said tremulously but distinctly, "like the kindness of God."
+
+A silence fell. "The wee thing has courage," thought Ellen to herself.
+"It's plain to see what's happened. Marion's often sneered at her
+religion, and she's just letting her see that she doesn't mind. I like
+people who believe in something. Of course it might Le something more
+useful than Christianity, but if she believes it...."
+
+Marion lifted her head, stared at the hillside, and said, "Yes. And
+look. It is followed by the shadow, like His indifference."
+
+Tears came into the old lady's eyes. "Good-bye. We must settle on an
+afternoon for tea. I'll send somebody round with a note. Good-bye." She
+pushed past them, a grieved and ruffled little figure, a peony-spot of
+shock on each cheek, and then she looked back at Ellen. "We'll all look
+forward to seeing you, my dear," she called kindly; but feared, Ellen
+saw, to meet the hard eyes of this terrible woman, who was staring
+after her with a look of hostility that, directed on this little
+affirmation of love and amiability, was as barbarous as some ponderous
+snare laid for a small, precious bird.
+
+"Let's get on," said Marion.
+
+They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of
+the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice.
+To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing. It
+should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds,
+and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher
+level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green
+pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a
+crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle. But the
+quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in
+fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick
+dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an
+angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.
+
+They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran
+askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes,
+rusted and prohibitive and futile.
+
+"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of
+fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of
+raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence
+to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End
+trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go
+straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and
+lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as
+Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the
+day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the
+enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter,
+Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the
+thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land
+going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings
+and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I
+wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead
+leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the
+manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she
+pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said
+apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the
+two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose
+bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the
+others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had
+not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair
+exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there
+between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I
+won't come. I'm tired...."
+
+She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself,
+"She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half
+because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by
+losing my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly
+blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking
+of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had
+parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought,
+be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there
+could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having
+to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in
+a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike
+any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be
+tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A
+woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that
+work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and
+so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened
+and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really
+dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this
+Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it
+would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now
+this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a
+living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman
+who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a
+baby's coffin.
+
+And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and
+undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for
+an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy
+wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained
+timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last
+fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long
+succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire
+system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was
+never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the
+gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was
+always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day
+there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything
+but weak-eyed, plain people.
+
+The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it
+had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which
+is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the
+tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window
+at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls
+and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would
+not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.
+Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are
+bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the
+end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.
+The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had
+frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement,
+would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of
+pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's
+lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there
+would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"
+She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before
+she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to
+remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she
+wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean
+living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out,
+leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass
+bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation,
+while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth
+grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a
+meal.
+
+Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor
+souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that
+all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by
+passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was
+feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud
+at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an
+errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting
+strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the
+woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming
+up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to
+speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and
+they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded
+without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore
+having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed
+with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She
+could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom
+she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for
+Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to
+be happy.
+
+Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.
+Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not
+be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with
+Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had
+seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed
+in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there had always been
+something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a
+sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by
+sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as
+dignified as befitted one who came as an ambassador from life itself,
+and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair
+outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of
+courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarrassment. She
+was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck
+through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be
+his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and
+Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.
+
+There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by
+the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had
+left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees
+that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge
+that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone
+far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had
+felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly
+and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she
+had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to
+the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a
+queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of
+the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said,
+"Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an
+inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she
+followed him down the hillside that nobody since the world began had
+ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner,
+and she became scarlet with shame.
+
+When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared
+nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like
+air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen
+it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had
+pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to
+up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to
+him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he
+answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk
+to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could
+come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that
+seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how
+the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I
+suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who
+does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on
+in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now.
+Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."
+
+At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in
+which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away,
+wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about
+to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its
+cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over
+her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked
+at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting
+along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an
+inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a
+disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year
+later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he
+had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He
+murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had
+looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey
+eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It
+was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of
+passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.
+
+With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a
+courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days
+with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed
+it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of
+seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair
+dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time
+that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action.
+She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion
+would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had
+looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they
+would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But
+they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good
+with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow
+the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would
+pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all
+his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black....
+She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all
+other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt
+about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that
+there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him
+that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite
+well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more
+beautifully than she had ever been.
+
+She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if
+Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself
+to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she
+could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.
+Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base
+passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational
+hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It
+would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and
+besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as
+little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now
+nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping
+broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"
+
+She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the
+flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower
+towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the
+hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl
+was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the
+tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had
+formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations
+by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion
+had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first
+moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the
+bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down
+on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of
+the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among
+such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it
+was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that
+she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird,
+and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's
+spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind
+became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh
+and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had
+been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary
+importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible
+presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it
+could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself
+loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had
+fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she
+must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act
+of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that
+made her cry out with joy.
+
+Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was
+intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should
+intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with
+being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The
+girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower
+as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under
+faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about
+the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added
+to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for
+the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course
+the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of
+Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer
+mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She
+took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was
+sinister.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The
+white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains
+of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at
+each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue
+which the night assumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the
+gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses
+in a bowl had the air of brooding and passionate captives. Different
+from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of
+the wood fire danced again in the glass doors of one of the bookcases:
+and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep,
+stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at
+odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker.
+She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that
+there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent
+schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which
+seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author
+whose work she studied. In the swinging glass door beside her there was
+a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she
+herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in
+the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by
+night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and,
+orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard
+would find such an interior on his return.
+
+"Have you found a book you like?"
+
+"No. There's lots of lovely ones. But none I just fancy. I'm inclined to
+be disagreeable and far too particular this evening. Are these your
+books or Richard's?"
+
+"Nearly all mine."
+
+"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could
+have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point
+if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at
+all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a
+bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.
+I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."
+
+"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you
+awake."
+
+"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all
+right as soon as Richard comes."
+
+Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till
+then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted
+intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift
+dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching
+with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate
+matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its
+midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.
+Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through
+the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on
+the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of
+irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high
+polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived
+that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation
+into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the
+most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.
+It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the
+evening in making Ellen like her.
+
+"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.
+
+"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."
+
+But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She passed into the room of bright
+new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction
+in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for
+I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."
+
+"Let me brush your hair."
+
+As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because
+Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she
+brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been
+gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in
+whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to
+be understood and conciliated. Her wish that it were so reminded her how
+much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl's
+shoulder at her reflection in the glass. "It is a face that believes
+there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out," she
+thought. "Well, that is probably true for her. I, with my foes who are a
+part of myself, am unusually cursed. If these young people have ordinary
+luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy
+standing by and watching them. Oh, I must make friends with her. We have
+many things in common. I will talk to her about the Suffragettes. What
+shall I say about them? I do honestly think that they are splendid
+women. I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out
+into the streets knowing they will be stoned...." A memory overcame her.
+"Ah!" she cried out, and laid down the brush.
+
+"What's the matter?" exclaimed Ellen, standing up. There was a certain
+desperation in her tone, as if she thought the tragic life of a
+household ought to have a definite closing-time every night, after which
+people could go to bed in peace.
+
+"I forgot--I forgot to take some medicine. I must go and take it now.
+And I don't think I'd better come back. I'm sure you'll brush your hair
+better yourself. I'm sure I tugged. You're so tired, you ought to go to
+bed at once. Good-night. Good-night." By the slow shutting of the door
+she tried to correct the queer impression of her sudden flight, but knew
+as she did so that it sounded merely furtive.
+
+In her own room she undressed with frantic haste so that she could turn
+out the light and retreat into the darkness as into a burrow. But
+everywhere in the blackness, even on the inside of the sheet she drew
+over her face as she lay in bed, were pictures of the aspects of evil
+the world had turned to her that day: thirty years before, when she was
+stoned down the High Street of Roothing. She was in the grip of one of
+her recurrent madnesses of memory. There was no Richard to sit by her
+side and comfort her, not by what he said, for she had kept so much from
+him that he could say nothing that was really relevant, but by his
+beauty and his dearness, which convinced her that all was well since she
+had given birth to him; so her agony must go on until the dawn.
+
+She must get used to that, because when he was married to Ellen she
+would no longer be able to sit up in her bed and call "Richard,
+Richard!" and strike the bell that rang in his room--that rang, as it
+seemed, in his mind, since no other sound but it ever wakened him in the
+night. Not again would he stand at the door, his dark hair damp and
+rumpled, his eyes blinking at the strong light, while his voice spoke
+hoarsely out of undispersed sleep. "Mother, darling mother, are you
+having bad dreams?" Not again would she answer moaningly, "Oh, Richard,
+yes!" and tremble with delight in the midst of her agony to see how,
+when this big man was dazed and half awake, he held his arms upwards to
+her as if he were still a little boy and she a tall overshadowing
+presence. In the future he must be left undisturbed to sleep in Ellen's
+arms. That thought caused her inexplicable desolation. Rather than think
+it she gave up the struggle and allowed herself to be possessed by
+memory, and to smart again under the humiliation of that afternoon when
+life had made a fool of her. For what had hurt her most was that she had
+gone out into the world, the afternoon it stoned her, in a mood of the
+tenderest love towards it.
+
+She had risen late, she remembered, that day. All night long she had
+been ill, and had not slept until the first wrangling of the birds. Then
+suddenly she had opened her eyes, and after remembering, as she always
+did when she woke, that she was going to have a child, she had looked
+out of her wide window into the mature and undoubtful sunshine of a fine
+afternoon. She had felt wonderfully well and terribly hungry, and had
+hastened at her washing and dressing so that she could run downstairs
+and get something to eat. When she went into the kitchen she saw that
+dinner was over, for the plates were drying in the rack and Peggy, the
+maid, was not there. It was incredible that she had not known why Peggy
+had gone out, that she should fatuously have told herself that the girl
+was probably working in the dairy; but in those days her mind was often
+half asleep with love for the unborn.
+
+She rejoiced that she had missed the family meal, for it was not easy to
+sit at the table with Grandmother and Cousin Tom and Aunt Alphonsine,
+unspoken comments on her position hanging from each face like
+stalactites. In the larder she found the cold roast beef, magnificently
+marbled with veins of fat, and the cherry pie, with its globes of
+imperial purple and its dark juice streaked on the surface with richness
+exuded from the broken vault-of the pastry, and she ate largely, with
+the solemn greed of pregnancy. Afterwards she washed the dishes, in that
+state of bland, featureless contentment that comes to one whose being
+knows that it is perfectly fulfilling its function and that it is
+earning its keep in the universe without having to attempt any
+performance on that vexing instrument, the mind.
+
+When she had finished, she wandered out of the kitchen aimlessly,
+benevolently wishing that her baby was born so that she could spend the
+afternoon playing with it.
+
+The parlour door was ajar, and she peeped in and saw Grandmother sitting
+asleep in the high-backed chair, a shaft of sunlight blessing her bent
+head to silver and stretching a corridor for dancing motes to the bowl
+of mignonette. She saw the scene with the eye of an oleographer. In
+defiance of experience she considered her grandmother as a dear old
+lady, and the hum of a bee circling about the mignonette sounded like
+the peace that was in the room becoming articulate and praising God.
+Enjoyable tears stood in her eyes. Drying them and looking round the
+dear scene, so that she might remember it, she saw that the grandfather
+clock marked it as half-past two. Now was the time that she must go for
+her walk. The children would be back at school, the men would be at
+work, and the women still busy cleaning up after their midday meal. She
+was afraid now to walk on the Yaverland lands for fear of finding
+Goodtart, the cattleman, standing quite still in some shadowed place
+where she would not see him till it was too late to avoid touching him
+as she passed, and turning on her those dung-brown eyes in which
+thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a canal; and
+though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with
+Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had
+stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the
+belvedere. The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go
+so far. But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran
+from the glebe land opposite Yaverland's End and stretched towards the
+village High Street. No one ever went there at this time of day.
+
+Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and
+she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though
+she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown. Stealing out
+very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down
+the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She
+had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish
+cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and
+reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The
+Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson
+Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine
+it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married,
+and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not
+receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to
+the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant
+oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by
+some wise, far-sighted person.
+
+It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had
+slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon,
+to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will
+to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that
+it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before
+the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his
+pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone
+would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of
+her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come
+to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was
+twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the
+spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a
+woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With
+aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that
+showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had
+happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and
+seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy
+figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.
+
+It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances
+these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive
+greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being
+without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that,
+and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in
+love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she
+knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing
+his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that
+must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the
+exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then
+perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to
+have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive
+eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held
+to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day
+in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel
+in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him
+like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their
+beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of
+acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that,
+for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.
+
+At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a
+tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down
+her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again
+and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and
+daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly,
+swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the
+trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch
+scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of
+the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For
+the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the
+most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously
+for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the
+unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their
+mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home
+litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they
+could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds,
+and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared
+excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts
+in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her
+and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young
+doctor who had been _locum tenens_ here in February, and that they had
+seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the
+Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in
+order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family,
+and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill
+these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.
+She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little
+wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as
+happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to
+venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when
+men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.
+
+The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of
+an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to
+earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked
+leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it
+dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit
+half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up
+a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly,
+the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of
+crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of
+Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by
+going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into
+the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be
+Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the
+village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and
+would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the
+unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from
+all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their
+ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite
+close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under
+the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.
+
+Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed
+at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the
+society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of
+thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that
+his great horny fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was
+drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so
+disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of
+another expulsion. "Oh, ter dash with the thing!" he exclaimed
+mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue
+sky above and snuffled. Marion's heart dissolved. She could not let this
+poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving
+only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.
+"George!" she called softly, staying among the branches. He gaped about
+him. "George!" she called a little louder. "The ball's in the pit, among
+the leaves." But he was transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice
+and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to
+gape. She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after
+only half a moment's reluctance she stepped forward. She did not really
+mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention
+that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby. For there was
+now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been
+before and her body was like a vase. It was only when they had awful
+thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not
+have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn. So she went
+over to him, pointing to the pit. "I saw it roll down there, George.
+Look! There it is."
+
+But he did not pick up the ball. He appeared to be petrified by the
+sight of her. "Make haste," she said, "they'll be waiting for you." At
+that he dropped his lids, and his lips thickened, and his face grew red.
+Then he raised his head again and looked at her with eyes that were not
+dull, as she had always seen them before, but hot and bright, and he
+began to shift his weight slowly backwards and forwards from one foot to
+the other. Her heart grew sick, because all the world was like this, and
+she turned again to the path home. But through the tree-trunks in that
+direction there came two other boys in search of the ball--Ned Turk, who
+to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes;
+and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had
+done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd
+faces. A horror came on her. It was as if they had assumed masks to warn
+her that they had some secret and sinister business with her. Then one
+pointed his hand at her and made an animal noise, and the other laughed
+with his mouth wide open. Neither said anything. Their minds were
+evidently engaged in processes beneath those which find expression in
+language. She stiffened herself to face them, though she felt frightened
+that these two boys, whom she had known all her life, with whom she had
+ridden on the hay-wains in summer and caught stickle-backs in the marsh
+dykes, should change to these speechless beings with red leering masks
+who meant her ill.
+
+For the first time she felt herself too young for her destiny. "I am
+only nineteen," she cried silently. Tears might have disgraced her but
+that the child moved in her as if it had looked out at the frightening
+figures through her eyes, and she suddenly hated Harry for leaving her
+and his son unprotected from such brutes as people seemed to be, and was
+vivified by the hatred. She made to walk past the boys back towards
+Yaverland's End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to
+their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately
+answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads
+whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being
+consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that
+would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing
+for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and
+walk down Roothing High Street and go back to Yaverland's End by the
+lane. Her mood of forgiving love for the village, which the cricket-ball
+had interrupted, had been so real that she felt as if a pact had been
+established between it and her, and she was quite sure that she would be
+safe from the boys there. If they were tiresome and followed her, no
+doubt somebody like Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general stores, would take
+her in and let her rest till it was dark, and then see her home. She
+turned round and walked out of the wood, and because she could not, in
+her heavy-footed state, trample through the undergrowth, she had to
+follow the path that led her to within a yard or two of George Postgate.
+She could see from the workings of his large face that he was forming
+some plan of action. And sure enough, when she passed him, he cried out
+"Dirty Marion!" and twitched the sun-bonnet from her head. The sudden
+movement made her start violently, for though she had not known what
+fear was until she conceived, she now knew a panic-terror at anything
+that threatened her body. That made the boys shout with laughter and
+call to their friends to hurry up and see the fun.
+
+The sunshine that beat down on the unshaded field was hot on her bare
+head. It would be awkward too, going into the village hatless and with
+ruffled hair. But she must not be angry with George Postgate, for indeed
+the incident had been to him only a means of gaining that popularity
+with the fellows that his poor stupid soul so longed for and had so
+often been refused, and he could not know that the fright would make her
+feel so ill. Since the first agonising months of her pregnancy, when
+nausea and faintness had pervaded her days, she had never felt as ill as
+this. A sweat had broken out on her face and her hands; she had to
+pant for breath and her limbs staggered under her. But she would be all
+right if she could sit down for one moment. There was a hawthorn stump a
+little way off, and to this she made her way, but as she sunk down on it
+a clod of earth struck her in the shoulder. She spun round, and another
+broke on her face. Grit filled her mouth, which was open with amazement.
+She had been deaf with physical distress, so she had not heard that the
+boys had gathered together on the wood's edge and were now marching
+after her in a shouting crowd. Something in her attitude when she turned
+on them made them fall dumb and stock-still for a moment. But as a gust
+of wind ruffled her hair and blew her skirts about her body a roar of
+laughter went up from them, and earth and dry dung flew through the air
+at her.
+
+As she set her face towards the High Street again, which still seemed
+very far away, she sobbed with relief to see that old Mr. Goode, the
+carrier, had come down to the end of his garden to see what the noise
+meant, and that he had almost at once gone back into his house. Of
+course he would come out and save her. In the meantime she pushed on
+towards the houses, that because of her sickness and her fear rocked and
+wavered towards her flimsily like a breaking wave. A heavy clod struck
+her in the back, and she shrieked silently with terror. If they hurt her
+she might give birth to her baby and it would not live. She had not had
+it quite seven months yet, so it would not live. At that thought anguish
+pierced her like a jagged steel and she began to try to run, muttering
+little loving names to her adored and threatened child. She looked
+towards the road to see if old Mr. Goode was coming, and was surprised
+to see that he was standing at the gate of the field with two other men
+and a boy. And though they were all looking towards her, they made no
+movement to come to her help. Perhaps they did not see what was
+happening to her. It did not matter. She would be there in a few
+moments. One of the boys had found a tin can and was beating on it, and
+the sounds made her head feel bad. She staggered on, looking on the
+ground because of the sun's strong glare.
+
+When she found that her feet had reached the patch of rutted ground that
+was around the gate, she sobbed with thankfulness. She threw out her
+hands to the multitude of people who had suddenly gathered there, and
+cried out imploringly, for if someone would only take her to a place
+where she could lie down she would be all right and she would keep her
+child. But none of them came to her, and her deafened ears caught a
+sound of roaring. She could not see who they were and what they were
+doing, for all things looked as if she saw them through flowing water.
+But she knew the tall figure by the gatepost must be Mr. Goode, so she
+stumbled to him and raised her head and tried to find his kind face.
+But, like the boys, he wore a mask. Veins that she had never noticed
+before stood out red on his forehead and his beard twitched, and the
+funny lines that darted about his eyes, which had become small and
+winking, made his face a palimpsest in which an affected disgust
+overlaid some deep enjoyment. He did not seem to be looking at her;
+indeed, he averted his eyes from her, but thoughts about her made him
+laugh and send out a jeering cry--wordless like the call of the boys.
+She realised that he and these people whom she could not see, but who
+must be people who had known her all her life, had come out not to save
+but to see her ill-treated and to rejoice. She stood stock-still and
+groaned. Her head felt wet, and she put up her hand and found that a
+stone had drawn blood behind her ear. The boys pressed close about her
+and beat the tin can in her ears, and one stretched out a stick and
+touched her, which made Mr. Goode and the unseen enemies laugh. But at
+that she shrieked. She shrieked with such terrible anger at those who
+insulted the mother of her child, that all their jaws fell and they
+shrank back and let her pass.
+
+But when she had gone a few paces up the road someone shouted something
+after her, and there was a noise of laughter and then of the shuffling
+of many feet behind her, and jeers and cat-calls and the beating of the
+tin can. She went on, looking to the right and the left for some old
+friend to come out and take her to shelter, but now she knew that there
+would be none. These people would drive her on and on. And when she got
+home to Yaverland's End, if they would let her go there, and did not
+trample her down on the roadside first, she would lose her child. The
+core of her body and soul would be torn out from her, and all promise
+of pleasure and all occasion of pride. For there was no pleasure in the
+world save that to which she had looked forward these seven months, of
+seeing that perfect little body that she knew so well and kissing its
+smooth skin and waiting for it to open those eyes--those black eyes; and
+there could be no greater degradation than to bring forth death, when
+for months the sole sustenance against the world's contempt had been
+that she was going to give birth to a king of life. There danced before
+her eyes all the sons of whom she was to be bereft in the person of this
+son. The staggering child, the lean, rough-headed boy of ten with his
+bat, the glorious man.
+
+Now her loss was certain. All the people were running out into the
+gardens of the little houses on the right and throwing up the windows
+over the shuttered shops on the left, and all wore the flushed and
+amused masks that meant they were determined that she should lose her
+child. Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general store, the kind old woman whom
+she had thought would take her in, and Mrs. Welch, the village drunkard,
+were leaning over adjacent garden walls, holding back the tall, divine
+sunflowers that they might hobnob over this delight, and their faces
+were indistinguishable because of those masks. Even Lily Barnes,
+standing on the doorstep of the nice new Lily Villa her husband, Job
+Barnes the builder, had built for their marriage, with her six months
+old baby in her arms, was thus disguised, and seeming, like Mr. Goode,
+to look through her old friend at some obscene and delicious fact, sent
+up that hooting wordless cry.
+
+Marion was so appalled that a woman carrying her baby should connive at
+the death of another's that she stood quite still and stared at her,
+until the boys behind her thrust her with sticks. When she passed the
+alley between the post-office and the carrier's she saw the cattle-man,
+Goodtart, looking out at her from its shadows; he did not move, but his
+dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger
+stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his
+neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with
+earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with
+nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every
+time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.
+
+"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated
+it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it
+up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished
+that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his
+child to this.
+
+Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and
+the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with
+his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back
+into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she
+had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no
+solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself
+like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this
+thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.
+But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her
+and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was
+approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light
+feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face
+obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some
+invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality
+which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried
+to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some
+remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that
+she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.
+
+She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and
+pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and
+behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt
+and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying
+standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively,
+Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it
+said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of
+butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her. He was asking
+the village people what would happen when the squire came home and
+heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire's
+tenants. A silence fell on her pursuers. From the rear old Mr. Goode's
+kind voice said something about "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey"; Ned
+Turk piped, "We don't mean no 'arm," and the crowd dispersed. It
+shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated
+and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin
+cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect
+by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of
+their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.
+
+She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey. She
+realised that she was safe. If she could rest now she would keep her
+child. She knew relief but not exultation. It was as if life had been
+handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed
+with the cup. There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon:
+the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she
+had been rescued. When Peacey's voice had boomed out above her it had
+expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it
+had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful
+than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and
+he begged them to have similar prudence. He had risked nothing of his
+reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her. To this loathsome
+world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her
+divine child. She looked up at Peacey and laughed.
+
+His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness. "You'd best
+come into Cliffe's cottage," he said, and went before her. It struck
+her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street
+it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or
+without his knowledge. Well, she must lie down, and this was the only
+door that was open to her. She must follow him.
+
+Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and
+through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur: "Poor little
+girl!" Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in
+his heart spoken to itself? Was he really a kind man? She looked at him
+searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes,
+which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing. In any case
+she must take his arm, or she would fall. She even found herself
+shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she
+was afraid the people inside might not welcome her. She did not know the
+Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five
+years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make
+friends with a young married woman. But its trim garden, where on golden
+summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his
+clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while
+his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own
+loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion
+wishing that Harry and she were properly married. Because she had
+received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for
+of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy. But the
+shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was
+as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into
+some vacated house given over to decay. There was dust everywhere, and
+the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the vase on the
+table had died yesterday; and the woman who stood in the middle of the
+room, looking down at her hands and turning her wedding ring on her
+finger, was not pretty or joyous. Her face was a smudge of sullenness
+under hair that was elaborately dressed yet was dull for lack of
+brushing, and her body drooped within the stiff tower of her
+thickly-boned Sunday-best dress. She looked at Marion without curiosity
+from an immense distance of preoccupation. There came from a room at the
+back of the house the strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee," played on
+the harmonium, and at that she made a weak, abstracted gesture of
+irritation.
+
+"Go and get a basin of water and a bit o' rag. The girl's head's
+bleeding," said Peacey, and she went out of the room obediently. He
+collected all the cushions in the room and piled them on the horsehair
+sofa, and helped her to lie comfortably down on them. Then he walked to
+the window, and stood there looking out until Mrs. Cliffe came back into
+the room. He took the basin without thanks, and set it down on a chair
+and began to bathe Marion's head, while Mrs. Cliffe stood by watching
+incuriously.
+
+"Now then, Trixy," he said, not unpleasantly, "you'd best go into the
+back parlour and listen to your beloved husband playing hymns so
+trustfully."
+
+She went away, still without speaking, and Marion, no longer feeling
+defensive before a stranger, closed her eyes. Really his fat hands were
+very gentle, very clever and quick. After a few moments he had finished,
+and she was able to turn her face to the wall and talk to her baby that
+had been saved to her, and to exult that after all she would see those
+eyes. She shivered to think how nearly she had lost him, and was
+transfixed by her hatred of Harry. She turned hastily and faced the
+room.
+
+Peacey was watching her with his quiet eyes. He said in a silken voice,
+"This sort of thing wouldn't happen to you if you were married to me."
+
+She lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. She knew that what he said
+was true.
+
+"You've looked at me as if I were a pickpocket, you have," he went on,
+"just because I want to marry you. I don't hold it against you. You're
+young. That young, that it's a shame this has happened to you. But after
+to-day perhaps you'll judge me a bit fairer. You see, I'm older than
+you, and I've seen a bit of the world, and I know how things are. And I
+knew you'd have a nasty jar like you had to-day before you were through
+with it. And I don't doubt you'll have a few more before you're done. It
+ain't too good for the little one, if you'll excuse me mentioning it.
+You can't expect a man of any feelings to look on without trying to do
+what he can."
+
+She looked up to scan his face for some sign of sincerity, and found
+herself for the first time wishing that she might find it and have
+reason to distrust her own dislike of him. But he was sitting sideways,
+with his head turned away from her, and she could see nothing of him but
+his hot black clothes and his fat hand slowly stroking the thigh of his
+crossed leg in its tight trouser. A sigh shook the dark bulk of his
+back.
+
+"Me of all men," he said softly, "who had such a mother."
+
+There was a long pause. She grew curious.
+
+"Is she dead?" she asked.
+
+"Died when I was ten. Not a soul's ever cared for me since then. I'm not
+sorry. It's made me remember her all the better. And she was one of
+God's saints."
+
+His voice was husky. She muttered, "I am sorry," and was annoyed to find
+that she really was.
+
+"Why need you be?" he asked. "There's those that haven't that much to
+look back on. All I want from you, Miss Marion, is to let me help you.
+Or at least not to think ill of me for wanting to help you."
+
+He sat still for a moment and continued to stroke his thigh.
+
+"Marion," he began abruptly, and then paused as if to brace himself.
+"Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you
+to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never wouldn't bother you for
+that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise
+with some chance of keeping it. And besides, there's more than that to
+it. How," he asked, lifting his head and speaking mincingly, "should I
+presume to go where Sir Harry's been? I would never ask you to be a wife
+to me. Just to accept the protection of my name, that's all I ask of
+you."
+
+They sat for a while in the embrowned sunshine of the dusty room.
+
+He rose and stood over her, drooping his sleek head benevolently. "Ah,
+well," he said, "I'd best leave you alone. God knows I never meant to
+intrude on you. Perhaps you would take a little doze now, and after tea
+I'll take you home." He looked on her moistly, tenderly. "Think kindly
+of me if you dream." Some emotion coagulated his voice to a thick, slow
+flow. "You'll be the only woman who ever has thought of me in her dreams
+if you do. I've never had anything to do with women all my life. You
+see, I know I've got an ugly mug. I wouldn't dare to make love to any
+woman in case I saw--what I've seen in your face--what I saw in your
+face that night I came out on you from the belvedere. Oh, I don't blame
+you, Miss Marion. You're young--you're beautiful. You've had a real
+gentleman for your sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you.
+Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands
+together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her
+matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate
+that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her.
+"Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled
+about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body
+neckless and sloping like a seal's, and said softly, "And don't think it
+was me who put Lady Teresa up to coming down to Yaverland's End
+to-morrow morning. It is her ladyship's own idea. I said to her, 'Leave
+the poor girl alone.' I have always said to her, 'Leave the poor girl
+alone.'" His voice faded. He moved vaporously out of the room.
+
+One is too harsh to one's dead self. One regards it as the executor and
+residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate
+regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty
+years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the
+closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her
+life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was
+conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present
+should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting
+up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The
+tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost
+as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black
+fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all
+the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he
+has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the
+end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my
+Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely
+Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him
+unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There
+are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She
+groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like
+cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot
+thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this
+dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it
+was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had
+remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear
+it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage
+to live.
+
+Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about
+what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should
+sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or
+Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on
+that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to
+abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her
+consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was
+within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn
+baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she
+had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of
+her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves
+had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had
+been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly
+nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo
+knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical
+adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment
+dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to
+live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and
+have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill
+and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the
+shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it
+and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next
+day it would forsake her.
+
+She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer
+from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose
+at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was
+necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look
+up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the
+expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been,
+it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she
+dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that
+Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the
+church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl
+who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope
+that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy
+head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of
+paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of
+Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not
+really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and
+tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.
+
+Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking
+personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm
+black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of
+Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a
+profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that
+Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its
+bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or
+of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no
+reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at
+Torque House. By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry. The child
+would doubt again.... Since these things would have happened she could
+not do other than she did. Her surrender was the price she had to pay
+for Richard's life.
+
+How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to
+pay any real price! She looked back through the past at Peacey's conduct
+of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at
+some perfect and obscene work of art. He had laid his hand so
+wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so
+that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the
+renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he
+turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to
+one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme
+mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante
+love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and,
+knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as
+their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship,
+she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his
+melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had
+failed utterly.
+
+Mrs. Cliffe had come in with a cup of tea and some cake on a tray.
+"You'll feel better for this," she said, and while Marion had ate and
+drunk she had stood by the window and looked at her. It seemed to Marion
+that she had greatly changed of late. Before, she had belonged very
+definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from
+the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even
+after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any
+cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw
+and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative
+of a change from her pristine gentility.
+
+"Funny I never heard of you being like this," she said at last.
+
+"It is. I thought everyone was talking about it."
+
+"They may be. But there's times when one doesn't listen to what people
+are saying." For a time she was silent. "Ah, well," she meditated
+bitterly, "it doesn't pay to do wrong, does it?"
+
+"I haven't done wrong," said Marion.
+
+"So you say now," Mrs. Cliffe told her, "but there'll come a day when
+you see you have." She drew in her breath with a little gasp as Peacey
+put his head in at the door.
+
+He looked sharply from one to the other, and then advanced to Marion's
+couch, rubbing his hands genially. "Now then, Trixy," he said teasingly,
+"you don't want me to talk too long to your beloved husband, do you? I
+might go telling him things about you, mightn't I? You run along and
+look after him." Mrs. Cliffe retired quite taciturnly, nothing in her
+face responding to this rallying, and he bent quickly over Marion. "I
+hope she hasn't been worrying you?" he asked. Concern for her?--it
+sounded just like concern for her--made his voice tremble. "That's why I
+hurried back. Women are so narrow-minded to their poor sisters who
+haven't been so fortunate. I thought she might have been making you feel
+a bit uncomfortable."
+
+"Oh no," said Marion.
+
+The mask of his poor ugly face, which had been grotesque with pitying
+lines, became smooth. He sighed with relief, and sat down by her side,
+very humbly.
+
+"But she was beginning to talk rather strangely," the poor fool Marion
+had continued. "I think she's altered very much lately."
+
+"Do you know, I was thinking so myself," Peacey had answered
+reflectively. "I wonder if she's got anything on her mind. I wish I
+could find out. One doesn't like a 'ome of friends not to share its
+worries with you, without giving you a fair chance to 'elp. I must see
+whether I can get it out of 'er."
+
+Oh, he was a kind man. He was certainly very kind. She put down her cup
+and braced her body and her soul, and said, "Mr. Peacey...."
+
+The world had deceived her utterly that day; and yet there was one in
+that cottage who had suffered more than she, for by her suffering she
+had bought no Richard. Poor Mrs. Cliffe! She was a woman of sixty now,
+white-haired, and fine-featured with the anxious fineness of one who has
+for long lived out of favour with herself and has laboured hard for
+re-establishment; but the fear still dwelt in her. Most times that
+Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting
+knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here
+and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly. But
+every now and then, perhaps once a year, she would put down her knitting
+so soon as Marion came in sight and come into the road to meet her and
+would give her nervous, absent-minded greetings. Then she would draw her
+into the furthest edge of the pavement, because the blind have such
+sharp hearing, and she would whisper:
+
+"Have you heard from _him_ lately?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He's still at Dawlish?"
+
+"They say so."
+
+"Do you think he will ever come back?"
+
+"No. He will never come back."
+
+"Ah." She would stand looking past Marion with her face cat's-pawed by
+memory and her fingers teasing the fringe of her shawl, till from the
+garden the blind old man would cry lovingly and querulously, "Trixy,
+where are you?" and she would answer, "Coming, dearie." As she turned
+away she would murmur: "I shouldn't like him to come back...."
+
+Poor Trixy Cliffe! She should have known only the sorrow of pure
+femalehood, such sorrow as makes the eyes of heifers soft. Women like
+her should be harvested like corn in their time of ripening, stored in
+good homes as in sound barns, and ground in the mill of wifehood and
+motherhood into the flour that makes the bread by which the people live.
+But there must have been some beauty working in her soul, for Peacey
+went only where he saw some opportunity to cancel some movement towards
+the divine, being a missionary spirit. So she had been delivered over to
+that terror which survived for ever. Even in the exorcised blue
+territory of a good old woman's eyes. "Oh, poor Trixy, poor Trixy!"
+moaned Marion, weeping. But it struck her that she was enjoying herself,
+and she sat up rigidly and searched her soul for the smuggled
+insincerity. "I must be lying," she said aloud with loathing. "I really
+cannot be pitying Trixy Cliffe because in my heart of hearts I care for
+no one but Richard. I would knead the flesh of anyone on earth and bake
+it in the oven if that were the only food I could give him. What am I
+doing this for? Ah, I see. I am hanging about this fictitious emotion
+simply because I do not wish to go on and remember Roger." She held out
+her hands into the blackness and cried out, "Oh, Roger, forgive me for
+shutting you out of my memory as I have shut you out of everything else.
+I will remember everything, I will!" She lay down and let all pictures
+reappear before her eyes, but her mouth was drawn down at the corners.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It was no use wondering now whether or not Peacey had really murmured
+"Good day, ma'am," as they parted at the door of the church after their
+furtive marriage. She had certainly thought she had heard this ironic
+respectfulness, and she had stared after him with a sudden dread that
+under the cream of benignity there might after all be a ferment of
+malign intention. But that gait, which was so light and brisk for such a
+heavy man, had already taken him some distance from her, and he was now
+entering the yew alley that was the private way from Torque Hall to the
+churchyard. The sunlight falling through the interstices of the dark
+mossy trees cast liver-coloured patches on his black coat. She had
+turned and looked down, as she always did when human complexities made
+her seek reassurance as to the worth of this world, on the shiny
+mud-flats, blue-veined with the running tides, and green marshes where
+the redshanks choired. Her misgiving had weakened at that beauty, for
+with the logic of the young she thought that if the universe was
+infinitely good it could not also be infinitely evil, and it had been
+utterly dispelled by his considerate conduct during the following weeks.
+
+He did not try to see her at all until a day or two before the birth of
+her child was expected. Then he came at twilight. He would not let
+Grandmother put a match to the lamp in the parlour, and Marion knew from
+his quiet urgency that he was doing this so that she might continue to
+wear the dusk as a cloak. He sat down by the window, his shoulders black
+against the sunset, and his fat hands, with their appealing air of shame
+at their own fatness, laid on the little table beside him an old; carved
+coral rattle and a baby's dress precious with embroideries. These he had
+bought, he said, up in London, where he had had to go for a day to do
+business with the wine merchants. He had not seemed to listen to her
+thanks. But his hunched shape against the primrose light and the
+gleaming of his thick white fingers playing nervously with the fragile
+gifts spoke of a passionate concern for her. No doubt that concern was
+sincere. They told her after her confinement that during the day and
+night through which her child was slowly torn from her he had not left
+the house, and at her cries a sweat had run down his face. That was not
+unnatural. An incomplete villainy would vex its designer as any
+unfinished work of art vexes the artist. But she interpreted it in the
+sense that he, knowing what delusions youth has regarding the human
+capacity for love, had foreseen that she would.
+
+She let him see her before anyone else, and he had made the most of that
+ideal occasion when her being was so sensitive that it responded to
+everything, and so well pleased at having safely borne her son that she
+saw everything as evidence of creation's virtue. He had added stroke to
+stroke with the modest confused smile with which he entered the room, as
+if he felt his vast bulk ridiculous in this room of small rosebud
+patterns; the uneasy laughter with which he disguised his embarrassment
+when they could find no chair big enough for him; the shy wonder with
+which he put out his hand and hooded the tiny black head with it, and
+uncurled the little hand with his obese forefinger; the reticence with
+which he checked his remark that he had always wanted to have a child of
+his own. And he perfected the picture that he desired her to see by the
+assurance he gave murmurously from the darkness of the open door. "Get
+well soon.... You needn't be afraid of me. We made a bargain. I mean to
+stick to it." He had caught the very tune that dogged sincerity plays on
+the voice's chords. She lay happy after he had gone because she and her
+child had so true a friend.
+
+It was, of course, from no malice against her that he set out to deceive
+her, but from the natural desire to protect his being from alterations
+hostile to its quality. Long after, sitting with Richard in a café in
+Rio de Janeiro, she had looked at the men who were taking the lovely
+painted women to themselves, and she detected behind the gross mask that
+the prospect of physical enjoyment set on the faces an expression of
+harsh spiritual defensiveness; and thenceforward she had understood why
+Peacey had practised this fraud on her. He had known, as all men know,
+that there is a beneficent magic in the relationship between men and
+women; the evil man, at war with all but himself, cannot but admit that
+for his supremest pleasure he depends on one other than himself, and by
+his gratitude to her is tainted with altruism and is no longer
+single-minded in his war on others. Such men uphold prostitution because
+it exorcises sex of that magic. It is not a device to save sensuality,
+for love with a stranger is like gulping new spirit, and love with a
+friend is drinking old wine. Its purpose is indeed this very
+imperfection of the embraces that it offers, for they leave the soul as
+it was.
+
+Peacey, she understood in the light of this discovery, had desired her
+with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and
+a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would
+have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to
+create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her
+and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.
+She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler's
+pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as
+old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of
+craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as
+unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked
+down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top
+shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver: thinking his
+solution out to its perfect issue.
+
+It had been quite perfect. By that visit, and by his abstention from any
+later visit, he had induced in her just that mood of serenity and
+confidence which would be most shocked by the irruption of his passion.
+The evening when it all happened she had been so utterly given up to
+happiness. She had taken the most preposterously long time to put
+Richard to bed. He had had a restless day, and had been so drowsy when
+she went to feed him in the evening that she had put him back in his
+cradle in his day clothes, but about half-past eight he had awakened and
+called her, and she found him very lively and roguish. She had stripped
+him and then could not bear to put his night-clothes on, he looked so
+lovely lying naked in her lap. He was not one of those babies who are
+pieces of flesh that slowly acquire animation by feeding and sleeping;
+from his birth he had seemed to be charged with the whole vitality of a
+man. He was minute as a baby of three months is, he was helpless, he had
+not yet made the amazing discovery that his hand belonged to him, but
+she knew that when she held him she held a strong man. This babyhood was
+the playful disguise in which he came into the world in order that they
+might get on easy terms with one another and be perfect companions.
+Never would he be able to feel tyrannous because of his greater
+strength, for he would remember the time when she had lifted him in her
+weak arms, and that same memory would prevent her from ever being
+depressed into a sense of inferiority, so that they would ever move in
+the happy climate of a sense of equality. And every moment of this
+journey towards that perfect relationship was going to be a delight.
+
+She bent over him, enravished by the brilliant bloom of his creamy skin
+and the black blaze of his eyes, which had been black from birth, as
+hardly any children's are; turned him over and kissed the delicate crook
+of his knees and the straight column of his spine and the little square
+wings of his shoulder-blades, and then she turned him back again and
+jeered at him because he wore the phlegmatic, pasha-like smile of an
+adored baby. She became vexed with love for him, and longed to clasp
+him, to crush him as she knew she must not. She put on his
+night-clothes, kissing him extravagantly and unsatedly, and when she
+finished he wailed and nuzzled to her breast. "Oh, no, you greedy little
+thing," she cried, for it was a quarter of an hour before he should have
+been fed again, but a wave of love passed through her and she took him
+to her. They were fused, they were utterly content with one another. He
+finished, smacking his lips like an old epicure. "Oh, my darling love!"
+she cried, and put him back into the cot and ran downstairs. If she
+stayed longer she would keep him awake with her kisses and play. She was
+brightened and full of silent laughter, like a girl who escapes from her
+sweetheart.
+
+Grandmother sat very quietly at her sewing and soon went upstairs.
+Grandmother was getting very old. When she said "Good-night" she seemed
+to be speaking out of the cavern of some preoccupation, and when she
+went upstairs her shawl fell from her shoulders and trailed its corner
+on the ground. Marion hoped that the old lady had not worn herself out
+by worrying about her, and she pulled out the sewing that had been shut
+up in the work-basket and meditated finishing it, but she was too tired.
+Nowadays she knew a fatigue which she could yield to frankly, as it was
+honourable to her organism, and meant that her strength was going into
+her milk and not into her blood. She folded her arms on the table and
+laid her head on them and thought of Richard. It was his monthly
+birthday to-day. He was three months old. She grieved to think that she
+could feed him for only six months more. How could she endure to be
+quite separate from him? Sometimes even now she regretted that the time
+had gone when he was within her, so that each of her heartbeats was a
+caress to him, to which his little heart replied, and she would feel
+utterly desolate and hungry when she could no longer join him to her
+bosom. But she would always be able to kiss him. She imagined herself a
+few years ahead, calling him back when he was running off to play,
+holding his resistant sturdiness in her arms while he gave her hasty,
+smudged kisses and hugged his ball for more loving. But she reflected
+that, while the character of those kisses would amuse her, they would
+not satisfy her craving for contact so close that it was unity with his
+warm young body, and she must set herself to be the most alluring mother
+that ever lived, so that he would not struggle in her arms but would
+give her back kiss for kiss. She flung her head back, sighing
+triumphantly because she knew she could do it, but as her eyes met her
+image in the mirror over the mantelpiece she was horrified to see how
+little like a mother she was looking. Lips pursed with these long
+imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child's mouth; she had lost
+utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a
+child may sleep: on a child's path her emanations were beginning to cast
+not light but lightning.
+
+She called out to herself: "You fool! If you really love Richard you
+will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow
+strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him
+an orange and not a kiss!" But it seemed to her that this would be a
+sacrifice until, staring into the glass, she noticed that she was now
+more beautiful than she had ever been, and then she saw the way by which
+she could be satisfied. Harry must come back; she knew he was coming
+back, for they had intercepted his letter to her, and they would not
+have done that if it had been unloving. After she had weaned Richard she
+must conceive again and let another child lift from him the excessive
+burden of her love: then her mind and soul could go on in his company
+without vexing him with these demands that only the unborn or the
+nursling could satisfy. Then this second child would become separate
+from her, and she must conceive again and again until this intense life
+of the body failed in her and her flesh ceased to be a powerful artist
+exulting in the creation of masterpieces. It must be so. For Richard's
+sake it must be so. Her love would be too heavy a cloak for one child,
+for it was meant to be a tent under which many should dwell. Again as in
+the wood she laid her hand on her body and felt it as an inexhaustible
+treasure. Again she was instantly mocked.
+
+There had come, then, a knock at the door. She had felt a little
+frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt
+fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is
+endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not
+be bitten by a frothing mouth. But it was not late, and it was as likely
+as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian
+calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.
+
+Peacey stood there. He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his
+body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll. There
+was an appearance of ceremony about him. His skin shone with the white
+lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly
+in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which
+she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like
+varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.
+
+He did not speak. He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he
+should enter. She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that
+clung about him been so definitely that of soap. From the garden behind
+him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds
+disturbed. His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids,
+with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or
+twice. When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish
+and he stepped within. He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to
+strip off his gloves. His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction,
+terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out: "Why have
+you come?"
+
+But he answered nothing. Speech is human, and words might have fomented
+some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should
+know each other only as animals and enemies. He continued to take off
+his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him
+hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the
+lamp. She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and
+moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood. Then in the blackness his
+weight threshed down on her. Even his form was a deceit, for his vast
+bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength. All consciousness soon left
+her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.
+Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her. She saw it as a lovely
+naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side,
+where it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body,
+sitting by with its haunches in a spring. She cried out to herself: "You
+can rise above this! This is only a physical thing," but her own answer
+came: "Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing. Yet it was a
+sacrament and gave you life. There is white magic and black magic. This
+is a black sacrament, and it will give you death." Her soul fainted into
+utter nothingness.
+
+She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself
+up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.
+But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and
+made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over
+her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish
+early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow
+of the lamp the night before. It was evident that Peacey had set it in
+order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing
+she had left crumpled on the table. At this manifestation of his
+peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son's
+room. But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was
+ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first
+to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty
+had through all previous agonies reassured her. But the eastern sky was
+inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before,
+and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the
+barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch
+wounds. Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had
+happened to her one of earth's ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking
+on could make good. But turning to her child to still his crying, she
+saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on
+the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty
+and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and
+she ran to him. She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the
+criminal face of the morning.
+
+From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest
+isolation. She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing
+what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but
+she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now
+why Grandmother had been so preoccupied that she let the tail of her
+shawl trail on the ground as she went upstairs that night, and why
+Cousin Tom Stallybrass had not come in to tell how the calf had gone at
+Prittlebay market. When one afternoon she came to the head of the stairs
+and saw Aunt Alphonsine gesticulating in her tight _dame de compagnie_
+black in the parlour below, stretching out her long lean neck like the
+spout of a coffee-pot to Grandmothers' ear, she stood quite still,
+staring at the two women and hating them till they saw her and fell
+silent. She did not take her gaze from them until Aunt Alphonsine put up
+her hand to cover her scar. Then she knew that this wretched woman was
+at last afraid of her and would let her alone, and she turned
+contentedly to the room where Richard was.
+
+But later on a misgiving seized her lest her aunt might have come as
+envoy from Peacey, and since she perceived that, her rage against the
+world was so visibly written on her that she inspired fear; she thought
+it best to give her boy into the charge of Peggy and to go over to
+Torque Hall herself. She waited in the courtyard outside the servants'
+quarters while they fetched him, and stood with her head high, so that
+the faces peering at her from the windows should see nothing of her
+torment, at the corner of the gardens that was visible through the
+gracious Tudor archway. There was nothing showing save a few pale mauve
+clots of Michaelmas daisies standing flank-high in the slanting dusty
+shafts of evening sunshine, and the marble Triton, glowing gold in
+answer to the sunset, with gold autumn leaves scattered on his pedestal.
+But she knew very well how fair it all must be beyond, where she could
+not see--the broad grass walk stretching between the wide, formal
+flowerbeds, well tended but disordered with the lateness of the year, to
+the sundial and the chestnut grove. How could Harry, who had loved her,
+possess all this and not want to share it with her? She could have
+sobbed like a child whose playmate is not kind, had not Peacey stood at
+her elbow. "I want to give you warning that if ever you come near me
+again I will kill you," she said. He looked sharply at her and she saw
+that he was convinced and discomfited. But suddenly he smiled. She went
+home, wondering uneasily why he should have smiled, but came to the
+conclusion that this was simply one of his mystifications and that he
+had simply been trying to cover his defeat. It was an extraordinary fact
+that there never once occurred to her that possibility, the thought of
+which, she afterwards realised, had made Peacey smile. The truth was
+that she never thought directly of that night's horror, but, perhaps
+because of that fantasy about the wounded youth which had vexed her
+delirium, she always disguised it in her mind as an encounter with a
+wild beast, and the expectation of human issue no more troubled her than
+it would a woman who had been gored by a boar.
+
+It was partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous
+peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some
+months that she was going to have Peacey's child. It was indeed a rainy
+December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was
+little Jack Harken, because he was whistling "Good King Wenceslas," as
+he always did, and would not go to answer him, although she knew
+Grandmother and Peggy were both in the dairy, because she was distraught
+with her own degradation. Her encounter with Peacey had been like being
+shown some picture from a foul book and being obliged to stare at it
+till it was branded on her mind, so that whenever she looked at it she
+saw it also, stamped on the real image like the superscription on a
+palimpsest. But now she felt as if she herself had become a picture in a
+foul book. And she was quite insane with a sense of guilt towards
+Richard. This discovery had, of necessity, meant that she must wean him,
+and her obsession interpreted their conflict between them that had
+naturally followed as a wrangle between them as to her responsibility
+for this evil. Now he was lying in his cot screaming with rage, his
+clean frock and the sheets running with the rivulets of milk that he had
+spat out and struck from the teat of the bottle she was forcing on him,
+and she was sobbing, for this sort of thing had been going on for days,
+"I can't help it, darling, I can't help it."
+
+Then Jackie began to thump rhythmically on the door below, and she ran
+down, maddened with so much noise, and snatched the letter he held out
+to her. At the writing on the envelope her heart stood still. She
+recanted all she had lately thought of Harry. Hatred and resentment fell
+from her. The promise of her lover's near presence came on her like a
+south wind blowing over flowers. At his message that he was waiting for
+her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is--a
+shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its
+mate's hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that
+changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable
+gold. In her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her
+shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly
+so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the
+thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell,
+because her lover's arms would so soon be round her.
+
+She was amazed, for she had not yet had leisure or the heart to look out
+of the window, that beneath her the marshes crackled white with sunlit
+snow, and a blue sea stretched to the rosy horizon that girdles bright
+frosty days. Even as this beauty had lain unseen under her windows, so
+had her happiness waited unsuspected. She did not see him till she was
+close upon him, for he was striding up and down between the last two
+trees of the elm hedge. Her heart ached when she saw him standing,
+brilliantly lovely as the glistening snow-laden branches above him, for
+it was plain from the confident set of his shoulders and the loose grip
+of his hand on his stick that he was unaware that any situation existed
+which was not easily negotiable. They had evidently told him nothing at
+Torque Hall to destroy the impression she must have created by her last
+letter to him in which she had described her acceptance of Peacey's
+offer of a formal marriage. They had not dared, for they knew how
+terrible he would be when he moved to avenge her. But he lifted his eyes
+and ran to her and took her in his arms, and did not cease to kiss her
+till she sobbed out what they had done to her. Then it was as if a wind
+had blown and the snow had fallen from the branches, leaving them but
+dark, gnarled wood.
+
+"But why did you marry him?"
+
+"The people stoned me in the street and I could get no peace at home."
+
+"Couldn't you have tried to stand it?"
+
+"I was afraid for the boy."
+
+"Then why couldn't you have gone away?"
+
+"How could I when I was so ill? Why did not you come back?"
+
+"How could I leave the prince and princess?"
+
+She was aghast to find them quarrelling, and while he drew a shuddering
+breath between his teeth, she interrupted: "Oh, Richard is so lovely!
+You must see him soon. Oh, such a boy!"
+
+But he had paid no heed and shakingly poured out words since it was so
+like the harmless spite of a child that beats young to old, her blood
+from that of a loved girl to a hating woman. He found the situation, she
+had thought at the time, and still thought after thirty years, far less
+negotiable than a high love would have done. It did not occur to him
+that he might take her away. He took it for granted that thereafter
+they must be lost to each other. But save for his desire to blame her
+for these mischances, which did not offend her, since it was so like the
+harmless spite of a child that beats his racquet because it has sent his
+ball into the next garden, he seemed not to be thinking of her part in
+that loss at all. It was his extreme sense of his own loss that was
+making him choke with tears. It appeared that love was not always a
+shelter, a wing, a witty clemency, a tender alchemy. She stood half
+asleep with shock until a sentence, said passionately in his delightful
+voice which made one see green water running swiftly, and at first
+refused admission to her mind by her incredulous love, confirmed itself
+by reiteration. "Damn it all," he was saying, "you were unique!" At that
+she cried out, "Oh, you are Peacey too! I will go back to Richard," and
+turned and stumbled up the wet hillside.
+
+It is true that Harry's desertion nearly killed her--that there was a
+moment, as she breasted the hill-top and found herself facing the
+malevolent red house where they had always told her that he did not
+really love her, when she thought she was about to fall dead from excess
+of experience and would have chosen to die so, if Richard had not waited
+for her. Yet it was also true that for long she hardly ever thought of
+Harry. Such fierce and unimagined passions and perplexities now filled
+her, that the simple and normal emotions she felt for him became
+imperceptible, like tapers in strong sunlight.
+
+The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry
+frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in
+the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had
+left Torque Hall that morning. She had shaken her head and given a
+dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had
+had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because
+the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she
+was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to
+speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her
+or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey. Nor, when a few weeks later
+it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had
+been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next
+twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must
+be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved. She thought of it,
+indeed, but negligently. She could imagine well how he had walked with
+his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a
+tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very
+virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped
+and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest
+in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the
+shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, "I must get out of
+this." No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to
+the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies. It was not like her
+agony. Nothing was simple there. Destiny had struck her being a blow
+that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was
+confusion, and the best things were bad.
+
+Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
+beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
+his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
+would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
+and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
+so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
+forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
+constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
+a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
+that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
+her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
+that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
+with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
+knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
+to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
+was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
+matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
+her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
+with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
+was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
+dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
+motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
+to judge her and bring this matter to an end.
+
+It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
+that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
+he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
+he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
+money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
+thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
+yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
+that day of which she had told nobody.
+
+But she had cheered herself in all those nights that she would make up
+for her body's defection by loving the child very much when it was born.
+She knew she would have no passion for it as she had for Richard, but
+she foresaw herself being consciously and slantingly tender over it,
+like a primitive Madonna over the Holy Child. There was, of course, no
+such solution of the problem. It became plain that there was not going
+to be in that hour when she knew the unnatural horror of a painless
+parturition. She had not been at all shocked by the violence she had
+endured at Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with
+the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a
+persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating
+herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like
+looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that
+here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which
+have no meaning and realising that here is madness.
+
+She was going through a process that should have produced life: but
+because of the lack of some essence which works through pain, but
+nevertheless is to the breeding womb what sight is to the eye or sanity
+to the brain, it was producing something that was as much at variance
+with life as death. The old women at her bedside chuckled and rubbed
+their hands because she was having such an easy time, but that was
+because they were old and had forgotten. If a young woman had been
+there she would have stood at the other side of the room between the
+windows, as far away from the bed as she could, and her lips would have
+pursed, as if she felt the presence of uncleanness. So were her own,
+when they showed her the pale child. She had indeed done an unclean and
+unnatural thing when she had brought forth a child that lived yet was
+unloved; who was born of a mother that survived and looked at it, and
+who yet had no mother, since she felt no motion towards it, but a deep
+shiver of her blood away from it; who aroused no interest in the whole
+universe save her own abhorrence; who was, as was inevitable in one so
+begotten and so born, intrinsically disgusting in substance.
+
+"Well, I have Richard to help me bear this," she said to herself, but
+her heart reminded her that though she had Richard, this child had no
+one. Pitifully she put out her arms and drew it to her breast, but
+detected for herself the fundamentally insincere kindness that a
+stranger will show to a child, confident that before long it will be
+claimed by its own kin.
+
+She always remembered how good the little thing had been as it lay in
+her arms, and how distasteful. Those were always to remain its silent
+characteristics. It was so good. "As good," the nurses used to say, "as
+if he were a little girl." It hardly ever cried, and when it did it
+curiously showed its difference from Richard. He hated being a baby and
+subject to other people's wills, and would lie in a cot and roar with
+resentment; but this child, when it felt a need that was not satisfied,
+did not rebel, but turned its face to the pillow and whined softly. That
+was a strange and disquieting thing to watch. She would stand in the
+shadow looking at the back of its little head, so repellently covered
+with hair that was like fluff off the floor, and listening to the cry
+that trailed from its lips like a dirty piece of string; and she would
+wonder why it did this, partly because she really wanted to know, and
+partly because it fended off the moment when she had to take it in her
+arms. Perhaps, she reflected, it muted its rage because it knew that it
+was unlovable and must curry favour by not troubling people. Indeed, it
+was as unlovable as a child could be. It was not pleasant naked, for its
+bones looked at once fragile and coarse, and its flesh was lax, and in
+its clothes it was squalid, for it was always being sick or dribbling.
+Then her heart reproached her, and she admitted that it cried softly
+because it had a gentle spirit, and she would move forward quickly and
+do what it desired, using, by an effort of will, those loving words that
+fluttered to her lips when she was tending Richard. Time went on, but
+her attitude to it never developed beyond this alternate recognition of
+its hatefulness and its goodness.
+
+She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to
+bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed
+infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant
+in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out
+of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when
+her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly
+to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for
+knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty
+knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food
+round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a
+railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would
+speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered
+him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does
+when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But
+Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk
+perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that
+passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got
+tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked
+playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with
+trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of
+foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine
+and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a
+pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over
+again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and
+Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!"
+When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both
+his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so
+that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly
+noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would
+take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not
+share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the
+best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to
+a servant. He was of the substance of his mother, and he knew all that
+she knew, and he knew that this child was an intruder.
+
+They clenched themselves against him. They were kind to him, but they
+would silently scheme to be alone together. If they were all three in
+the garden, she sitting with her needlework, Richard playing with his
+engine and Roger making daisy-chains, there would come a time when she
+would arise and go into the house. She would not look at Richard before
+she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When
+she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious
+operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale,
+or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to
+look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him,
+knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door and stand for a
+moment, twiddling the handle round and round, as if he had not really
+been so very keen to come to her, and she would go on indifferently with
+her occupation. But presently she would feel that she must steal a
+glance at the face that she knew would be looking so adorable now,
+peering obliquely round the edge of the door, the lips bright with
+vitality as with wet paint and the eyes roguish as if he felt she were
+teasing life by enjoying it so, and the dear square head, browny-gold
+like the top of a bun, and the little bronze body standing so fresh and
+straight in the linen suit. So her glance would slide and slide, and
+their eyes would meet and he would run to her. If he had anything on his
+conscience he would choose this moment for confession. "Mother, I told a
+lie yesterday. But it wasn't about anything really important, so we
+won't talk about it, will we?"
+
+Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk,
+until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so
+boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love
+for him as in long meadow-grass. Even as she imagined that night before
+Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss.
+They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other
+child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle,
+surveying them with wild eyes. There would be a moment of dislocation.
+Then she would cry, "Come along, Roger!" and Richard would slip from her
+knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms
+round her neck and kiss her. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as
+if it needed reassurance.
+
+But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very
+difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of
+him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never
+felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving
+nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in
+order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage
+which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was
+eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel
+either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in
+different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the
+immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the
+other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when
+she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great
+distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she
+marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for
+love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would
+never mature.
+
+The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another
+eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque
+Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed
+between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she
+was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but
+she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so
+after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past
+each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift
+her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she
+would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful,
+and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was
+as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a
+band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were
+contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be
+pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's
+breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the
+other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it
+would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its
+features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any
+expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the
+mud. They would pass on--their hearts sunk deeper into dingy
+acquiescence in their separation.
+
+Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as
+externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.
+Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house
+into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers
+to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though
+his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of
+naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when
+Roger ailed--which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a
+weak digestion--she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse
+him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary
+intensity on the minutić of his treatment and diet as if she were
+attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on
+presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter
+evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often
+to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start
+one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent,
+concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal
+existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the
+park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames
+mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave
+any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him
+as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing
+did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.
+
+As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare
+that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman
+living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the
+other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes
+at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers
+rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into
+it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and
+she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger,
+but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there had
+arrived--as there did every six months--parcels of toys, addressed to
+him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of
+paper scrawled "With love from father."
+
+She would be troubled by such moments when they came, for she was
+growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this
+pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and
+struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had
+smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love
+itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and
+breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent
+that it did not detect that nobody had really given it anything, and
+went on rejoicing, thus redeeming her from guilt. He would come and
+stand at the door of any room in which she was sitting, and she would
+pretend not to know he was there, so that she need caress him or say the
+forced loving word; but when at length, irritated by his repeated
+sniffs, she turned towards him, she would find the grey marbles of his
+eyes bright with happiness, and he would cry out in his dreadful
+whistling voice, "Ah, you didn't know I was watching you!" and run
+across undoubtingly to her arms. There would be real gratitude in the
+embrace she gave him. His trust in her had so changed the moment that
+she need not feel remorse for it.
+
+It had seemed quite possible that they could go on like this for ever,
+until the very instant that all was betrayed. She had had a terrible
+time with Richard, who was now seven years old. After their midday meal
+he had asked permission to go and spend the afternoon playing with some
+other boys on the marshes, and she had given it to him with a kiss,
+under which she had thought he seemed a little sullen. When Roger and
+she had nearly finished their tea he had appeared at the door, had stood
+there for a minute, and then, throwing up his head, had said doggedly:
+"I've had a lovely time at the circus." She had left the bread-knife
+sticking in midloaf and sat looking at him in silence. This was real
+drama, for she had refused to take them to the circus and forbidden him
+to go by himself because there was a measles epidemic in the
+neighbourhood. It flashed across her that by asking for permission to
+play with the boys on the marshes when he meant to go to the circus he
+had told her a lie. The foolish primitive maternal part of her was
+convulsed with horror at his fault. Because he was more important than
+anybody else, it seemed the most tremendous fault that anybody had ever
+committed, and because he was her son it seemed quite unlike any other
+fault and far more excusable. Her detached wisdom warned her that she
+must check all such tendencies in him, since what would in other
+children be judged a shortcoming natural to their age, would in him be
+ascribed to the evil blood of his lawless begetting, and he would start
+life under the powerful suggestion of a bad reputation. She resolved to
+punish him. The core of her that was nothing but love for Richard, that
+would have loved him utterly if they had not been mother and son, but
+man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, cried out with
+anguish that she should have to hurt him to guard against the destiny
+which she herself had thrust upon him.
+
+She said in a strained voice: "How dare you tell a lie to me and pretend
+that you were going to the marshes?" He answered, his eyebrows meeting
+and lying in straight, sullen bars: "I had to do that so's you wouldn't
+worry about me not coming home. And I paid for myself with the sixpence
+that was over from the five shillings Cousin Tom gave me at Christmas.
+And you know it doesn't really matter about the measles, because I'm
+strong and don't always go catching things like Roger does."
+
+He made as if he were going to sit down at the table, but she said: "No,
+you mustn't have any tea. Go to your room and undress. You've lied and
+you've disobeyed. I'll have to whip you." Her heart was thumping so that
+she thought she was going to faint. He lifted his chin a little higher
+and said: "Very well, the circus was very good. It was quite worf this."
+He marched out of the room and left her sick and quivering at her duty.
+After she had heard him bang his door, she realised that Roger was
+asking her again and again if he might have some more cherry jam, and
+she answered, sighing deeply, "No, dear, it's too rich. If you have any
+more you'll be ill," and she rose from the table and took the jar into
+the larder. She decided to clear away tea first, but that only meant
+carrying the tray backwards and forwards twice, and after a few moments
+she found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, shaking with
+terror, while the other child whined about her skirts and stretched up
+its abhorrent little arms. She pushed it aside, qualifying the harsh
+movement with some insincere endearment, and went to Richard's room and
+walked in blindly, saying: "I must whip you--you've broken the law, and
+if you do that you must be punished." Out of the darkness before her
+came the voice of the tiny desperado: "Very well. It was quite worf
+this. Mother, I'm ready. Come on and whip me." She pulled down the
+blinds and set herself to the horrid task, and kept at it hardly,
+unsparingly, until she felt she had really hurt him. Then she said, with
+what seemed to be the last breath in her heart-shattered body: "There,
+you see, whenever you break the law people will hurt you like this. So
+take notice." She moved about the room, leaving it as it should be left
+for the night, opening the windows and folding up the counterpane, while
+he lay face downwards on his pillow. Just as she was closing the door he
+called softly:
+
+"Mummie!"
+
+She continued to close it, and he cried:
+
+"Mummie!"
+
+But she remained quite quiet so that he thought she had gone. After a
+minute she heard him throw himself over in the bed and kick the clothes
+and sob fiercely, "Gah! Why can't she come when I call her?"
+
+She was back by his bedside in a second, and his arms were round her
+neck and he was sobbing:
+
+"Mummie, mummie, I know I've been naughty!" And as he felt the wetness
+of her face he cried out, "Oh, mummie, have I made you cry? I will be
+good! I will be good! I'll never make you cry again! I know I was a
+beast to go 'cos you really were frightened of us getting measles, but
+oh, mummie, I did so want to see a tiger!"
+
+They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that
+were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost
+melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.
+
+"You were quite right to whip me," he told her. "I wouldn't have
+believed you were really cross if you hadn't hurt me." Presently, when
+he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he
+sighed, "Oh, darling, the circus was lovely! There were such clever
+people. There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the
+ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful
+lady in pink satin. Mummie, you'd look lovely in pink satin!--and she'd
+bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.
+That was lovely, but I liked the animals best. Oh, darling, the lions!"
+
+She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that
+ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he
+protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
+surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
+up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
+of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
+could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
+do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
+parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
+They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
+suddenly as children do.
+
+She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
+nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
+little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
+than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
+waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
+rose and left him.
+
+Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily
+through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart
+wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew
+that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had
+been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going
+to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that
+she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve
+this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the
+open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by
+some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all
+poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate
+for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.
+
+She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and
+humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of
+nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the
+woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way
+touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her
+eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went
+round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop
+on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was
+pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark doors and
+windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their
+thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they
+were consciously preserving their occupants from the night's magic. As
+she walked to the garden's edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass
+and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks. The
+round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were
+hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and
+changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within
+the house was Richard. All was beauty.
+
+Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother? She stood
+there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew
+cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went
+back to the house.
+
+She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door
+was open and giving out a faint ray of light. She pulled it open and saw
+the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the
+jar into his mouth. A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it,
+threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull.
+It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that
+gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair,
+the floor. She lifted the child down and struck it. It gave her the most
+extraordinary pleasure to strike it. She struck it three times, and each
+time it was as good as drinking wine. Then she fell forward on her knees
+and covered her face with her hands. The child ceased to howl and put
+its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only
+reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it. Still, she submitted
+to its embrace, and muttered in abasement: "Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn't
+have done that!"
+
+The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam,
+and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that
+anybody had behaved badly to it. There was nothing to do but to give it
+a kiss and take it off to bed. When she saw its horrid little body
+stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered
+again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether
+very much force would be needed to kill it. All the time it knelt at her
+knee saying its prayers she was wondering whether, when he was a little
+older, he would not get caught by the tide out on the flats. "You vile
+woman!" she exclaimed in amazement. "You murderess!" But that was merely
+conversation which did not alter the established fact that her
+profounder self still hated the child it had brought forth, as it had
+done before he was born, and now, as then, was plotting to kill it, and
+that some check which her consciousness had always exerted on that
+hatred had for some reason been damaged, and that he was in active
+danger from her.
+
+All night she lay awake, and in the morning she went up to the bailiff's
+office at Torque Hall and asked them to send for Harry. She waited in an
+inner room, her heart quite calm with misery, and when Harry appeared in
+the doorway she did not care one way or another that he was white and
+shaken. Without delaying to greet him, she told him that she loathed
+Peacey's child so much that it must be taken away from her, at least for
+some time, and that she had wondered if she ought to give him a chance
+of finding affection with his father, who had, after all, never stopped
+sending him presents.
+
+There was a silence, and she turned her eyes on him and found him
+looking disapproving. Plainly he thought it very unnatural of her to
+dislike her own child, and was daring to doubt if his own son was safe
+with her. He--he of all men--who by his disloyalty had brought on her
+this monstrous birth that had deformed her fate! She clenched her fists
+and drew in a sharp breath and her eyes blazed. He moved forward
+suddenly in his chair, and she saw that this display of her quality had
+drawn him to her, as always the moon of her being had drawn the fluid
+tides of his, and that he wanted to touch her. Nearly he desired her.
+That also was insolence. Her acute hating glance recorded that whereas
+desire had used to make his face hard and splendid like a diamond, like
+a flashing sword, it now made it lax, and she realised with agony,
+though, of course, without surprise, that he had been unfaithful to
+their love times without number. But she looked into his eyes and found
+them bereaved as her heart was. She turned aside and sobbed once, drily.
+After that, they spoke softly, as if one they had both loved lay dead
+somewhere close at hand. He told her that Peacey had set up for himself
+in an inn, and that a widowed sister of his, named Susan Rodney, who
+also had been in the Torques' service, was keeping house for him. She
+was a really good sort, he declared, although she was Peacey's sister,
+and very motherly; indeed, she had been terribly upset by the loss of
+her only child, a little boy of nine, so she would doubtless welcome the
+charge of Roger. At any rate, there would be no harm in letting the
+child go to her for a three months' visit.
+
+"I'll settle the whole thing," he said. "You'd better not write; he may
+want to meet you."
+
+With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything
+useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she
+abruptly rose to go. But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity
+that had vexed her for years.
+
+"Tell me," she asked. "How did you get rid of Peacey? Was it money?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "Not altogether. You see, I found out
+something about him...."
+
+She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had
+perpetuated.
+
+So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation.
+She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her
+brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper
+lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow
+floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And
+because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was
+sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at
+Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance
+at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she
+found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been
+in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which
+was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as
+to how he was getting on at Dawlish.
+
+"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would
+begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer,
+and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious
+man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that
+which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated
+her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.
+
+Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by
+explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had
+suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she
+could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to
+win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and
+be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly
+in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely
+she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had
+gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the
+other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been
+subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read
+book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to
+this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not
+bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood
+had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows
+brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her
+bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the
+Ten Commandments.
+
+Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the
+eyeballs were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose
+and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much,
+and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms
+round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly
+difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her,
+and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her.
+But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that
+because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more
+impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the
+child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in
+this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her
+heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she
+had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being
+slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was
+necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment
+Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his
+poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other
+love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them
+off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly,
+and with an air of refusing to participate in the spoils of vice,
+declined to let Marion buy her a firstclass ticket, so the parting had
+to take place in a crowded thirdclass compartment. Roger shrieked and
+kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion
+said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now
+she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the
+eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And
+there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."
+
+All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this
+plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who
+stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters
+wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he
+never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream
+out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been
+sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother
+hates him!"
+
+She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with
+grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus
+about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child
+might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She
+watched the diminishing train with a criminally light heart. Richard
+began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely--just us two!"
+
+It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran
+into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep,
+into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did
+not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the
+head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he
+went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the
+garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a
+foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not
+been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he
+returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter,
+for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick
+suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him
+out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have
+stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not
+struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed
+her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a
+picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put
+them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted
+candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her
+pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which
+these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and
+Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and
+sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost
+nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better
+than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he
+would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her
+about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would
+settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would
+tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.
+
+On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together,
+and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found
+the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine.
+They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried
+horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see
+Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it
+were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there
+met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings,
+and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the
+sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels
+thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled
+and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its
+flames.
+
+Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness
+and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and
+lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it
+was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his
+body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and
+unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings
+as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride
+ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his
+behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable
+conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his
+spirit were poured out into his passion for her. She had always known
+these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the
+knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For
+now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man
+to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she
+was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud
+by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother
+of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according
+to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be
+enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses
+in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so
+much less splendid than his son.
+
+She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour
+on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with
+the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew
+that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to
+keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite
+safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to
+speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to
+say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard
+would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she
+would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to
+speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she
+tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might
+try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be
+nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger
+will always be nice to me--you needn't worry about that."
+
+As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural
+slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village
+school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact,
+disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered
+judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of
+his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which
+his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure,
+whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute
+illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically
+than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or
+need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so
+were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly,
+or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or
+workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely
+than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together
+men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to
+rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged
+to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure,
+their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be
+adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.
+
+Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
+passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest
+after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind
+like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and
+even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
+goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would
+disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose
+begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him
+take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her
+the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that
+stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith
+Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought
+beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any
+man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to
+everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long
+would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she
+cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard
+looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The
+surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical
+kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very
+well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute,
+with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to
+burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest
+of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity,
+and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way,
+"You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll
+be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.
+If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger,
+she would succeed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking
+and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay
+in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone
+from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by
+nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and
+love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning
+for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later
+years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the
+afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever
+rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as
+one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own
+thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that
+the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle
+of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it
+specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two,
+and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last
+Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds
+about the dark edges of the room.
+
+"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.
+She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began
+to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning
+their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.
+"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys
+say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because
+always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down
+and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to
+infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.
+But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile,
+as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly,
+"Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his
+brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as
+children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some
+important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant
+resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow,
+acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has
+to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.
+But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an
+off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the
+best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"
+She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had
+been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about;
+it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups
+were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....
+
+As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and
+rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment
+so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the
+benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that
+her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no
+longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she
+wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week
+before Christmas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on
+the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it
+threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the
+pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.
+There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to
+remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her
+brainpan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he
+would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.
+It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so
+many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she
+took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six
+months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by
+reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to
+be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was
+declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that
+love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy
+than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not
+have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the
+house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then
+penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant
+presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat
+with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she
+could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor
+little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that
+Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in
+subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his
+cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they
+would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished
+she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and
+not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from
+looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey
+and he knew it.
+
+Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to
+heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She
+picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and
+struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients
+would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was
+being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter
+to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not
+know, and then, because the grandfather clock twanged out three and she
+knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the
+windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High
+Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found
+Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped.
+The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously,
+and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all
+the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation
+of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at
+once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days
+after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey,
+the village people would go through her story all over again to try to
+find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a
+tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which
+the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer
+distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming,
+_please_, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the
+favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much
+imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.
+
+"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say
+afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the
+extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy
+with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed.
+For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was
+nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the
+game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote
+her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back
+within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an
+infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back,
+pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be
+taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger,
+she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped
+them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame
+died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and
+cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"
+
+What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels
+with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than
+a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can
+hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.
+She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the
+blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air
+with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him
+suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and
+abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her
+no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every
+hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in
+some way that would hurt her.
+
+One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when
+she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up
+and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had
+forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able
+to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to
+write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not
+coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She
+took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown
+getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard
+and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away
+she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and
+wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of
+blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or
+of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper;
+and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said
+wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into
+February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and
+the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.
+
+That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn
+she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men
+looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her
+hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.
+Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.
+Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In
+the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to
+herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God
+I may never spend another like it."
+
+But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul
+walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously,
+struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was
+no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not
+long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture
+so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in
+an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get
+something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a
+bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few
+hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now
+undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They
+were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that
+there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put
+into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and
+at games.
+
+Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance
+which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead
+from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a
+school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a
+player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure
+was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know
+as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail
+of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were
+both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his
+superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader
+might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.
+When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this
+suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth
+limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he
+pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it
+was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this
+sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.
+She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that
+she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to
+her.
+
+But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down
+Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown sunshine of the
+dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his
+dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of
+the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the
+other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep,
+for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of
+memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given
+her with its first prick, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that
+those things would go on and on, until in the end a little figure in a
+nightshirt beat the dark with its fists.
+
+For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating
+her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her
+that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart
+which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little
+more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she
+coveted more than any pleasure. But that process, if it ever had begun,
+was stopped when Richard was fifteen.
+
+It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays,
+that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that
+she had started up, crying out, "Harry! Harry!" She heard the latch of
+the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.
+Half asleep, she mumbled, "Harry, it can't be you?..." A voice answered
+haltingly, "No," and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and
+lit the candle by her bedside. She could not see him, for the light was
+too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her
+dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, "Go to
+bed, I'm all right, all right." But he sat down on her bed and took her
+hand in his, and said sullenly, "You've been calling out for my father.
+Why are you doing that?" She whimpered, "Nothing. I was only dreaming."
+But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep. "I know all
+about it, mother. The other boys told me about it. And Goodtart said
+something once." His hand tightened on hers. "You used to meet him up at
+that temple." For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and
+then persisted, "What is it? Why do you cry almost every night? I've
+heard you ever so often. You've got to tell me what's the matter."
+
+She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid
+for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that
+the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but
+because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin
+cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she
+desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her
+long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the
+shore by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him
+so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips
+dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the
+boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"
+
+"What boy did that?"
+
+"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."
+
+"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."
+
+She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually
+became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair
+across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she
+wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had
+happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight
+of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself,
+"Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"
+
+But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face
+against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and
+sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at
+him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking,
+"Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I
+love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for
+one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears,
+slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with
+kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with
+relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back
+to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He
+did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped
+softly into dreamless sleep.
+
+Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced
+by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of
+guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes
+against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it
+is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by
+calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest
+dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and
+she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was
+binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his
+childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from
+a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand
+what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these
+nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her
+destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she
+could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly
+concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a
+profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She
+did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory
+quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little
+figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt
+nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As
+much as ever Roger was an orphan.
+
+But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this
+matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed
+it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How
+proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to
+sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to
+that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from
+boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen
+so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when
+he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids
+and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent
+clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her
+until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She
+had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul
+when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship,
+he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"
+She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather
+roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting,
+did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned
+away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had
+distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would
+imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for
+going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was
+not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that
+travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his
+magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had
+found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and
+the farm-men, for she had grown very sly about her fellow-men, and knew
+that it was best to hide happiness lest someone jealous should put out
+their hand to destroy it. So she had gone down to the orchard and sat in
+the crook of a tree, looking out at an opal estuary where a frail
+rainstorm spun like a top in the sunshine before the variable April
+gusts. She wondered how his dear brown face would look now he had
+outfaced danger and had been burned by strange suns. She had heard
+suddenly the sound of steps coming down the path, and she had turned in
+ecstasy; but there was nobody there but a pale young man who looked like
+one of the East-End trippers who all through the summer months
+persistently trespassed on the farm lands. As he saw her he stopped, and
+she was about to order him to leave the orchard by the nearest gate when
+he flapped his very large hands and cried out, "Mummie! Mummie!" There
+was a whistling quality in the cry that instantly convinced her. She
+drew herself taut and prepared to deal with him as a spirited woman
+deals with a blackmailer, but as he ran towards her, piping exultantly,
+"Now I'm sixteen I can say who I want to live with--the vicar says so,"
+she remembered that he was her son, and suffered herself to be folded in
+his arms, which embraced her closely but without suggestion of strength.
+
+That day, at least, she had played her part according to her duty: she
+had corrected so far as possible the sin of her inner being. It had not
+been so very difficult, for Roger had shown himself just as
+goldenhearted as he had been as a child. He would not speak of the years
+of ill-treatment from which he had emerged, save to say tediously, over
+and over again, with a revolting, grateful whine in his voice, how hard
+Aunt Susan had worked to keep the peace when father had one of his bad
+turns. It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice
+in a draper's shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and
+overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained
+of was that the "talk was bad." Tears came into his light eyes when he
+said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save
+sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for
+her. There would never be any end to that. All through the midday meal
+he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and
+would say whistlingly: "Ooh, mummie, d'you know, I used to think it must
+be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think
+I've ever seen such another head of hair."
+
+But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they
+walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of
+which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when
+I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said
+that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you
+didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."
+
+Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a
+kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try
+his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and
+that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you
+knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past
+eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she
+had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they
+ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into
+the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly
+excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here,
+Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who
+defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not
+like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But
+Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened
+with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It
+evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a
+third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself
+felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other
+people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have
+come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see
+it's Roger!"
+
+Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for
+him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure,
+she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome
+having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But
+her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it
+was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of
+a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his
+coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he
+had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one
+chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell
+the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer
+and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and
+immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of
+waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are
+you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her
+chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when
+suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's
+shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to
+run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to
+carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not
+look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice,
+"Hello, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not
+bear to look at his warty hands any longer, and then asked: "Roger,
+dear, is there anything the matter?" She spoke to him always without any
+character in her phrases, like a mother in books. He mumbled, "Nothing,
+mummie," but would not lift his head; and after a gulping minute
+whimpered: "I want to go back to the shop." "Back to the shop, dear? But
+I thought you hated it. Darling, what is the matter?" He remained
+silent, so she took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
+Perhaps that had not been a very wise thing to do.
+
+Marion had dropped her hands and gone back to Richard, and said with
+simulated fierceness: "You haven't done anything to Roger that would
+make him think that we don't like having him here?" He glanced sharply
+at her and recognised that their destiny was turning ugly in their
+hands, and he answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to a chap
+who's been through such a rotten time." She thought, with shame, that if
+his face had become cruel at her question, and he had answered that he
+thought it was time the other went, she would have bowed to his
+decision, because he was her king, and she realised that it was no
+wonder that Roger had found out. That moment of which she was so proud
+because she had said heartily, "Richard, don't you see it's Roger?"
+without showing by any wild yearning of the eye that she would have
+given anything to be alone with him, had been instantly followed by a
+betrayal. For when he had lifted his lips from her cheek and had turned
+to greet Roger with courtesy that was at once kind and insincere, he had
+left one hand resting on her shoulder as it had been when they embraced,
+and his thumb stretched out to press on the pulse that beat at the base
+of her throat. If she had been completely loyal she would have moved;
+but she had stood quite still, letting him mark how she was not calm and
+rejoicing at all, but shaken as by a storm with her disgust at this
+loathsome presence. His hand had relaxed and he had passed it
+caressingly up her neck. She had let herself sigh deeply; she might as
+well have said, "I am so glad you understand I hate him." That was the
+first of a thousand such betrayals. The words said between souls are not
+heard by the eavesdropping ear, but the soul also can eavesdrop, and
+tells in its time. That morning there must have come a moment to the
+poor pale boy, as he worked at his silly present in the little shed,
+when it was plain to him that the mother and the brother whom he had
+thought so kind were vulpine with love of each other, vulpine with hate
+of him.
+
+There was no disputing his discovery, since it was true. The only thing
+to do was to try to arrange some way of life for him in which he would
+have a chance to become an independent person who could form new and
+unspoiled relationships. It was, of course, out of the question to send
+him back to the shop, but the problem of disposing of him was one that
+raised innumerable difficulties which Marion was the less able to face
+because her bad dreams had begun again. He had so little schooling that
+it was impossible to send him in for any profession. He, himself, who
+was touchingly grateful because they were not sending him back to the
+shop, chose to be trained as a veterinary surgeon, and he was
+apprenticed to old Mr. Taylor at Canewdon. But it turned out that though
+he had a passionate love for animals he had no power over them. After he
+had been chased round a field three times and severely bitten by a
+stallion with whom he had sat up for two nights, Mr. Taylor pronounced
+that it was hopeless and sent him home. They tried him as a chemist's
+assistant next, and he did well for ten months, until there was that
+awful trouble about the prescription. There had been nothing to do after
+that save to put him to work as a clerk and give him an allowance that
+with his wages would enable him to live in comfort and try to seem glad
+when he came home for his holidays.
+
+For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not
+love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made
+him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and
+half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not
+take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for
+his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at
+his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were
+so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank
+Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get
+there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep
+things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less
+misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window
+than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was
+concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end
+of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes
+following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her
+heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was
+responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to
+ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as
+everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which
+confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving
+from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city,
+because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.
+
+From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she
+was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he
+would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say
+bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And
+she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as
+you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be
+sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling
+and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the
+inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it
+would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.
+And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there
+flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing
+would happen. But what thing? She would put her hand to her head, but
+she was never able to remember.
+
+And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen;
+though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing. She herself had
+never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it,
+but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had
+always done its duty by Roger. It told, of course, the most moving story
+of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he
+should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been
+walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a
+flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller's in Watford
+and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his
+allowance, he could not possibly pay.
+
+The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at
+first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger. It had been
+unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had
+been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation
+of the note of love. It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in
+the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense
+rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur,
+"Oh, but he was speaking the truth. I'm quite comfortably off. I've come
+to pay the jeweller," and watch the look of amazement on the hot,
+high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated
+into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man,
+and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no
+longer. Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger. Marion
+felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to
+feel.
+
+She liked, too, going into the jeweller's shop and sitting there under
+the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely
+voice that she had learned from her lover: "Yes, but I don't want you to
+take them back. I want to pay for them. There seems to have been some
+misunderstanding. There is no difficulty about the money at all. My son
+only wanted you to wait till his quarter's allowance came. I have the
+money here in notes. If you would count it...." She was playing a
+mother's part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller's eyes were
+examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she
+had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because
+it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from
+within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly
+because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served
+Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried
+back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him
+as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have
+done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious
+woman...."
+
+But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up
+suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with
+pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took
+it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into
+a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the
+oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.
+She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay
+two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other
+hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her
+train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you,
+mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of
+his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll
+of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For
+since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not
+love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space,
+there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had
+always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....
+
+But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had
+written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his
+allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must
+try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a
+situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they
+heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his
+holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an
+increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at
+first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then
+in Rio de Janeiro. There she was happy. She was one of those Northerners
+to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its
+natives. For over those the sun has had power since their birth,
+consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became
+pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the
+Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth. But
+with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of
+the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons. She could walk
+across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the
+heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent
+pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the
+thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she
+was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had
+always impotently desired to do.
+
+And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched
+his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had
+established it over her being from the moment of his conception. There
+was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in
+hesitancy, but in simultaneous snatchings at life by both of the warring
+forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation. He loved
+riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he
+did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him
+in his pleasure. But he gave the core of his passion to his work and
+disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he
+was always cool and remote like a priest. It gave him pleasure to be
+insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of
+fineness and humility. He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality
+of his work that he rejected half the world's offers to him. And always
+he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if
+they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country
+that had banished them and were earning great honours. She wished this
+life could go on for ever.
+
+But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the
+flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap. She did not
+open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.
+His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an
+Indian's in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and
+satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.
+That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think
+of Richard's actions as being good or bad, but only as being different
+in colour and lustre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are
+pearls, and there are emeralds. But it made her feel lonely, and she
+turned soberly to opening her letter. It was from Roger. He was in
+trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were
+gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help. At
+first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising
+that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly:
+"Richard, how can I cable money to Roger? He wants it quickly. And,
+Richard, I think I should go home and look after him." Richard had set
+his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment's quivering
+silence, had broken into curses. "Oh, don't speak of poor Roger like
+that!" she had cried out, and he had answered terribly: "I'm not
+speaking of him; I'm speaking of my father, who let you in for all
+this." She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his
+face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace
+with his father before he died. Not even for Harry's sake would she
+imperil the love between her and her son.
+
+She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been
+useless. Roger would never come back to live with her. All she could do
+was to sit at Yaverland's End, ready to receive him when he turned up,
+as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was
+going to do in the future. Usually on these occasions he brought her a
+present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the
+humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a glass jar of
+preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking
+magnificent when he saw it in the grocer's shop. She would kiss him
+gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the
+grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in
+cities.
+
+A regular routine followed these visits. First he wrote happy letters
+home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was
+silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job
+and owed money to the landlady. Then she would seek him out, wherever he
+was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards
+Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the
+house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an
+irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home
+with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.
+At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.
+For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become
+so if he went back and lived with her. As things were, he could
+interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.
+Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible
+quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so
+sorry for his landladies. To admit that he could not earn a bare living
+when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would
+have broken his spirit.
+
+Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her,
+but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend
+together on these occasions. There fell increasingly moments of silence
+when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good
+little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his
+unpleasantness. For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.
+As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning
+to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was
+something else about his appearance, something tarnished and
+disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at
+Leicester said to her: "I do think it's such a pity that a nice young
+man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don't take more care of himself like he
+ought to." Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world,
+because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her
+son a murderer than a drunkard. She had wondered if the truth need ever
+reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind's eye a newspaper
+paragraph: "Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings
+for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course
+of their duty...." She had asked quickly, "What is he like? Does he get
+violent?" The woman had answered: "Oh no, mum; just silly-like," and had
+laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.
+
+Oh God, oh God! When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to
+something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear,
+but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had
+always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was
+conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was
+somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention
+to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for
+daring to be Richard--an intention that was vindictive against beauty
+and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not
+strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit
+for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's
+drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would
+side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.
+They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness
+would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped
+out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that
+lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness
+that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.
+Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and
+excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she
+cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been
+so different...."
+
+If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great
+house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there
+slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry
+would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of
+her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born
+child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have
+gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a
+boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of
+immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his
+face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she
+longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have
+turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men
+and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them
+threatened, not one of them doomed....
+
+Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.
+The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming
+tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her
+house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would
+not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.
+Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it
+had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her
+eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...."
+
+There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric
+bell.
+
+She looked at the clock by her bedside. It was three o'clock. She said
+to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange
+things have happened assume when they fear that yet another is
+approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation,
+"It's late for anyone to call."
+
+But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.
+
+She cried out, "Ah, yes!" She knew who it was. It was Roger, come in
+rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and
+squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself. She hurried over to her
+wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into
+slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, "Roger, Roger,
+Roger! ... Why, it's you, Roger!... Come in. Come in, my boy.... What is
+it, my poor lad?..."
+
+She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle
+of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and
+smoothed from it certain lines of loathing. Bowing her head, she
+murmured a remonstrance to some power.
+
+But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the
+door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare,
+lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,"
+so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared
+to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more
+hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard
+line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the
+threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and
+hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor
+darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight
+coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it
+seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the
+white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous
+stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but
+their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.
+
+She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed
+nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor
+she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had
+looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked
+like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern
+countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where
+she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles
+away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat
+outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their
+relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without
+warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.
+
+She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the
+shed?" she asked indifferently.
+
+"No. It's outside the gate."
+
+"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."
+
+He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of
+dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.
+
+She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the
+illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the
+phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange
+night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were
+co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears
+she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge
+electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous
+son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he
+passed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It
+was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores
+lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit
+to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and
+kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.
+
+She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search
+of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of
+light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been
+anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have
+gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from
+him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her,
+that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.
+
+When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."
+
+Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance
+of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had
+not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his
+cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The
+queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet
+somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity
+for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....
+
+He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and
+murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her
+that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in
+an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely
+name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way
+it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly
+as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.
+It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his
+favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to
+school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow
+of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the
+flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."
+
+She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but
+she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm
+plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption.
+These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that
+the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's
+hot!" she said, holding out the plate.
+
+He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.
+
+"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.
+
+"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in
+Scotland."
+
+"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"
+
+"As well as well can be."
+
+"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."
+
+"No, I've had none, none at all."
+
+"That means not too many. Does it?"
+
+They kissed, and he said tenderly yet harshly: "Roger hasn't been
+bothering you?"
+
+"Ah, the poor thing, don't speak of him like that," she said. "No, but
+I've not heard from him for six weeks. Not even at Christmas. I'm a
+little anxious. But it may be all right. You remember last Christmas
+there was a time when he didn't write. I expect it'll be all right." But
+with her eyes she abandoned herself to fear, so that he should soothe
+her and stroke her hands with his, which were trembling in spite of
+their strength because he was so glad to see her.
+
+"Mother, darling, I have hated leaving you alone. But it was necessary.
+I've done good work this winter." He made with one hand a stiff and
+sweeping movement that expressed his peculiar kind of arrogance, which
+stated that his was the victory, now and for ever, and yet took
+therefrom no pride for himself. "I've pulled it off," he said jeeringly,
+and smiled at her derisively but with tight lips, as if they must take
+this thing lightly or some danger would spring. "Where I get my brains
+from I don't know," he muttered teasingly, and put out his hand and
+traced the interweaving strands in one of her plaits. "What hair you've
+got!" he said. "I've never seen a woman with ..." He started violently
+and was silent.
+
+She cried out, "What is it?" But he answered, speaking clippedly, "Oh,
+nothing, nothing...."
+
+So evidently was he overcoming a moment of utter confusion that she
+turned away and busied herself with the coffee.
+
+Behind her his voice spoke falsely, uplifted in a feint of the surprised
+recollection which at its first coming had struck him dumb the previous
+moment. "And Ellen! I'm a nice sort of lover to be five minutes in the
+house without asking for my Ellen! How is she? How have you been getting
+on together?"
+
+"Oh, your dear Ellen!" she cried fervently. But her heart went cold
+within her. He was right. It was against nature that he should have
+forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was
+sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman
+he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of
+destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make
+time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he
+had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head,
+thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable
+look of a man who is truly in love. Well, if that were so, why could it
+not be pure and easy joy for them both, as it was for other sons and
+mothers when there were happy marriage afoot? Why must their life, even
+in such parts of it as escaped the shadow of Peacey or Roger, be so
+queer in climate? This time it was Richard's fault. She had been
+willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people. Her
+spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, "Go and eat your
+eggs before they're cold." As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and
+trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of
+his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and,
+cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?" she
+demanded.
+
+He answered mildly, "Didn't I?"
+
+"No, you didn't," she told him curtly. "You said you thought her pretty.
+Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch
+little face!..."
+
+She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the
+uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the
+smile on his lips. Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air
+as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to
+follow their diverse musics? But she could not quarrel with him for
+long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was
+given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame
+her heart like the advance of an army. His flesh and hair seemed to
+reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with
+water. Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into
+some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his
+mouth vigilant. Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver.
+Utterly melted, she cried out, "I am so glad you have come home."
+
+He started, and came smiling out of his dream. "I am so glad to be
+here," he said. They laughed across the table; the strong light showed
+them the dear lines they knew on one another's faces. "That's why," he
+cried brilliantly, "I've come at this ungodly hour. I had to be here. I
+got into London at nine o'clock and I went and had some dinner at the
+Station Hotel. But I felt wretched. Mother, I'm getting," he announced
+with a naďve triumph, "awfully domestic. I got the hump the minute Ellen
+left Edinburgh. I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and
+got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here
+by midnight if I hadn't had a smash at Upminster. No, I wasn't hurt. Not
+a scrap. It was at the beginning of that garden suburb. God, it must be
+beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe. I'm
+glad we live in this old place. Well, a chap who'd bought some timber at
+an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a
+log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half
+a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a
+garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up.
+The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown
+and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down
+because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his
+business, I ask you?' he kept on saying. Mustn't it be queer to have
+womenfolk with whom one doesn't feel identical?" They exchanged a
+boastful look of happiness, the intensity of which, however, seemed the
+last effort he found possible. For his lids drooped, and he supported
+his head on his hand and took a deep drink, and said drowsily, "I'm glad
+to be here."
+
+She went and stood beside him and stroked his hair. "I should have come
+to you at Aberfay," she grieved. "But I knew I couldn't stand the
+winter, and I would only have been a nuisance to you if I had been ill
+all the time. Did the woman feed you properly, dear?"
+
+He said, without looking up, "I wouldn't have let you come. It was a
+God-forsaken hole. I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for"--he
+gave it out with an odd hesitancy, almost as if he were boyishly
+shy--"Ellen. And I had to stand it, so that I could pull this thing
+off."
+
+She asked, "What thing, my dear?" though she was not so very greatly
+interested. By daylight her ambition for him was fanatic and without
+limit. But in this stolen hour, when no one knew that they were
+together, she let herself feel something like levity about his doings.
+It seemed enough, considering how glorious he was, that he should merely
+be.
+
+He began to eat again and told the story tersely between mouthfuls. "You
+know the reason that I stayed up in Edinburgh after I'd sent off Ellen
+was that I thought I had to show the directors what I'd been doing at
+Aberfay next Thursday. They were to come on to me after they'd paid
+their visit to the Clyde works. Well, they came yesterday instead. Sir
+Vincent has to go to America sooner than he expected, so he wanted to
+get it over. When they saw what I'd been trying for during the last six
+months they got excited. As a matter of fact it is pretty good. I wish I
+could tell you about it, but you know I can't. Also I had told McDermott
+that Dynevors, the Birmingham people, had heard my contract was up in
+March, and wanted to buy me. So they got frightened, and offered me a
+new contract that they thought would keep me." He had finished his meal,
+and he pushed away his plate and stretched himself, looking up at her
+and smiling sleepily.
+
+"Have you taken it?"
+
+"Rather. It couldn't have been better."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."
+
+"How?"
+
+He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm
+too woolly-headed to tell you now."
+
+"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a
+rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are
+you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared
+nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest
+he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.
+
+He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to
+reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm
+glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been
+working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my
+footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest
+director. I've got"--again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of
+arrogance that was not vanity--"the best brain of them all. In ten years
+I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly
+everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the
+next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being
+fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind,
+who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any
+class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I
+meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific
+man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."
+
+"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.
+
+"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where
+it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you.
+You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the
+example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself.
+Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady
+enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be
+done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to
+impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes--there's a
+kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work,
+when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what
+one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have
+kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have
+pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.
+
+"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into
+British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking
+so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one
+go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's
+important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world.
+It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only
+look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study
+matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that
+when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's
+not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool
+that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself
+with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will
+die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything
+on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself,
+such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.
+
+"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification
+for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose
+that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was
+to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as
+little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it,
+considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were
+beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so
+easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just
+kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women
+that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here
+and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the
+reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is
+that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your
+life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me,
+and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember
+licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself
+teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married
+woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by
+your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of
+her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been
+magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such
+thing as justice in heaven or earth--I tell you, mother, it's kept me
+going to think of the sacrifice you made for me--"
+
+"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with
+you."
+
+"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case
+against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of
+him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being
+cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband--for some man to
+adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all
+been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist
+more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything
+about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this
+while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done
+for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful
+you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"
+
+Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with
+grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I
+never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I
+mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance
+music...."
+
+"Oh, you poor darling!--and you would have danced so beautifully!" he
+cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself
+free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she
+might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were
+only moods. I never really wanted anything except to be with you!" But
+her bliss in him had been too tightly strung by his sudden coming and by
+his open speech of that concerning which they spoke as seldom as the
+passionately religious speak of God, so for a little time she had to
+weep. But presently she stretched out her hand and pressed back his
+seeking mouth.
+
+"Hush!" she said with a grave wildness. "We must not talk like this."
+
+He lifted his face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found
+her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly
+he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on
+his hand and staring at a blank wall.
+
+She saw that she had hurt him. She drew close to him again, and murmured
+lovingly, though still with defensive majesty: "Why should we talk of
+it, my boy? It's all over now, and you're a made man. This contract
+really does mean that, doesn't it?"
+
+He answered, patting her hand to show that he submitted to her in
+everything, "Oh, in the end it means illimitable power."
+
+To give him pleasure she exchanged with him a brilliant and triumphant
+glance, though at this moment she felt that her love for him concerned
+itself less with ambition than she had ever supposed. Incredulously she
+whispered to her harsh, sceptical mind that it almost seemed as if its
+sphere were not among temporal things. But it gave her a real rapture to
+perceive in his eyes the elder brother of the expression that had always
+dwelt there in his childish days when he announced to her his
+cricket-scores and his prizes; even so, she had thought then, the
+adjutant of a banished leader might hand him down arrows to shoot on the
+city that had exiled him. And indeed the success of their conspiracy had
+been marvellous. In old times they had looked out of this house under
+lowered and defiant brows, knowing there was none without who knew of
+them who did not despise them. But now they could smile tenderly and
+derisively out into this hushed moonlight that received the uncountable
+and fatuously peaceful breaths of the sleepers who had been their
+enemies and were to be their slaves. It was strange that at this of all
+instants she should for the space of a heartbeat lose her sense of the
+uniqueness of her fate and be confounded by amazement at the common lot
+in which they two and the vanquished sleepers alike partook. Was it
+possible that this could be? That this plethora of beings that coated
+the careless turning earth like grains of dust on a sleeping top were
+born--mysterious act!--and mated--act so much more mysterious than it
+seemed!--and died--act which was the essence of mystery! She was dizzied
+with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught
+hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to
+her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less
+broad body. She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking
+about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as
+unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest. Penitently she dropped a kiss
+on his forehead and muttered, "Richard, you're a good son. You've made
+up for everything I've been through many times over...."
+
+"Then stay up with me a little," he said. "Don't let's go to bed yet."
+He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the
+hearth till it faced the grate. "Sit down, dear, and I'll make you a
+fire. Dear, do sit down. This is the last night we shall have
+together." She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew
+to be in him a mask of intense desire. He busied himself with the fire
+and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he
+had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her
+lap and seemed to sleep.
+
+But he did not. Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep
+of his eyelashes. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered; and discovered
+happily, "Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen." She waited serenely,
+while the clock ticked.
+
+Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being
+here...."
+
+She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough
+that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.
+
+But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to
+my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm
+mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case--because they've got the works
+on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I
+shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a
+place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll
+be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to
+our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising
+his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him,
+though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before.
+"It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what
+it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar
+thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go,
+hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I
+were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place
+where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that,
+mother?"
+
+She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened
+here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a
+reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling.
+"Yes, I love it."
+
+They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He
+grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if
+he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like
+the house?"
+
+She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.
+
+"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.
+
+For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward
+and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked
+unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"
+
+He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six
+hours with her without seeing that I must? She--she's a lamp with a
+double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little
+soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the
+same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from
+hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned
+again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty
+faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at
+him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he
+repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making
+for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live."
+And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his
+lips would not--that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen,
+there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made
+him leaden and uneager.
+
+"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured,
+and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than
+your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying
+to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to
+find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune
+in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."
+
+He made no response. The words were strangled in her throat, and she
+fell to tapping her foot rhythmically against the fender. Her eyes were
+moist; this was so different from the talk she had expected.
+
+Presently his shoulders twitched. "Don't do that, mother dear," he said
+impatiently.
+
+"I'm sorry, darling," she answered wearily. She threw herself back in
+her chair and clenched her fists. Desperation fevered her, and she began
+to speak vindictively. "Of course it was a great relief to me when I saw
+the kind of girl Ellen is, considering how up till now you've sidled
+past women of any sort of character as if you'd heard that men got sent
+to prison for loving any but fools."
+
+He laughed uneasily.
+
+"Yes," she went on; "you always seemed to be looking carefully for
+anything you could find that was as insipid as a water-melon. You can't,
+you know, possibly count your love-affairs as amongst your successes."
+She jerked her head back, her lips retracted in a kind of grin.
+"Mariquita de Rojas!" she jeered.
+
+He started, though not much. "I never knew you knew about that," he said
+mildly.
+
+"Of course I did." She quivered with exaggerated humiliation. "To see my
+son spending himself on something so nearly nothing. And then the way
+you moped and raged at her when she threw you over. Seeing the poor
+woman was a fool, how else could you expect her to behave but like a
+fool? It was undignified of you to put the burden of being the woman you
+loved on a poor thing like her--like overworking a servant girl." She
+perceived that she was hot and shaking, and that she was within an ace
+of betraying the secret that there sometimes rose in her heart a thirst
+to beat and hurt every woman that he had ever loved. Words would pour
+out that would expose her disgusting desire to strike and scratch if she
+did not substitute others. So she found herself crying in a voice that
+was thinner than hers: "And a married woman! To see you doing wrong!"
+
+The moment she said it she was ashamed and drew an expunging hand across
+her lips. And as she had feared, he threw over his shoulder a glance
+that humorously recognised the truths which she had insincerely
+suppressed: that while she desired to hurt the woman whom he had loved,
+she would gladly have murdered any woman who had refused to love him,
+whether married or single; and that she had never cared what he had done
+so long as he did not lose his physical and moral fastidiousness, and
+did not lust after flesh that, having rotted its nerves with delight
+unsanctioned by the spirit, knew corruption before death, and so long as
+he had not pretended to any woman that he wanted her soul when he wanted
+her body.
+
+Seeing the tears in her eyes, he said kindly: "Well, I never thought
+Mariquita's marriage counted for much. Do you remember how you took her
+in one night when old de Rojas hid in a cloisonne vase on the verandah
+for cover and potted at the stars with his gun?" But in his voice she
+read wonder that for the first time in his life he should have found his
+honest mother forging a moral attitude.
+
+It was dreadful that, on this of all nights, and so soon after a special
+illumination of their relationship, she should have set him making
+allowances for her to cover up her insincerity. She stammered miserably:
+"Well, Ellen's a dear, dear girl," and twisted her fingers in her lap,
+and cried out in a fresh access of fever: "It's strange: this is a cold
+night, and yet I feel hot and heavy and sticky as I did in Italy when
+the sirocco blew."
+
+He slid his hand into hers again and altered his position so that he
+could smile up into her face. "Yes, she's a dear girl," he agreed
+comfortingly.
+
+"Then marry her soon!" she begged. "You're thirty. It's time you had a
+life of your own. You must make the ties that will last when I am dead.
+Marry her soon."
+
+"Yes," he said. "I will marry her soon."
+
+"At once!" she urged. "You can be married in three weeks, you know, if
+you set things going immediately. You'll see about it to-morrow, won't
+you?"
+
+He said nothing, but stroked her hand.
+
+"You will do that?" she almost shrieked.
+
+He moistened his dry lips. "I hadn't thought ... quite so soon...."
+
+"Why not? Why not?"
+
+"She is so very young," he mumbled, and turned away his face.
+
+"Why, Richard, Richard!" she exclaimed softly. "God knows I'm not in
+love with old-fashioned ideas. I've only to put up my hand behind my ear
+to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down
+Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas
+are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this
+idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What
+you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old
+enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you
+miscall--that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed
+in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her
+inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of
+the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to
+each other, like other mothers and sons?
+
+He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right,
+mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false
+brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in
+town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything
+really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got
+lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with
+her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult
+to get."
+
+"Ah, jewellery," she said.
+
+"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented,
+unconscious of her irony.
+
+Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen,
+that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and
+would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you,
+they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to
+give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for
+certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The
+heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are
+no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well
+with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was
+not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her
+son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise
+ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the
+house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling
+under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be
+lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still
+suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's
+misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but
+lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who
+sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So
+it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft
+as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself. It had seemed to
+Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the
+moon's faith in them. Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights
+were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion
+had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to
+hunger for something hardly to be attained by man. Perhaps his son, if
+he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had
+forgotten. She said eagerly: "Richard, before you go to bed, let us go
+out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island."
+
+"No," he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap. She began to
+rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation.
+There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that
+there was no hope, things never went well on this earth. Then he
+exclaimed suddenly, "Marion."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of
+Ellen's magic which he loved and desired to share with her. But he
+muttered, "That box on the dresser. Up there on the top shelf."
+
+She followed his eyes in amazement. "The scarlet one in the corner? That
+belongs to cook. I think it's her workbox. What about it?"
+
+He stared at it with a drowsy smile. "You had a cloak that colour when I
+was a child," he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.
+
+"Why, so I had," she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, "How
+he loves me! He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good
+ale that he could drink. He speaks like a sweetheart...." And then
+caught her breath. "But that," she wept on, "is how he ought to speak of
+Ellen, not of me." A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into
+her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong,
+competent hands, and said to herself uneasily: "I wish life could be
+settled by doing things and not by thinking...." But the conviction had,
+by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind. She cried out to
+herself in anguish: "Of course! Of course! He cannot love Ellen because
+he loves me too much! He has nothing left to love her with!" A tide of
+exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement
+within her of the pride that leads to death. For if Richard went on
+loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never
+thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do. The girl
+would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its
+heart hurt as dear little Ellen. And there would be no future. She would
+have no grandchildren. When she died he would be so lonely.... And it
+was her own fault. All her life long she had let him see how she wanted
+love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry's failure; and so he
+had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his
+own needs. "What can I do to put this right?" she asked herself. "What
+can I do?"
+
+She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap. "Mother,
+what's the matter?"
+
+"The matter?"
+
+"You were looking at me like a judge who's passing sentence."
+
+"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who
+sentences the children for the sins of the father."
+
+His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father.
+"Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."
+
+It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could
+free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any
+more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit
+groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.
+It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she
+were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.
+
+She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was
+strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at
+each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a
+hammer on her own delicate reluctances.
+
+"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I
+ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before
+he died."
+
+He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.
+
+"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent
+because of the beating of her heart.
+
+Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."
+
+"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the
+afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of
+course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house,
+which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father
+standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was
+happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't
+got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which
+he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia
+and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their
+names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled
+from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them,
+so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.
+
+Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went
+on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in,
+if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite
+close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped
+himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got
+to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come
+and see you.'"
+
+Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The
+snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left
+you to for years."
+
+"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I
+took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me
+all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a
+dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly
+frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him
+saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world,
+will it be as jolly as this?'"
+
+"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"
+
+"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said
+that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise
+what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had
+been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."
+
+"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a
+woman, what would you have said?"
+
+"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for
+one's husband. One expects much more."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his
+eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a
+house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we
+talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to
+him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been
+worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But
+men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a
+mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a
+son's a happier thing than a daughter--there's something a little sad
+about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do
+with this business of having children--and men like that do so love
+happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the
+lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the
+couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke
+up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four,
+and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you
+and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked
+if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you
+would."
+
+"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"
+
+"Yes. It was Punch."
+
+She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had
+loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that
+he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up
+old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.
+
+She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know
+that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."
+
+"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque
+Hall."
+
+The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had,
+so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went
+on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.
+And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead."
+For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she
+raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that
+there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling
+it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't
+you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long
+before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a
+part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each
+other--and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't
+matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making
+something--something--" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for
+some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot,
+and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is
+so!" she cried defiantly.
+
+The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and
+envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to
+bed," he said.
+
+"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.
+Uneasily he stood and watched her.
+
+"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"The Registrar?"
+
+"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one
+does."
+
+"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in
+the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there
+only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes," he said. "Good-night."
+
+When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the
+table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought
+grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to
+her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door. She
+flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there
+would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything.
+She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the
+passage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the
+memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive
+and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken
+of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve,
+and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad
+complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and
+crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were
+there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered
+her.
+
+Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite
+with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it
+seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on
+her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had
+read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said
+that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant
+cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was
+somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause
+of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was
+no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked
+with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits
+that were all that was to be seen of the girl.
+
+"Ellen," she said.
+
+The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved
+her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should
+have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.
+
+"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."
+
+Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled
+like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.
+
+"I know. We've got the vote."
+
+"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."
+
+The girl sat up. "When did he come?"
+
+"Last night."
+
+"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"
+
+"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."
+
+Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've
+nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said
+shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she
+noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet
+high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too
+modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my
+dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets
+lose their value when they are disclosed...."
+
+She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a
+glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.
+Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity,
+for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she
+felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but
+to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end
+of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a
+silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the
+floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining
+green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored
+the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees
+and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like
+the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the
+chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred
+smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls,
+in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured
+itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She
+nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.
+
+Ellen ran across the lawn to her, beetle-black in her mourning, but
+capering as foals do.
+
+"I'll not have my breakfast till he does," she announced. "Is there
+anything I can do for him?"
+
+"Nothing, my dear, I'm afraid. But look at the view. Isn't it lovely?"
+
+The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, it's bonny. And it's neat. It's redded
+itself up for Richard's coming."
+
+"'Redded itself up'? What does that mean?"
+
+"Don't you use the word here? English seems to be a terribly poor
+language. Redding up means making everything tidy and neat, so that
+you're ready for anything."
+
+That was what one must do: red oneself up. It was true that it was no
+use doing that for Richard any more, and that there was no one else in
+the world for whom she wished to be ready. But she must be schooled by
+the spectacle of the earth, for here it was shining fair, and yet it had
+nothing to expect; it was but the icing of a cake destined for some
+sun's swallowing.
+
+"Is Richard a good riser?" asked Ellen, adopting a severe,
+servant-engaging tone to disguise the truth that she was trembling with
+desire to see her lover.
+
+"Usually, but he may be late to-day since he went to bed such a short
+time ago. He evidently isn't up yet, for his blind's still down. That's
+his room on the left."
+
+But as they gazed the blind went up, and they saw him turning away from
+the window.
+
+"Oh, why didn't he look at us!" cried Ellen. "Why didn't he look at us?"
+
+"Because he is thinking of nothing but how soon he can get down to
+breakfast and meet you," said Marion; but being aware of the quality of
+her blood, which was his, she knew that he had not seen his women and
+the glittering world because he had risen blind with sullenness.
+
+"Will he be long, do you think?" she pondered. "Not that I'd want him to
+miss his bath." She broke into a kind of Highland fling, looking down on
+the blue and silver estuary and chanting, "Lovely, lovely," but desisted
+suddenly and asked: "Mrs. Yaverland, do you think there's a future
+life?"
+
+Marion said lazily, "I shouldn't have thought you need to think out that
+problem yet awhile."
+
+"Oh, I'm not worrying for myself. But on a fine day like this I just
+hate to think my mother's not getting the benefit of it somewhere. And
+seeing your age, I thought you might have begun to give the matter
+consideration."
+
+Marion resolved to treasure that remark for repetition to Richard; and
+was dashed to remember that it was probable in future they would not
+share their jokes. "Well, I don't think there's any evidence for it at
+all," she said aloud; "but I don't think that proves that there isn't
+one. I don't think we would be allowed to know if there was one, for I'm
+sure that if most people knew for certain there was going to be another
+world they wouldn't make the best of this." But she saw, from the way
+that Ellen continued to stare down at her toes, that that abstract
+comfort had not been of any service, so she parted with yet another
+secret. "But I do know that when Richard's father died all the trees
+round the house seemed to know where he had gone."
+
+Ellen raised wet but happier eyes. "Why, I felt like that when they
+brought mother's coffin out of the Fever Hospital. Only then it was the
+hills in the distance that knew--the Pentland Hills. But do you really
+think that was true?"
+
+"I knew it was then," said Marion. "If I am less certain now it is only
+because I have forgotten."
+
+They nodded wisely. "After all, there must be something."
+
+"Yes, there must be something...."
+
+Ellen began to dance again. Marion turned aside and tried to lose the
+profound malaise that the reticent feel when they have given up a secret
+in thinking how well worth while it had been, since Ellen was such a
+dear, young, loving thing. She found consolation in this frost-polished
+morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her
+abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance
+over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of
+rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine
+jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world
+had neglected nothing in its redding up.
+
+At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go
+in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"
+
+"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. From now onwards he's
+yours, not mine."
+
+Ellen ran in and Richard came to the window to meet her. As he drew her
+over the threshold by both hands he called down the garden, "Good
+morning, mother." But Marion had perceived that from the moment of
+seeing her his face had worn the dark colour of estrangement. She turned
+and walked blindly away, not noticing that Mabel had come out to bring
+her the morning post, and was following at her heels, till the girl
+coughed.
+
+There were four letters. She opened them with avidity, for they were
+certificates that there were other things in life as well as Richard
+with which she could occupy herself. Two were bills, the first from her
+dressmakers and the other from the dealer who had sold her some coloured
+glass a few weeks before; and there was a dividend warrant for her to
+sign and send to her bankers. Sweeping about the lawn as on a stage, she
+resolved to buy clothes that would make her look like other untormented
+women, and more hangings and pictures and vases to make her house look
+gay. Then she observed that the fourth envelope was addressed in the
+handwriting of the son whom she could not love.
+
+She looked towards the house and saw the son whom she loved, but he did
+not see her. Ellen's red head was close to his shoulder.
+
+It was horrible handwriting outside and inside the envelope: a weak
+running of ink that sagged downwards in the second half of every line
+and added feeble flourishes to every capital that gave the whole an air
+of insincerity. It had the disgusting appearance of a begging letter,
+and indeed that was what it was. It begged for love, for condonation of
+the writer's loathsomeness. She held it far off as she read:
+
+"DEAR MOTHER,
+
+"You will be wondering why I had not written to you. You will know soon
+that something you would not have expected has happened to me. I am not
+sure how you will take it. But I will be with you in two days, and then
+you will see for yourself. I hope you will not harden your heart against
+me, dear mother.
+
+"Your loving son,
+
+"ROGER."
+
+There was no address, but the postmark was Chelmsford. No doubt he had
+written in the cells. For the letter could have no other meaning but
+that the disgrace she had foreseen had at last arrived.
+
+She could not bear to be out there alone on that wide lawn, in the
+bright light, in the intense cold. She ran to the window, and not daring
+to look in lest they should be very close together, she called,
+"Richard, Roger is coming."
+
+There was a noise of a chair being pushed back, and Richard stood over
+her, asking: "When? Has he written?"
+
+She held out the letter.
+
+There was the rustling of paper crushed in the hand, and she looked up
+into his burning and compassionate eyes. Her head dropped back on her
+throat; she grew weak with happiness. He was her own once more, if she
+would but disclose in what great fear and misery she stood. But in the
+room behind there sounded the chink of china. Little Ellen was bending
+over the table, putting the tea-cosy over Richard's egg.
+
+Marion said levelly: "Well, I shall be glad of Roger's company while
+you're occupied with Ellen." She added reprovingly, as if she were
+speaking to a child: "You mustn't be jealous of the poor thing. I saw
+last night that you can be jealous...."
+
+His eyes blazed at the indecency. He stepped back from the window.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Ellen was very glad that Marion was going out for the whole of the
+afternoon, for then she would be alone with Richard; and though they had
+been out together all the morning, there had been that in the atmosphere
+which made a third. The whole time it had been apparent that the coming
+of this Roger, who must be an awful man, was upsetting him terribly.
+When he had taken her out into the garden after breakfast he had looked
+up into the vault of the morning and had put his hand to his head,
+making a sound of envy, as if he felt a contrast between its crystal
+quality and his own state of mind. He had liked standing with her at the
+edge of the garden and setting names to the facets of the landscape,
+which he plainly loved as he had never told her that he did. He really
+cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be
+afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned
+out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not
+lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way
+among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the
+golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts
+and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black
+gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped.
+Something in the orchard below had waylaid his attention. Ellen looked
+down the steep bank to see what it was, and saw Marion sitting in the
+low crook of an apple-tree. She snatched at contemptuous notice of the
+way that the tail of the woman's gown, which anyway was far too good for
+any sensible person to wear just going about the house and garden in the
+morning, was lying in a patch of undispersed frost; but fear re-entered
+her heart. Marion was sitting quite still with her back to them, yet the
+distant view of her held the same terrifying quality of excess as her
+near presence.
+
+There could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the
+earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat,
+stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.
+
+Richard said: "No, she isn't crying. She isn't moving. I should feel a
+fool if I went down and she didn't want me." And because his voice was
+thin and husky like a nervous child's, and because he was answering a
+question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid. This woman was
+throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But these were only the things that one thought about life. As soon as
+one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be. The world was not
+really tragic. When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where
+they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure,
+and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even
+now, since the water looked so smooth. He answered that winter boating
+was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation
+that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but
+which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had
+had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white
+oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed
+the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin
+snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only
+warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the
+primrose moon on the right. She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to
+take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take
+her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in
+the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.
+
+Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he
+turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious
+abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world
+that he refused to hurry, "Go and put on your hat and we'll start at
+once." So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the
+harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she
+forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.
+There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically
+unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat
+dwellings that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and
+boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs
+of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being
+designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know
+of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and
+there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the
+place which struck the same note of innocence.
+
+The town council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the
+esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a
+bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with
+cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen
+thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too,
+when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed
+the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The
+houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep
+green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which no one sat,
+and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its
+base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take
+the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air
+had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish,
+spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were
+brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but
+breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the
+pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the
+simple people who lived in the other part of the town.
+
+She was amused by it all, and was sorry when they came to the
+Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked
+very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was
+polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant
+port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to
+land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains,
+spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled
+beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the
+boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before
+had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men
+who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on the
+tradition of brave life, and it made her want to cry to see how
+crowsfeet of pleasure came at the corners of their eyes when they looked
+at Richard, and how they liked to slap his strong back with their rough
+hands, which age was making delicate with filigree of veins and
+wrinkles. And she could see, too, that they liked her. They looked at
+her as if they thought she was pretty, and teased her about the
+Votes-for-Women button she was wearing, but quite nicely.
+
+When they were standing under the dark eaves of the boathouse, looking
+up at the gleaming tawny sides of the motor-launch, one of the old men
+pointed at the golden letters that spelt "Gwendolen" at the prow, and
+said, "Well, Yaverland, I suppose you'll have forgotten who she is these
+days." Another added: "He'd better, if he's going to marry a
+Suffragette." And all broke into clear, frosty laughter. She cried out
+in protest, and told them that Suffragettes were not really fierce at
+all, and that the newspapers just told a lot of lies about them, and
+that anyway it was only old-fashioned women who were jealous, and they
+listened with smiling, benevolent deference, which she enjoyed until her
+eyes lighted on Richard, and she saw that he was more absorbed in her
+effect on his friends than in herself.
+
+For a moment she felt as lonely as she had been before she knew him, and
+she looked towards the boat and stared at the reflection of the group in
+the polished side and wished that one of the dim, featureless shapes she
+saw there had been her mother, or anyone who had had a part in her old
+life in Edinburgh. She turned back to the men and brought the
+conversation to an end with a little laughing shake of the head, giving
+them the present of an aspect of her beauty to induce them to let her
+mind go free. Again she felt something that her commonsense forbade to
+be quite fear when he did not notice for a minute that she was wistfully
+asking him to take her away. It was all right, of, course.
+
+When they had said good-bye to the happy old men and were walking along
+the promenade, he asked: "What was the matter, darling? Didn't you like
+them? They're really very good old sorts"; and understood perfectly when
+she answered: "I know they are, but I don't want anybody but you." There
+was indeed vehemence in his reply: "Yes, dear, we don't want anybody but
+ourselves, do we?" Undoubtedly there was a change in the nature of the
+attention he was giving her. Instead of concentrating in that steady
+delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated
+between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete
+abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his
+stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of
+the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She
+hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend,
+whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished
+home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and
+disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and
+soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life
+explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the
+luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where
+Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness,
+overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the
+hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the
+squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything
+else in the glittering, brittle world around her.
+
+Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under
+Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within
+herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were
+always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their
+absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white,
+view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the
+hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she
+turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have
+you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of
+her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more
+desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen
+had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house
+with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the
+midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast
+mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And
+Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had
+noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is
+he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very
+poor person, ma'am. His boots is right through, and his coat's half off
+his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.
+Shall I tell him to go away?"
+
+But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.
+She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a
+minute."
+
+Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each
+other queerly.
+
+She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook
+haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably
+haven't seen him since he was a boy."
+
+"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at
+the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and
+unsuspicious."
+
+Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face
+suffused with the bloom of kind, sad passion, and lifted towards her
+son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the
+rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if
+she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful,
+closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some
+hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated
+her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard
+of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had
+stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the
+kitchen.
+
+"Richard!" breathed Ellen.
+
+He went on eating.
+
+"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does
+she want it to be Roger?"
+
+"God knows, God knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are
+lots of things about her that I don't understand."
+
+Some moments passed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she
+said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."
+
+"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He
+stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly,
+coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out
+suddenly. "Who is it?"
+
+"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a
+ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's
+Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman
+but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away
+because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and
+now he's on the road. I must give him something, poor creature. Such a
+nice wife he had--he says she's in Chelmsford workhouse. I'll send him
+on to old Dawkins at Dane End; I'll get him to give the poor wretch a
+few days' work."
+
+Ellen disliked her as she left the room. She looked thick and ordinary,
+and was apparently absorbed in the mildly gross satisfaction of a
+well-to-do woman at being bountiful. Moreover, she had in some way hurt
+Richard, for his face was dark when he came back to the table.
+
+But an amazement struck Ellen as she thought over the scene. "Richard,"
+she exclaimed excitedly, "is it not just wonderful that this man should
+come to your mother for help after she'd put him to the door? I'm sure
+she'd make a body feel just dirt if she was putting them to the door. It
+would be a quiet affair, but awful uncomfortable. But she's such a good
+woman that, even seeing her like that, he knew she was the one to come
+to when he was really in trouble. Do you not think it's like that?"
+
+"Oh yes," he almost groaned. "Even when she's at her worst you know that
+she's still better than anyone else on this earth."
+
+When Marion came back she sat down at the table without noticing what
+seemed to Ellen his obvious dejection, and began to talk about this man
+Milford, telling of the power he had over his beasts and how a prize
+heifer that they then had, by the name of Susan Caraway, had fretted for
+three weeks after he had left. She said that he gained this power over
+animals not by any real love for them, for he was indifferent to them
+except when he was actually touching them, and would always scamp his
+work without regard for their comfort, but simply by some physical
+magnetism, and pointed out that there it resembled the power some men
+have over women. It surprised Ellen that she laughed as she said that,
+and seemed to find pleasure in the thought of such a power. When the
+meal was over she sat for a moment, gathering together the breadcrumbs
+by her plate, and said pensively: "Yes, it might quite easily have been
+Roger." Ellen wondered how it was that Richard had always spoken of his
+mother as if she needed his protection, when her voice was so nearly
+coarse with the sense of being able to outface all encounterable events,
+and she felt a flash of contempt for his judgment. She wished, too, that
+when Marion rose from, the table he had not followed her so closely
+upstairs and hovered round her as she took up her stand on the
+hearthrug, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her foot in the fender,
+and kept his eyes on her face as she settled down in an armchair. It was
+just making himself cheap, dangling after a woman who was perched up on
+herself like a weathercock.
+
+When she said, "I'm going to walk over to Friar's End. Old Butterworth
+wants me to do some repairs which I don't feel inclined to do, so I want
+to have a look at the place for myself," the announcement was so little
+tinged by any sense of the persons she was addressing that she might as
+well have held up a printed placard. Ellen thought he was a little
+abject to answer, "So far as I can remember, Butterworth's rather a
+rough specimen. Wouldn't you like us to come with you?" and almost
+deserved that she did not hear. Such deafness argued complete
+abstraction; and indeed, as she turned towards them and stood looking
+out towards the river, her face again wore that incomprehensible
+expression of secret and even furtive satisfaction. The sight of it
+fell like a whip on Richard. He lowered his head and sat staring at the
+floor. Ellen cried out to herself, "She's an aggravating woman if ever
+there was one. It's every bit as bad as not saying what you feel, this
+not saying what you look," and tried to pierce with her eyes the dreamy
+surface of this gloating. But she could make nothing of it, and looked
+back at Richard; and shuddered and drew her hands across her eyes when
+she saw that he had lifted his head and was turning towards her a face
+that had become the mirror of his mother's expression. He, too, was
+wrapped in some exquisite and contraband contentment. She raised her
+brows in enquiry, and mockingly he whispered back words which he knew
+she could not hear.
+
+"I think I'll go now," said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.
+Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly: "Why
+are you looking at me like that?" But he would not answer, and began to
+laugh quietly. "Tell me!" she begged, but still he kept silence, and
+seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but
+would not disclose. It struck her as another example of Marion's
+dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room
+after she had left it and that it should blot out the son's habitual
+splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly: "Oh, very well, be a
+Cheshire cat if you feel called to it," and went and pretended to look
+for a volume in the bookcase. It was annoying that he did not come after
+her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat
+until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front
+door.
+
+She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above
+the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was
+at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but
+because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling,
+she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the
+smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored
+world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to
+ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again
+in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little
+bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God
+could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right
+too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our
+time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the
+living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put
+about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the
+outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.
+She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly reassured.
+For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it
+borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved
+in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts
+commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the
+broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only
+frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve
+and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to
+find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed
+them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her
+wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body
+close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was
+astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and
+felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to
+him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her
+on to his knee and began to kiss her.
+
+But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain
+expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process
+which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had
+a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of
+course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over
+and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told
+herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind
+of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of
+love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest
+kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were
+impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she
+found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare,
+bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of
+tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had
+their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it
+was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that
+he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like
+trees.
+
+Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it
+was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first
+there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when
+one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a
+tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk,
+and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces
+where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the
+birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the
+grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches
+that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were
+their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together;
+the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when
+they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making
+anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves
+his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he
+sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad
+when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.
+
+"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade
+necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good
+against your white, white skin."
+
+"That's verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by," she told
+him wisely, "for I couldn't go wearing a green necklace when I'm in
+mourning."
+
+"But you won't be in mourning much longer."
+
+"Six months in full mourning, six months half. That's as it should be
+for a mother."
+
+"But what nonsense!" he exclaimed irascibly. "When you're a young little
+thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes. It doesn't do your mother
+any good, your going about in black."
+
+"I know well it doesn't, but, remember, mother was old-fashioned Scotch,
+and she was most particular about having things just so. Specially on
+melancholy occasions. I remember she was most pernickety about her
+blacks after my father's death. And though she's entered into eternal
+life, we've no guarantee that that makes a body sensible all at once."
+She saw on his face an expression which reminded her that he had been
+careful never to acquiesce when she spoke of the possibility of a future
+life, and she cried out: "You needn't look so clever. I'm sure she's
+going on somewhere, and why you should grudge it to the poor woman I
+don't know. And your mother thinks there's something after death, too.
+She told me this morning in the garden that she was quite certain of it
+when your father died. She said that all the trees round the house
+seemed to know where he had gone."
+
+"Oh, she said that, did she?" His arms released her. He stared into her
+face. "She said that, did she?" he repeated in an absent, faintly
+malevolent murmur; and clasped her in his arms again and kissed her so
+cruelly that her lips began to bleed.
+
+"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. "You're not loving me, you're just
+taking exercise on me!"
+
+He let her go, but not, she knew from the smile on his face, from any
+kindness, but rather that he might better observe her distress and gloat
+over it. She moved away from the heat of the fire and from that other
+heat which had so strangely been engendered by these contacts which
+always before engendered light, and went to the window and laid her
+forehead against the cold glass. The day had changed and lost its smile,
+for the sky was hidden by a dirty quilt of rain-charged clouds and the
+frost had seeped into the marshes and left them dark, acid winter green,
+yet she longed to walk out there in that unsunned and water-logged
+country, opening her coat to the cold wind brought by the grey, invading
+tides, making little cold pools where she dug her heels into the sodden
+ground, getting rid of her sense of inflammation, and being quite alone.
+That she should want not to be with Richard, and that she should not be
+perfectly pleased with what pleased him, seemed to her monstrous
+disloyalty, and she turned and smiled at him. But there was really
+something wrong with this room and this hour, for as she looked at him
+she felt frightened and ashamed, as if he were drunk, though she knew
+that he was sober; and indeed his face was flushed and his eyes wet and
+winking, as if smoke had blown in them. For some reason that she could
+not understand he reminded her of Mr. Philip.
+
+She cried out imploringly. "Take me down to the marshes, Richard!"
+
+He shook his head and laughed at some private joke. She felt desolate,
+like a child at school whom other children shut out from their secrets,
+and drooped her head; and heard him say presently: "We are going out
+this afternoon, but not on the marshes."
+
+"Where?"
+
+He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would
+not answer. She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a
+game of it to cover her near approach to tears. Then he told her, not
+because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed
+to put him in a good humour. "We're going to the registrar, my dear, to
+fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks' time."
+
+The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing
+at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.
+He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more
+suitable to a smaller man. Oh, he was terribly different to-day! His
+eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were
+narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full. She screamed "Oh, no!
+Oh, no!" without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was
+crying out.
+
+He laughed and pulled her down on his knees. He was laughing more than
+she had ever known him laugh before. "Why, don't you want to, you little
+thing?"
+
+Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some
+reason. But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet,
+unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.
+She said feebly, as one who asks for water: "Please, please take me down
+to the sea-wall."
+
+His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness. "But why don't you
+want to come and see about our marriage? Are you frightened, dear?"
+
+Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as
+he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and
+said: "Nellie, ma wee lassie, dis onything ail ye?" and yet left her
+with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of
+curiosity and not because he really cared for her. She was dizzied.
+Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard. She muttered: "Yes, a
+little."
+
+He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with
+a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine. "Frightened of me, my darling?"
+
+She pulled herself off his knee. "I don't know, I don't know."
+
+"Why? Why?"
+
+She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the
+flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to
+Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The
+immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and
+twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly
+because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr.
+Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had
+hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects
+was not so great as she would have hoped. She could bear it no longer,
+and screamed out: "Oh! Oh! That's how Mr. Philip looked!"
+
+It took him a minute to remember who she meant. Then his face shadowed.
+"Don't remind me of him, for God's sake!" he said through his teeth. "Go
+and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar."
+
+She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her
+trembling. He was very like Mr. Philip. Softly she said: "You sounded
+awful, as if you were telling me."
+
+"I was."
+
+She began to want to cry. "I'll not do anything that I'm told."
+
+He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat. It struck her as a
+mark of debasement that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their
+minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made
+some wordless sound. He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard
+him before: "Go and put on your things."
+
+"Away yourself to the registrar," she cried more loudly still, "and tell
+him he'll never marry you to me."
+
+The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled
+something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.
+She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was;
+and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards
+a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden
+feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peacock it in heaven, had
+come to show his wings to earth. On the other side, turned to the colour
+of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that
+Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were
+remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many
+concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman. The
+woman was not young and wore a man's cloth cap and a full, long, filthy
+skirt. They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard
+apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures
+across the gap. At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces
+close together, and vomited coarse cries at one another; and she had
+looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at
+the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than
+terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some
+boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners. Then she
+had been sixteen. Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting
+across a space. Could it be that vileness was not a state which one
+could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human,
+one must pass? If that were so, life was too horrible. She cried out
+through his vehemence: "No, I'm not going to marry you."
+
+"Don't be stupid. You're being exactly like all other women, silly and
+capricious. Go and put your things on."
+
+"I will not. I'm going away."
+
+"Don't talk nonsense! Where are you going?"
+
+"Back to Edinburgh." She made a hard line of her trembling mouth. "My
+mind's made up."
+
+He made a sound that expressed pure exasperation untouched with
+tenderness, and his eyes darted about her face in avaricious
+appraisement of this property that was trying to detach itself from him
+with a display of free will that might not be tolerated in property. She
+could see him resolving to take it lightly, and thought to herself:
+"Maybe it's just as well that it's to be broken off, for I doubt I'm too
+clever for marriage. I would read him like a book and, considering
+what's in him"--a convulsion of rage shook her--"he'd be annoyed at
+that."
+
+He had been saying with deliberate flippancy: "Oh, you silly little
+Ellen," but at that convulsion a change came over him. Delight
+transfigured him. He jerked his head back as she had done, as if he
+would like to continue the violent rhythm of her movement through his
+own body, and blood and laughter rushed back to his face. Taking a step
+towards her, he called softly: "Oh, my Ellen, don't let us quarrel! Come
+here."
+
+But she remembered then how that scene at the base of the golden stone
+had ended. The pair had swung apart and had staggered their several
+ways, shrieking over their shoulders; and had suddenly pivoted round and
+stood looking at each other in silence. Then they had run together and
+joined in a rocking embrace, a rubbing of their bodies, and had put
+their mouths to each other's faces so munchingly that it had looked as
+if they must turn aside some time and spit out the cores of their
+kisses. She would have no such reconciliation. "I won't! I tell you I
+hate you!" she cried, and escaped his arm.
+
+Rage came into his face without displacing his intention to make love to
+her. That was against nature, unless nature was utterly perverse! She
+could not bear it. She struck him across the mouth and ran out of the
+room.
+
+There was a moment of confusion on the landing when she could not tell
+which of the white doors on the right and left led into her bedroom. The
+first one she opened showed her a table piled with heavy books; a vast
+wardrobe with glass doors showing a line of dresses coloured like autumn
+and of fabrics so exquisite that they might be imagined sentient; under
+a shelf beneath it a long straight line, regular as the border plants in
+a parterre, of glossy wooden shoe-trees rising out of rather large shoes
+made from many kinds of leather and velvets and satins; and in the
+carpets and the hangings a profound and vibrant blue. Accusingly she
+exclaimed into the emptiness, "Marion!" and darted into her own room
+just as Richard burst out into the passage. She flung herself on the bed
+and lay quite still while he knocked on the door. Twice he called her
+name. Nothing in her desired to answer. That was both relief and the
+loss of all. Three times again he knocked, and there penetrated through
+the panels one of those wordless noises that had been disgusting her all
+the afternoon. After a moment's silence she heard him go downstairs. She
+leaped up and dragged her trunk from a corner into the middle of the
+room, but instead of beginning to pack she fell on her knees and wept on
+to the comfortingly cool and smooth black surface.
+
+"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I
+thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll
+just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and
+looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them
+terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my
+face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into
+her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and
+found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely
+guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be
+dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be
+dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a
+necessary and noble journey towards economic and spiritual independence
+it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh,
+which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her
+mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight.
+What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real
+way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be
+crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer
+pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it
+and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried
+about the town.
+
+Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed
+and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained
+and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her
+life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man
+whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to
+disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in
+the glass which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate
+the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It
+struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from
+her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was
+overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened
+to her in it.
+
+She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping,
+but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that
+her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a
+vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have
+foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the
+galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many
+fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who
+died God's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one
+of them.
+
+She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that
+it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of glass
+which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a
+dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the
+victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of
+this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and
+wept and wept, until she fell asleep.
+
+It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she
+remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past
+few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a
+light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that
+it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want
+to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet
+terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those
+superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and
+waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps
+that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more--they
+were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was
+the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep
+and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing
+heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he
+was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he
+was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you
+poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"
+
+But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt
+down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face
+from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent
+of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words
+and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.
+
+"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute--oh, such a
+brute. Do, do forgive me."
+
+"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."
+
+"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.
+
+"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly,
+and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and
+the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my
+love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"
+
+He broke into anguished laughter. "No, you wee little thing!" He
+strained her to him and faltered vehemently: "You generous dear! When
+I've insulted and bullied you and shouted at you, you ask me if you've
+hurt me! I wish you had. It would have given me some of the punishment I
+deserve. Oh, keep me, you wonderful, strong, forgiving dear! Keep me
+from being a hound, keep me from forgetting--whatever it is we've found
+out. You've seen what I'm like when I've forgotten it. Oh, love me! Love
+me!"
+
+"I will, I will!"
+
+They clung together and spent themselves in reconciling kisses.
+
+"It was my fault, too," she whispered. "I was awful hard on you. And
+maybe I took you up too quick."
+
+"No, it was all my fault," he answered softly. "I was worried and I lost
+my head."
+
+"Worried? What are you worried about, my darling? You never told me
+that."
+
+"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. It's not a definite worry. It's to
+do"--his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of
+the room--"with my mother."
+
+If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft. "Your
+mother?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes," he said petulantly. It struck her that there was something
+infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might
+feel against its nurse. "She's been the centre of my whole life. And now
+... I don't know whether she cares for me at all. I don't believe she
+ever cared for anybody but my father. It's puzzling."
+
+His eyes were fixed on the shadows. He had quite forgotten her. She
+leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling
+of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.
+
+He dropped a kiss on it and went on: "So, you see, I fell back on you
+for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me. It's
+funny the change it makes in everything. I became--so conventional. When
+you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn't follow you because
+I was conscious that I oughtn't to come into your room. Afterwards,
+when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by
+you, I didn't care a damn for any rule." Their lips met again. She had
+to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about
+anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a
+woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more
+fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for
+you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...
+that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The
+corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like
+my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot
+her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came
+back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.
+"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know
+why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.
+Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that
+time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you
+might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in
+the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your
+living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially
+happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those
+lustful old swine."
+
+She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she
+had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and
+what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she
+had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she
+was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as
+if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them lustful?"
+
+In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could
+see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them
+proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you
+if he'd been young."
+
+Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it
+meant, but accepted it.
+
+A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and
+began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that
+means?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."
+
+In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured: "Sometimes. A little."
+
+He was trembling. "You poor thing. You poor little thing. Yet I can't
+tell you."
+
+She clapped her hands over her ears. "Ah, no. I couldn't bear to listen
+if you did." They sank into a trembling silence. Her black eyes, fixed
+on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white
+evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying
+under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which
+seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other
+sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in
+them proofs that the core of life was darkness. There came on her
+suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when
+she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard. She
+remembered it with a singular lack of dismay. There ran through her on
+the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new
+experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid
+annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had
+fallen down about her shoulders. They stood easily together in the light
+of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head,
+he looking down on the disordered glory.
+
+"But what's that for?" he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the
+middle of the floor.
+
+Her eyes filled with tears. "I was packing to go back to Edinburgh."
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said solemnly. "I came near to imperilling a
+perfect thing." He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss
+her, but she started away from him.
+
+"Oh, maircy! What cold hands!" she exclaimed.
+
+"I've been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle. It was
+freezing. And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and
+shaking with rage."
+
+"You poor silly thing!" she cried lovingly. "Give me yon bits of ice!"
+She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.
+
+For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great
+for him to bear, and he whispered: "This is all it is! This is all it
+is!"
+
+"What do you mean?" she murmured.
+
+"What you fear ... is just like this. You will comfort my whole body as
+you are comforting my hands...."
+
+She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her
+face, and she answered loudly, plangently: "Then I shall not be afraid!"
+They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy: "I will marry
+you any day you like." When he answered, "No, no, I will wait," she
+jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I
+want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they
+travelled far into a new sphere of love.
+
+It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from
+her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express
+train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her
+that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.
+But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder
+out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and
+pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear.
+She swung round to see what it was.
+
+A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.
+Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that
+the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what
+was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with
+her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that
+these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet
+interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut
+unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass
+buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the
+woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored
+skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were
+ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."
+
+The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting
+clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the
+shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they
+should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured
+the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect
+harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in
+disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.
+She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into
+their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection
+and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover
+what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.
+There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united
+several qualities that one would not have thought could be found
+together. She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet
+worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at
+the shoulders as if she were fragile. But the man was odd enough. He was
+pale and had a very long neck, and wore an expression of extreme
+foolishness. From the frown with which he was accompanying his gaping
+stare it was evident that his mind was so vague and wandering that he
+found it difficult to concentrate it; she was reminded of an inexpert
+person she had once seen trying to put a white rabbit into a bag. She
+looked again at the girl, with that contempt she felt, now that she had
+Richard, for all women who let themselves mate with unworthy men, and
+found that her dark eyes were fixed sullenly, almost hungrily, on
+Richard. She laid her hand on Richard's arm and cried: "If it's not
+impudence, it's the next thing to it, staring like that into a pairson's
+room! They're collecting, I suppose. Away and give them a penny."
+
+"No," said Richard. "They are not collecting. That is Roger."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Ellen could not understand why Richard whispered explosively as they
+turned away from the window: "Pin up your hair! Quickly! We must go down
+at once!" or why he hurried her downstairs without giving her time to
+use her brush and comb. When they got down into the old parlour Richard
+went to the side door that opened into the farmyard and flung it open,
+beginning a sentence of greeting, but there was nothing to be seen but
+the grey sheds, the wood-pile, and the puddle-pocked ground. He uttered
+an exasperated exclamation, and drew it to, saying to Ellen: "Open the
+front door! Please, dear." She did so, but saw nothing save the dark and
+narrow garden and the black trees against the white north sky. "What in
+Christ's name are they doing?" Richard burst out, and flung open the
+side door again. Both put their heads out over the threshold to see if
+the two visitors were standing about anywhere, and a gust of wind that
+was making the trees beat their arms darted down on the house and turned
+the draught between the two open doors into a hurricane. Ellen squealed
+as her door banged and struck her shoulder before she had time to steer
+clear of it. "Oh, my poor darling!" said Richard, and he was coming
+towards her, when they heard the glug-glug-glug of water dripping from
+the table to the floor, and saw that the draught had overturned a vase
+filled with silver boughs of honesty. He picked it up and uttered
+another bark of exasperation, for it had cracked across and he had cut
+his hand on the sharp edge of the china.
+
+"Oh, damn! oh, damn! oh, damn!" he cried, in a voice that rage made
+high-pitched and childish, sucking his finger in between the words.
+"What a filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two
+halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of
+distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered
+uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a
+desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the
+maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards
+the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved
+it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round
+till I've found that fool and that woman! This is some new
+folly--probably I'll have to get him away before mother comes! Come on!
+Perhaps they're hanging about the garden, though God knows why!" After
+making a savage movement towards the broken vase, as if he could not
+bear to leave the disorder as it was, and checking it abruptly,
+jarringly, he rushed into the dining-room, and Ellen followed him.
+
+The two were there, their faces pressed against the window-panes. Behind
+them the grey waste of stormy shallow waters, and the salt-dimmed
+pastures, and the black range of the Kentish hills, hung with
+grape-purple rainclouds, made it apparent how much greater dignity
+belongs to the earth and sea than to those who people them. As Richard
+and Ellen halted at the door the faces receded from the glass. The woman
+stepped backwards and, looking as if she were being moved on by a
+policeman, passed suddenly out of sight beyond the window's edge.
+Richard crossed the room and opened the French window, but by the time
+he had unlocked it the man in uniform, who had been beckoning to his
+companion with long bony hands, had gone in search of her. As Richard
+put his head round the door to bid them enter, the wind, which was now
+rushing round the house, made itself felt as a chill commotion, an icy
+anger of the air, in which both he and Ellen shivered. Presently the
+pair in uniform appeared again, but at some distance across the lawn,
+and too intensely absorbed in argument to pay any attention to him.
+
+"Oh, damn! oh, damn!" sobbed Richard. The wind was blowing earth-daubed
+leaves off the flowerbeds through the open door into the prim room. He
+stepped into the gale and shouted: "Roger! Roger! Come in!"
+
+Roger waved his arms, which were too long for the sleeves of his coat,
+and from his mouthings it was evident that he was shouting back, but the
+wind took it all. In anger Richard stepped back into the room and made
+as if to close the doors, and at that the two on the lawn ran towards
+the house, with that look which common people have when they run for a
+train, as if their feet were buckling up under them. Richard held the
+door wide again, but when the couple reached the path in front of the
+house they were once more seized with a doubt about entering and came to
+a standstill.
+
+"Come in," said Richard; "come in."
+
+The man took off his cap and ran his hands through his pale, long hair.
+"Is mother in?" he demanded in a thin, whistling voice.
+
+"Come in," said Richard; "come in."
+
+The man began: "Well, if mother's not in, I don't know--"
+
+Richard fixed his eyes on the woman's face. "Come in," he said softly,
+brutally, loathingly. Ellen shivered to hear him speak thus to a woman
+and to see a woman take it thus, for at once the stranger moved forward
+to the window and stepped into the room. As she brushed by him she
+cringingly bowed her shoulders a little, and looked up at him as he
+stood a head and shoulders higher than herself. He looked back steadily
+and made no sign of seeing her save by a slight compression of the lips,
+until she passed on with dragging feet and stood listlessly in the
+middle of the room. It was evident that they completely understood one
+another, and yet their understanding sprung from no recollection of any
+previous encounter, for into the eyes of neither did there come any
+flash of recognition. There could be no doubt that Richard was feeling
+nothing but contempt for this woman, and her peaked yet rich-coloured
+face expressed only sick sullenness; yet Ellen felt a rage like
+jealousy.
+
+Richard turned again to the garden, and said: "Come in."
+
+"Now don't be high-handed, old man," expostulated the stranger. But then
+he seemed to remember something, and stretched out both his arms, held
+them rigid, and opened his mouth wide as if to speak very loudly. But no
+sound came, and his arms dropped, and his long bony hands pawed the air.
+Then suddenly his arms shot out again, and he exclaimed very quickly in
+a high, strained voice: "Pride has always been your besetting sin,
+Richard. You aren't a bad chap in any way that I know of. But you're
+proud. And it doesn't become any of us to be proud"--his spirit was
+shaking the words out of his faltering flesh--"for we're all miserable
+sinners. You needn't order me"--he spoke more glibly now, the flesh and
+the spirit seemed in complete agreement--"to come out of the garden like
+that. I wish Poppy hadn't gone in." He caught his breath with something
+like a sob; but the woman in uniform made no movement, and turned her
+eyes to Richard's face as if it were he that must give the order. "I've
+got a reason for staying out here. I know mother's not got Jesus. If
+she's ashamed of me now that I'm one of Jesus' soldiers, I won't come
+in. I'll go and wrestle on my knees for her soul, but I won't hurt her
+by coming in. So here I stay till she tells me to come in."
+
+"But she's out," said Richard.
+
+The man in uniform was discomfited. The light went out of his face and
+his mouth remained open. He shifted his weight from one foot to the
+other and muttered: "Ooh-er, is she?"
+
+"Yes," said Richard pleasantly. "She's gone over to Friar's End, but
+she'll be back any time now. I wish you'd come in. I haven't seen you
+for years, and I'd like to swap yarns with you about what we've been
+doing all the time."
+
+"You'd have the most to tell," answered the other wistfully. "You've
+been here, there, and everywhere in foreign parts. And I haven't been
+doing nothing at all. Except--" he added, brightening up, "being saved."
+
+"That's your own fault," Richard told him. "I've often wondered why you
+didn't try your luck abroad. You'd have been sure to hold your own.
+Well, anyway, come in and have some tea. I don't know what mother would
+say to me if she came in and found I'd let you stay out in the cold.
+She'd be awfully upset."
+
+"Do you think she would?" the man in uniform asked, and seemed to
+ponder. He looked up at the grey sky and shivered. "'Tis getting
+coldish. And the cloth this uniform is made from isn't the sort that
+keeps out cold weather. God knows I don't want to grumble at the uniform
+I wear for Jesus' sake, but me having been in the drapery, I can't help
+noticing when a thing is cheap." He stared down at his toes for a time,
+lifting alternately his heels and pressing them down into the wet
+gravel; then raised his head and said nonchalantly: "Well, old man, I
+think I will come in after all." But he halted yet again when he got one
+foot over the threshold. "Mind you, I'm not coming in just because it's
+cold," he began, but Richard, exclaimed, "Yes, yes! Of course I know
+you're not!" and gripped him by the arm and pulled him into the room. He
+did not seem to resent the rough treatment at all, and went over at once
+to the woman in uniform, and, looking happily about him, cried: "Isn't
+this a lovely home? I always say there's nobody got such a nice home as
+my mother."
+
+His voice whistled; and Ellen in her mind's eye saw a vision of some
+clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy
+and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and
+breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise.
+She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard,
+meaning to tell him by a smile that she would help him to be kind to
+Roger. But Richard was still occupying himself with the window,
+examining with an air of irascibility a stain of blood which his cut
+finger had left on the white paint near the lock. His eyes travelled
+from it to the muddy footprints of the two who had come in from the
+garden and to the spatter of earth-daubed leaves on the polished floor,
+and his mouth drew down at the corners in a grimace of passion that made
+Ellen long to run to him and kiss him and bid him not give way to the
+madness of order so prevalent in this house. But he did not even look at
+her, so she could do nothing for him.
+
+He went forward to Roger, determinedly sweetening his face, and shook
+his hand heartily. "It's good that you should have turned up just at
+this moment, for I'm going to be married before long to Miss Melville,
+whom I met in Scotland when I was working at Aberfay. Ellen, this is my
+brother, Roger."
+
+Roger took Ellen's hand and then seemed to remember something. After
+exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked
+steadfastly into her face and said sombrely: "I hope all's well with
+you, sister! I hope all's well with you!"
+
+"Pairfectly," answered Ellen; and after a pause added, shyly: "And I'm
+pleased to meet you. I hope anyone that's dear to Richard will be
+friends with me."
+
+He flung his head backwards and cried, in that whistling voice: "Yes,
+I'll be that! And I'm a friend worth having now I've got Jesus! And He's
+given me Poppy too! Aha, old man!" With a little difficulty he put both
+his thumbs inside the corked edge of his armholes and began to stride up
+and down, taking steps unnaturally long for thin legs. "You aren't the
+only man who's thought of getting married! Great minds think alike, they
+say!" With a flourish he stretched out his hand, and it was plain that
+he thought he would touch the woman in uniform, though he was some feet
+away. Richard's and Ellen's eyes met; it was repulsive to see a man
+dizzied by so small a draught of excitement. "Richard, Miss Melville,
+this is Lieutenant Poppy, who's going to be my wife."
+
+It was difficult to know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although
+she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which
+conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was
+glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted
+darkness of her eyes.
+
+"We're going to be married as soon as I've served my year of probation.
+That's a long time ahead, for I've only been at it a fortnight. I expect
+you'll be getting married much sooner. Things always went easier with
+you than me," he complained. "But it'll be a happy day when it comes,
+and I get the two blessings at the same time, becoming a full soldier of
+Jesus and marrying Poppy. She's nearly a full soldier already. She
+joined the Army seven months ago."
+
+"Do you preach in the streets?" asked Richard.
+
+Roger's eyes filled with water. Ellen reflected that he must be
+curiously sensitive for one so dull-witted, for the rage and disgust
+behind the question had hardly shown their heads. "Yes, I do!" he said
+pettishly. "And if Jesus doesn't object, I don't see why you should."
+
+"I don't object at all," Richard assured him amiably. "I only wondered
+what sort of work you did. I suppose you haven't come to work at the
+Hallelujah Colony here, have you?"
+
+"That's just what I've done!" answered Roger joyfully. "I joined up at
+Margate and I've laboured there for three weeks. I didn't do so bad. Did
+I, Poppy? Not for a start? No one could exactly shine at street
+preaching at first, you know. They will laugh so. But I didn't do worse
+than other people when they begin, did I, Poppy? However, they've
+transferred me over here to the Colony, to do clerk work." He added with
+a touch of defiance: "And, of course, they'll want me to take services
+too, sometimes. In fact I'm going to take a service this evening."
+
+"How long are you to be here?"
+
+"Maybe always. They may feel I do the best work for Jesus here." He drew
+a deep, shuddering breath, and took his cap off and threw it on the
+table with a convulsive gesture. "If mother doesn't turn me away because
+I've given myself to Jesus," he said with that whistling note, "I'll be
+able to see her every day."
+
+"She won't turn you away."
+
+There was folly, there was innocence in Roger's failure to notice that
+Richard was speaking not in reassurance but in grimness, as one might
+speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place
+where he stood. "You ought to know, old chap," he murmured hopefully.
+"She's always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me.... I
+don't know.... Oh, I've prayed...."
+
+"Well, you'll know for yourself in a minute," said Richard. "I heard the
+front door open and close a second ago."
+
+Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the
+sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached
+him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother's being. She
+longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all
+the other things, but again he wouldn't pay attention to her. Indeed, he
+could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up
+to pain and apprehension. Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the
+case against Roger. He was sickening like something that has been fried
+in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral
+flaw made it all the more sinister. If there was not vileness in his
+will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded
+into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor,
+and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair. She looked at him
+accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum
+version of the emotion of embarrassment was sucking and gnawing one of
+her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true
+love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used
+despitefully. Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.
+
+The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger. But when
+Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else,
+because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held
+in her hand.
+
+There was stillness till Richard whispered: "Mother."
+
+She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, "Oh,
+Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the
+parlour."
+
+He answered softly: "No one broke it. The wind blew it down when I
+opened the door to Roger."
+
+Her eyes did not move from his. Her mouth was a round hole. He put out
+his hand to take the piece of china from her. They both gazed down on
+it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance. She gave it to
+him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger. When she found him
+she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the brass buttons, and
+the brass studs on his high collar. Then she became aware of the woman,
+and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her
+uniform. His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it
+up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters
+on the magenta ribbon.
+
+"So you've joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?" she said, in that
+muffled, indifferent tone.
+
+"Yes," he murmured.
+
+"Do you preach in the streets?" Her voice shook.
+
+"Yes," he whispered.
+
+She gave the cap another turn on her hand. "Are you happy?" she asked,
+again indifferently.
+
+"Yes," he whispered.
+
+She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him.
+"Oh, my boy!" she cried. "Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at
+last!" Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room,
+and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger
+crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all
+soft, mothering curves to him.
+
+Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor. Roger's sobbing made a
+queer noise. Ahé ... ahé ... ahé.... It had an unmechanical sound, like
+the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard's
+motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a
+mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an
+unmechanical situation. It must break down soon. She looked across at
+Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but
+not so dejected as she might have feared. It struck her that he was
+finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the
+situation which was making her grieve--which must, she realised with a
+stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with
+that wrongness. He would rather have things as they were, and see his
+mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been
+natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing
+her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their
+children do. Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the
+far view of the river and the marshes.
+
+"Oh, mother!" spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion.
+"I'm a rich man now! I've got Jesus, and you, and Poppy! Mother, this is
+Poppy, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can."
+
+The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as
+if she would have liked to jump through it. One could imagine her
+alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some
+small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short
+hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and
+abjectly: "I didn't want to come."
+
+Marion answered smoothly: "But now that you are here, how glad I am
+that you have," and took her two hands and patted them. Looking round
+benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed: "I'm
+a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week." She was
+behaving like an old mother in an advertisement, like the silver-haired
+old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh's
+toffee or who reads the _Weekly Telegraph_ in plaques at
+railway-stations. The rapidity with which she had changed from the
+brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching
+hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been
+resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the
+perfection with which she had assumed this bland and glossy personality
+at a moment's notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration. She liked
+the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate. She was
+glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel
+proud on joining a pirate crew. She went over and stood beside Richard
+and slipped her arm through his. Uneasily she was aware that now she,
+too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it
+was. She drooped her head against Richard's shoulder, and hoped all
+might be well with all of them.
+
+"You see, mother, since I saw you I've had trouble--I've had trouble--"
+Roger was stammering.
+
+Marion turned from him to Richard. "Ring for tea," she said, "and turn
+on the lights. All the lights. Even the lights we don't generally use."
+
+Roger clung to her. "I don't want to hide anything from you, mother," he
+began, but she cut him short. "Oh, what cold hands! Oh, what cold
+hands!" she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him. As the lights went
+up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in
+the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as
+long and yellowish and covered with warts. The parlourmaid came in and,
+over her shoulder, Marion said easily: "Tea now, Mabel. There're five of
+us. And we'll have it down here at the table."
+
+She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an
+armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a
+look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it
+became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that
+Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant
+was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when
+she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies
+the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short
+and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been
+talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in
+watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation,
+which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched
+Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in
+their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors,
+were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor
+her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly
+to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned
+and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body,
+taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of
+attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was
+no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.
+
+"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a
+second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been
+very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm
+cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on
+the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward.
+And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard
+and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about
+it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that
+she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs
+had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was
+this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate
+Broadway--"
+
+The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they
+all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she
+nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways
+they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at _Margate_."
+
+"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got,
+Poppy!"
+
+Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided
+shoulders as she passed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and
+take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be
+very comfortable when one's tired."
+
+Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red
+fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at
+once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed
+thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular
+curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round
+Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls
+horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember
+also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses
+dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the
+bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of
+sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand
+among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for
+the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave
+her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones
+marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared
+that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her
+bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to
+destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was,
+perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there
+had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned
+effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the
+pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind
+the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking
+just like this; but it was gone immediately.
+
+"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going
+along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band
+playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to
+pass it by--think of it, mother, I was going to pass it by!--when the
+band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy.
+Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful
+voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a
+pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw
+her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was
+plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked
+straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that
+is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother
+for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were
+really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but
+when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you
+know, mother, Poppy _is_ Spanish--half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her
+mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good
+family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died
+when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by
+a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married
+again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other
+side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very
+godless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man
+who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted
+to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so
+cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she
+never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as
+she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."
+
+After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the
+appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."
+
+The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.
+
+"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung
+about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got
+Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden
+pale, febrile passion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to
+their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"
+
+"Yes, Roger," she answered him. "You'll be very happy--a husband that
+any woman would be proud of."
+
+"Oh, I'm not nearly good enough for Poppy," he said deprecatingly. He
+seemed used to Poppy's silence, and, indeed, whenever her silent absence
+from speech was most marked, he bent towards her in a tender attitude
+which showed a resolution to regard it as maidenly bashfulness. "Well,
+to get back to my story. I stood there peering through the crowd for
+another look at her, and an officer began preaching. Captain Harris it
+was. I didn't take any particular notice of him." He jerked his whitish
+face about contemptuously. "He's a poor preacher, isn't he, Poppy? He
+never gets a grip on the crowd, does he? And they can't hear him beyond
+the first few rows. I don't think I heard more than a few sentences that
+first evening. If I'd had been in the Army as many years as he has, and
+I couldn't preach any better than that, I'd find some other way of
+serving Jesus. I would really.
+
+"But after that"--he stopped, looked at some vision in the air before
+him which filled his eyes with tears and fire, and sighed
+deeply--"Captain Sampson preached the gospel. It's Captain Sampson I've
+been working under since I joined the Army. Oh, mother, mother, I wish
+you could hear him preach. He would give you Jesus. That first evening I
+heard him I saw Jesus as plain as I see you. I saw Him then looking
+fierce like He was when He scourged the moneychangers out of the temple.
+But when I'm alone, I see the other Jesus, the way he was most times."
+He put his head back and bleated: "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' The
+One that loves us when we're weak and when we fall, and loves us all the
+better for it. Even you"--he looked at Richard with a faint, malign
+joyfulness--"must feel the want of Him sometimes. Life can't be a path
+of roses for any of us, however strong and clever we are. So I say it's
+not good preaching to go on always about fighting for Jesus and being a
+good soldier, and making it seem as if religion was just another trouble
+we had to face." His voice broke with petulance. "It's a shame not to
+show people Gentle Jesus."
+
+He checked himself. Remorse ran red under his pale skin. "What am I
+saying?" he cried out. "Captain Sampson is a holy man! If he's harsh to
+those that work under him it's right he should be. God chasteneth whom
+He loveth, and it's the same way with Captain Sampson I expect. It's
+really a way of showing that he cares about you and is anxious about
+you. And anyway, he did give me Jesus that evening. Oh, mother, it was
+so wonderful!" The words rushed out of him. "He made you feel all
+tingling like you do when the fire engine goes past. Oh, it's an evening
+to remember! And it gave me Jesus! Oh, mother, you don't know what it's
+like to find Jesus! To know"--his voice whistled exultantly over the
+stricken tea-table--"that there's Somebody who really loves you!"
+
+For one second Marion covered her face with her hands.
+
+Unseeingly he piped on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into
+thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night,
+instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that
+happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been
+born as I wasn't any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel
+lovely and warm. And I've got earthly happiness as well. I've got Poppy.
+Oh, I'm a lucky man, lucky man! And I've got a lifework instead of being
+an odd-come-short. I'll always have something to do now. They've had
+experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into
+soldiers for Jesus. Surely they'll be able to find some work for me,
+even if they don't want me to preach. Look at what I'm going to do now.
+Even if I don't do anything but clerk work, it's helping the Labour
+Colony along--helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living
+under Bible influence when, if they weren't, there they'd be, roaming
+about the streets hungry and in sin. I'll be doing my bit, won't I,
+mother?"
+
+She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.
+
+Ellen felt contemptuous. She had read about those Hallelujah Army
+Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour
+meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the
+pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing
+with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few
+hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions. The very
+consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the
+flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the
+meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter
+(which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost
+security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard
+talk of revolution. She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence
+of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that
+made this world as unsightly as himself. And it was like him to talk
+about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of
+things that weren't true. The spectacle of this mean little intelligence
+refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and
+Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common
+hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingratitude to the great and
+wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man
+had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society. She
+leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone: "But you must
+know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the
+fringe of the problem. There's no way of settling the question of
+unemployment until the capitalist system's overturned."
+
+He looked at her with wide eyes and assumed an air of being engaged in
+desperate conflict. It was evident that his egotism was transforming
+this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon. "Ah! You're
+a Socialist. They only think of giving people money. But it isn't money
+people need. Oh, no. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
+world and lose his own soul?' It's Jesus they need. Give them the Bible
+and all their wants will be satisfied," he cried in a shrill peewit cry.
+
+"But the Bible isn't final. There's lots of things we know more about
+than the people who wrote it. Look at all yon nonsense they put in about
+Adam and Eve because they didn't know about evolution. That alone shows
+it's absurd to rely solely on the Bible...."
+
+She looked round for signs of the others' approval. She knew that
+Richard agreed with her, for among his Christmas presents to her had
+been Huxley's Essays, and when he had talked to her of science she had
+seen that research after that truth was to him a shining mystic way
+which he would have declared led to God had he not been more reverent
+than Church men are, and feared to use that name lest it were not sacred
+enough for the ultimate sacredness. But to her amazement he kept his
+eyes on the crumbs which he was picking up from the tablecloth, and
+through his parted lips there sounded the faintest click of
+exasperation. She looked in wonder at Marion, and found her eyes also
+downcast and her forefinger tapping on her chin as if she were seeking
+for some expedient to stop this dangerous chatter. Ellen despised them
+both. They had been terribly exercised at the thought that Roger was
+going to preach in the streets, but they did not care at all that he was
+delivered over to error. She looked at him sympathetically over the
+table, feeling that since these horrid people with whom she had got
+entangled did not like him, he might be quite nice, and found him
+exchanging a long, peculiar glance with Poppy, which was followed on
+both sides by a slow, meaning nod.
+
+He looked in front of him again and his round eyes vacillated between
+Richard and Ellen, growing rounder at each roll. Presently he swallowed
+a lump in his throat and addressed himself to her. "Ah, you're an
+unbeliever," he said. "Well, Captain Sampson says there's always a
+reason for it if people can't believe." He moistened his lips and panted
+the words out at her. "If you've been doing anything that's wrong--"
+
+A sob prevented him. "Oh, I can't go and spoil this lovely tea, even if
+I ought to for Jesus' sake!" he cried. "We're all so happy, I can't bear
+to break it up by telling you what it's my duty to do! Poppy, doesn't
+mother have everything nice? I've often thought of this tea-table when
+I've been eating at places where they did things, roughish. Look at the
+flowers. Mother always has flowers on the table, even when it's winter.
+Jesus wouldn't expect me to break this up." His face became transfused
+with light. "I believe Jesus loves everything that's done nicely,
+whether it's a good deed or bread-and-butter cut nice and thin. That's
+why," he mourned, so wistfully that all of them save the impassive woman
+in uniform made a kind, friendly bending towards him, "I mind not to be
+able to do anything really well. But Jesus loves me all the same. He
+loves me whatever I'm like!" His brow clouded. "But because He loves me
+I owe Him a debt. I ought to preach Him wherever I am, in and out of
+season. But I can't spoil this. Aren't we all happy, sitting here? I'll
+tell you what. They've asked me to take the Saturday evening service
+to-night because the Commandant and the two under him are all down with
+influenza. If you'll come and hear me I'll tell you what Jesus wants you
+to hear. Oh, mother, Richard, do, do come!"
+
+"Yes, Roger dear, we'll come."
+
+"You won't ... make fun of it?"
+
+"Oh no! Oh no!" Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy. "We
+haven't seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought.
+There are lots of things about me you don't know. For all you know, what
+you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me...."
+
+"What I said about Richard?..."
+
+"About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help
+one...."
+
+She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a
+pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining: "Oh, mother, if I
+could bring you to Jesus! Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I
+want!" But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started
+to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards. "Yes,"
+he cried reproachfully, "Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I
+reward Him!"
+
+They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the
+tea-leaves in her cup.
+
+"I told a lie!" he answered their common mute enquiry.
+
+"A silly, vain lie. I told you they'd asked me to take the Saturday
+evening service to-night. They didn't. I offered to take it. Nobody ever
+asks me to preach. They say I can't. Mind you, I don't think they're
+right. I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn't speak so
+badly. But that's not the point. I told a lie. I distinctly said they'd
+asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a
+success of things like Richard always does. Oh, what a thing to do to
+Jesus!"
+
+"But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry. It
+wasn't a deliberate lie."
+
+"Oh, mother, you don't understand," he fairly squealed. "You haven't
+been saved, you see, and you're still lax about these things. It does
+matter! It was a lie! I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees.
+Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?"
+
+Marion answered tenderly: "My dear, of course you can," but Poppy
+clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish,
+considered exasperation: "You haven't time. We ought to be at the chapel
+half an hour before the meeting. It's a quarter to six now."
+
+"Oh dear! oh dear! Is it as late as that? I wanted to write on a piece
+of paper what I'm going to say! Now I won't have time! Oh, and I did
+want to preach well! Oh, where's my cap?" He began to stumble about the
+room.
+
+Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set
+an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal. Richard
+and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the
+anticipation of disorder always provoked in them. "Tcha!" exclaimed
+Poppy contemptuously. "But it's there! On the armchair!" cried Ellen:
+she could not bear the look on Richard's and Marion's faces. "Where?"
+asked Poppy. It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen.
+"There! There! Among the cushions," she answered, and rose and went
+round the table to pick it up herself. Richard came and helped her.
+
+Roger seemed a little annoyed when Richard and Ellen found the cap for
+him among the cushions. Having to thank them spoiled, it could be seen,
+some valedictory effect which he had planned. He stood by while they
+shook hands with Poppy, who turned her head away as if to hide some
+scar, and when she had gone across to Marion tried to get in his
+designed tremendousness. By the working of his face, which made even
+his ears move a little, they knew they must endure something very
+characteristic of him. But into his weak eyes there bubbled a spring of
+joyful tenderness so bright, so clear, so intense that, though it would
+have seemed more fitting on the face of a child than of a man, it yet
+was dignified.
+
+"You make a handsome couple, you two!" he said.
+
+"Richard, you're a whole lot taller than me. When I'm away from you I
+forget what a difference there is between us. And the young lady, she's
+fine, too."
+
+"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.
+
+He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he
+murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite
+ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well,
+good-bye, mother."
+
+"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out
+myself, my dears."
+
+Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat
+down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he
+would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an
+overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and
+stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the
+sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door:
+Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the
+click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger,
+which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all,
+the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn
+of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark.
+But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body,
+and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him
+as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the
+dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to
+their own lives.
+
+When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps
+save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber,
+fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to
+polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped
+in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the
+candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four
+chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair
+had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have
+known that Ellen had been sitting there too.
+
+Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol
+of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words.
+Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that
+have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."
+
+"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh
+formula.
+
+"But you must have an éclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used
+to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the
+table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that
+her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties
+they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed
+their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite
+which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than
+whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be,
+little, sweet, and moderate.
+
+Marion brought her an éclair on a plate. She took it and stood up,
+asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and
+Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."
+
+"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found
+herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into
+the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been
+laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the
+stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes
+which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone
+of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've
+no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little
+gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more
+than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked
+draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the
+disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the
+mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side
+by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like
+rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and
+its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable--this tall man
+who could assail all things with his outstretched strength, this
+broad-bodied woman whom nothing could assail because of her crouching
+strength.
+
+Marion stretched out her hand to the fire. Her insanely polished nails
+glittered like jewels.
+
+She said in that indifferent tone: "Well, it wasn't so bad."
+
+Some passion shook him. "Mother! Mother! To think of him bringing that
+woman into this house--to meet you and Ellen!"
+
+"Hush, oh hush! He does not know."
+
+"But, mother! He ought to! Anyone could see--"
+
+"What she was. Yes, poor woman. But remember I made a bad job of Roger.
+I gave him no brains."
+
+"Mother--it mustn't happen again. She can't come here again."
+
+She grew stern. "Richard, you must say nothing to Roger. Nor to her.
+She's his love and pride. So far as he's concerned, she's a better woman
+than I am. I never put my love and pride in his life. If you speak to
+either of them you will ... add to my already heavy guilt. Besides ...
+how can she hurt Ellen and me? She's very weak. We're very strong."
+
+"But, mother, you saw what she was."
+
+"More than you did. She's had a child not long since."
+
+"A child?" He stared at her curiously, reverently. "How do you know?"
+
+"Some people get a brown stain on their face when they're having a baby,
+and afterwards it lingers on. I had it with you. Not with Roger. She has
+it now." She slowly drew her fingers over her face, her eyes wide in
+wonder. "It's a queer thing, birth...."
+
+Ellen tingled with shame because such things were spoken of aloud, by
+someone old. But Richard muttered huskily: "I wonder what the story
+is...."
+
+"Something horrible. She's come from a good home. Her teeth were well
+looked after when she was a girl. That hair took some conscientious
+torturing to make it what it is. She was caught, I suppose, by her love
+of beauty. Did you ever hear anything more pathetic than her name--Poppy
+Alicante?"
+
+"I don't see anything more in it than it's an obvious lie."
+
+"It was much more than that. Think of her as a little girl going with
+her mother into a greengrocer's and hearing about Alicante grapes, and
+asking what Alicante was, and being told it was in Spain, and making the
+most lovely pictures of it in her mind and keeping them there ever
+since. Oh, she's a poor, beauty-loving thing. That's how the handsome
+sailor picked her up in Chatham High Street on Saturday night."
+
+"No doubt you're right," he said, looking into the fire.
+
+"And she hated giving up the child. That's why she snarls at Roger.
+Until she gets another she'll be famished. It was taken over, I expect,
+by a married sister or brother who've got no children of their own.
+She's not allowed to see it now. Not since she left the nice place that
+was found for her after she'd got over her trouble. Twenty pounds a
+year--because of her lost character; and for the same reason rather more
+work than the rest of the servants, who all found out about it. So she
+ran away."
+
+He interrupted her: "Supposing all that's true. And I know it is. It's
+like you, mother, to read from a patch of brown skin on a woman's face
+things that other people would have found out only by searching registry
+records and asking the police. It's like the way you always turned your
+back on the barometer and read the sky for news of the weather. You're
+an old peasant woman under your skin, mother." His voice was hazed with
+delight. He had forgotten the moment in the timeless joy of his love for
+her. Ellen, in the shadows, stirred and coughed. He broke out again:
+"Well, supposing all that's true! Are you going to be honest and be as
+clear-sighted about what happened after she ran away? Mother, think of
+the things that have been done to her, think of the things she's seen!"
+
+The indifferent tone continued now, although she said: "Think of the
+horrible things that have been done to me, think of the horrible things
+I've seen! Oh, you're right, of course. Unhappy people are dangerous.
+They clutch at the happy people round them and drag them down into the
+vortex of their misery. But if you're going to hate anybody for doing
+that, hate me. Look how I've dominated you with my misfortunes, look how
+I've eaten up your life by making you feel it a duty to compensate me
+for what I've endured. Hate me. But don't hate Poppy. Oh, that poor,
+simple creature. Even now, after all that's happened, she'd be pleased
+like a child if you took her to a fair where there were merry-go-rounds.
+Oh, don't hate her. And don't hate Roger." Wildness flashed through her
+like lightning through a dense dark cloud. "Don't hate him, Richard!
+Take your mind off both of us. We're all right. I can manage everything
+quite well. I'm hard. I haven't got all those fine feelings you think I
+have. I'm quite hard. I can arrange everything beautifully. Roger's
+happy in the Hallelujah Army. He's gone to Jesus for the love I ought to
+have given him. I know they're thinking of turning him out. But I'll see
+to it that they keep him. I'll pretend to have leanings towards their
+religion, and I'll give them money from time to time so that they won't
+dare get rid of him. It will be rather amusing squaring them. I shall
+enjoy it. We will be all right. Leave us alone. Don't think of us. Think
+of Ellen. Think of Ellen. How you hold back from your happiness!" she
+cried gibingly. "I tell you, if I had had your chance of happiness when
+I was young, neither my mother nor my father would have held me back
+from it!"
+
+It was as if her soul had leapt, naked and raging, from out of her mouth
+when she said that. Ellen stirred among the cushions, feeling
+unformulated shame. She wondered how Richard could endure hearing that
+hoarse vehemence from the lips of one whom he must wish to be gentle and
+unpassionate. But he was gazing at his mother trancedly and with slight
+movements of his hands and feet, as if she were dancing and he desired
+to join her in her spinning rhythm; and she, mad, changeable woman,
+shivered and pressed her fingers against her mouth to silence herself,
+and looked down on her skirt, drawling lazily: "Well, here I am,
+standing about in my outdoor clothes. If there's anything I hate, it's
+wearing outdoor clothes in the house. However, it'll save me changing,
+and I've none too much time if I'm going to be punctual for Roger's
+meeting."
+
+She moved towards the door. He followed softly, as her shadow, and held
+it open.
+
+When he made to follow her out of the room she turned sharply. "You
+needn't come."
+
+"I promised Roger," he said falsely.
+
+"What nonsense!" she blazed. "I'll tell him you had to stay here with
+Ellen."
+
+She banged the door on him. He stood staring at its panels, which were
+rosy with firelight, and Ellen closed her eyes for weariness. After some
+seconds she heard his tread and felt him bend over her. "Ellen," he
+mumbled, "I must go with mother. That fool will be too awful on the
+platform. I must see her through."
+
+From the dark fey shape he made against the firelight she knew that he
+was not thinking of her, that the life she had given him by her love no
+longer ran in his veins. She scratched one of her wrists. If she could
+have let the life he had given flow out of her veins she would have done
+it. "Ay, do," she said. "I like you to be good to your mother. You never
+know how long you may have her with you," she added piously and not
+without cheerfulness.
+
+He left her with a kiss that was dry and spurious like a paper flower.
+She sank back into the chair and closed her eyes again, and listened for
+the closing of the front door which would leave her free to weep or rage
+or dance or do whatever would relieve the pressure of the moment on her
+brain. She filled in the throbbing tune by thinking of the visitors. It
+gave her a curious thrill, such as she might have felt if she had
+gratified her ambition to carry a heavy-plumed fan like Sarah
+Bernhardt's, to reflect that she had sat in the same room with a bad
+woman. A desire for unspecified adult things ran through her veins, as
+if she had just heard the strong initial blare of a band. Then she
+checked all thoughts, for from the hall she heard the sound of argument.
+
+The door was flung open by Marion. She moved towards the hearth with a
+burly speed which marked this moment a crisis in the house of languid,
+inhibited movements, and cast herself down on a low stool by the fender.
+Richard followed and stood over her, the firelight driving over his face
+like the glow of excited blood, the shadows lying in his eye-sockets
+like blindness. She cried up at him: "No, I will not go if you come too.
+How can I go and sit listening to him, with you beside me hating him!"
+He swayed slowly, but did not answer. She stripped herself of coat and
+furs and thrust them on him. "There. Take them up to my room. I'm not
+going. I'll tell some lie. Better than you hating him like this. And
+while you're up you'll find some papers on my desk about the mortgage on
+Whitewebbs. Attend to these. And don't come back just now. You drive me
+mad when you hate Roger so."
+
+When he had softly shut the door she put her hand to her head and said:
+"Oh, Ellen, what has happened to me? I have lost all my strength."
+
+But her voice was still level, and she was but a squat, crouching mass
+against the firelight. Ellen did not know whether she was really moved,
+nor, if she were, whether she could feel comradely with such emotion,
+since she had seen the woman blench at the thought of her son preaching
+in the street yet stay complacid at the prospect of him being lost in
+intellectual error. So she did not answer.
+
+"You must go for a long walk with Richard to-morrow," said Marion
+presently. "Over to Rochford, perhaps, where Anne Boleyn lived. It's
+pretty there."
+
+"That would be nice," Ellen answered. She liked it when they talked as
+if they were merely strangers. "Do you think it will be fine to-morrow?
+Richard said you were awful clever at telling the weather."
+
+"I can't say. I only looked out for a moment. The clouds are going and
+the moon's rising. But there's a queer feeling in the air to-night. It's
+not like the winter or spring or summer or autumn. It's as if we had
+come into some fifth season of the year." She fell silent and sat
+tapping the floor with her foot; and asked more loudly but in the same
+tone: "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
+me?"
+
+Ellen was sure she was being mocked; grown-up people never asked one's
+advice. She muttered sullenly: "I don't know"; but as she spoke she
+heard from Marion's dark shape a sound of discovery such as a searcher
+might make when his groping fingers closed on the lost pearl. Its
+intensity convinced, and she leaned forward, crying in full friendship:
+"You've thought of something to settle them?"
+
+But Marion answered, with that indifference grown nearly to a sneer:
+"Oh, no.... Oh, no...."
+
+Ellen leaned back, hating these adults that like to keep their secrets
+from the young.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Ellen was still on her knees fiddling with the lock of the French window
+in an effort to discover why Marion had found it so difficult to open
+and shut, when she saw through the lacquer of reflection which the lit
+room painted on the uncurtained glass that a dark mass had come to a
+halt just outside. It moved, and she perceived that it was a skirt. She
+stood up to face the intruder and looked through the glass into Marion's
+eyes. For a moment she stared back in undisguised anger. Of course, if
+the woman had had any sense she would never have formed this daft idea
+of going for a dander on the marshes at this hour of the night, whether
+her nerves were troubling her or not; but she never ought to have
+pretended to be so set on it, and let a body feel sure of having the
+evening alone with Richard as soon as he had finished with those beastly
+papers, if she was going to turn back in five minutes. Then she
+remembered that this was Richard's mother, and that for some reason he
+set great store by her; and she tried to smile, and laid her fingers on
+the doorknob to open it. But Marion shook her head and put out a
+prohibitory hand with so urgent a gesture that the unlit lantern which
+hung by a strap from her wrist bumped against the glass.
+
+Yet she remained for some seconds longer with her face pressed close to
+the window. She was peering into the room with an expression of wanting
+to fix its contents and its appearance in her memory, which was odd in
+the owner of the house. Ellen moved aside in order not to impede her
+vision, and stood disliking her for her pervasive inexplicability and
+for her extreme plainness. She had been very ugly all that evening since
+she came down to dinner, and now the shining glass in front of her face
+was acting in its uncomeliness like a magnifying lens. Her hair had
+suddenly become greasy during the last few hours, and it showed in lank
+loops where her hat had been carelessly jammed down on her head. In the
+same short space of time her face seemed to have grown fatter, and her
+skin had taken on the pallor of unhealthy obesity. Against it the dark
+down on her upper lip looked like dirt. Her eyes were not magnificent
+to-night. After she had stared round the room she looked again at Ellen,
+and gave her a forced smile that looked the more unpleasant because the
+corners of her mouth were joined to her nose by deep creases. It so
+manifestly did not spring from any joy, that Ellen could not answer it
+save by just such another false grin. Her honesty hated this woman who
+had thus negotiated her into insincerity, and she turned away. When she
+looked back the face had gone.
+
+She went back to the fire and sat thinking bitterly what a daft thing it
+was for a wife to go wandering round her own house in the night like a
+thief. But Marion was altogether an upsetting woman. She had kept the
+dinner waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and when she came down
+it was revealed that she had caused this delay, which must have
+inconvenienced the kitchen and was sheer cruelty to Richard, who had
+made next to nothing of a tea, by dressing herself up in a black and
+gold brocade affair that it was sheer madness to waste wearing when
+there was no company, and putting on jewels which made her stricken
+plainness look the more soiled and leaden. Then, once they sat down to
+the meal she had done her best to spoil, she had eaten so slowly that it
+dragged on interminably; and all the while had kept her great eyes fixed
+on Richard's face, so that though he sometimes turned aside and spoke to
+Ellen, he was always drawn away from her by his sense of that strong,
+exigent gaze. The minute they had finished, when there seemed a chance
+of their settling down in some more easy grouping by the fire, Marion
+had curtly and disagreeably asked him if he had gone through the papers
+about the mortgage; and when he answered that he had not been able to
+keep his mind on them she had told him to go upstairs and finish them
+just as if he were a child.
+
+Ellen raised her upper lip over her teeth at the thought of Marion's
+subsequent awkwardness. There had not, when she announced her plan of
+taking Richard and Ellen up to town the next morning and spending the
+day shopping and going to a theatre, been the least real party-giving
+joy in her tone. Her will seemed to be holding her voice in its hands
+like a concertina and waving it to and fro and squeezing out of it all
+sorts of notes; but the sound of generous happiness would not come. And
+when Ellen tried to tell her that it was very kind of her, but for
+herself she would rather stay quietly in the country and go for a walk
+with Richard, the woman had simply lifted her voice to a higher pitch
+and said: "Oh, but it'll be great fun. We must go before Sunday is on
+us." She was evidently one of those managing bodies who are accustomed
+to ride rough-shod over the whole world, and often do it under the
+pretence of kindness. It was most cunning the way she rang for the cook
+to try and make it seem that there was a pressing domestic reason for
+her taking this jaunt. But cook had let her down badly, staring in such
+ingenuous amazement, and blurting out: "Oh Lor', mum, I don't want no
+aluminium set now. All I said was I thought our copper saucepans would
+need re-coppering in a year or so, and that, considering the trouble and
+expense that meant, we might as well restock with aluminium." There had
+been a hysterical stridency about the way in which Marion had flouted
+the woman's protests by repeating over and over again: "Yes, you shall
+have them now. There's not the smallest reason why you should wait for
+them. I shall go up to Harrod's to-morrow morning."
+
+Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face
+and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing
+gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening
+the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die
+if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life
+could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the
+creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the
+garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely.
+Ellen crossed to one of the small leaded windows which were on each side
+of the French window and looked out of the open pane in its centre. It
+was as she feared. The light streaming from the room showed her Marion
+standing half-way across the lawn, looking up at the top storey of the
+house. As the ray found her she lowered her head and made a jerky,
+embarrassed movement in the direction of Ellen, who, feeling merciless,
+continued to hold back the curtain. Marion drew her cloak collar up
+about her ears and stepped aside into the darkness. Ellen went and sat
+down by the fire. From something in Marion's bearing, she knew that she
+would not be back for some time.
+
+It would be beautiful when Richard came down to her. Now that the room
+was purged of its late occupant she felt herself becoming again the
+miracle that Richard's love had made her in the days before they left
+Edinburgh. Her heart beat quicker, she was sustained by a general mirth
+and needed no particular joke to make her smile. She felt the equal of
+the tall flame that was driving through the fire. It did not worry her
+that Richard was not with her, for she knew that at each moment she was
+recovering more and more of that joy in life which had previously come
+to her every morning, though those were greyer than here: which had been
+a real possession, since Richard had often, when he was tired, found
+such restoration in reading its signs on her as a footsore man might
+find in throwing himself in long grass: which had been gradually going
+from her ever since the house had begun to draw her into its affairs.
+Now she was regaining it; though, indeed, ever to have become conscious
+of it, as she had during the time of being without it, was to have lost
+the glad essence of it. She quailed and rejoiced like a convalescent who
+sets out to put his strength to the test, when she heard the slamming of
+a door overhead.
+
+He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said:
+"Where's Marion?"
+
+It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the
+window, of the dark loiterer in the garden. Murmuring, "Oh, she'll be
+back in a minute," she opened her arms to him.
+
+He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very
+close. "Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run
+across the road!" he whispered in her ear. She knew immediately, from
+the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his
+lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he
+too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself
+with it. She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he
+avoided her kiss and said irritably: "I wonder if Roger made an awful
+ass of himself preaching to-night?"
+
+"I've no doubt," answered Ellen, "that he made Jesus most dislikeable.
+But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a
+setback here and there."
+
+"It's not that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having
+mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had."
+He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.
+
+Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his
+face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers;
+but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift
+from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill
+with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer,
+closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with
+him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a
+steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they
+were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as
+itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times
+which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found
+the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye
+first saw.
+
+"'Lamport and Holt. _Bruyčre_, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for
+Rosario. _Lalande_, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande.
+_Leighton_, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. _Vestris_, left
+Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to
+Pernambuco?"
+
+"Once," he said.
+
+"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."
+
+"Like Venice? Why?"
+
+"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."
+
+She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be
+suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some
+symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he
+had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating
+past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had
+made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the
+silence settle.
+
+After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"
+
+She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as
+it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out,"
+she said timorously.
+
+"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"
+
+"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and
+that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."
+
+"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to
+the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the
+east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird
+of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the
+end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he
+exclaimed.
+
+"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen
+felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the
+woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There
+was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and
+yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.
+
+"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He
+turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been
+incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me
+she was doing this?"
+
+Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it?
+You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each
+other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like
+children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces.
+She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this
+trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all
+day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him,
+slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing
+that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her
+head after the day she'd had. And I could never think she was a woman
+who'd be afraid of walking in the dark. And it seemed natural enough.
+Because it has been a day for her, hasn't it?"
+
+He agreed grimly: "Yes, it's been a day," and looked over his shoulder
+at the quiet silvern garden, and shivered. "Tell me," he asked, with a
+timidity that filled her with fear, since it was the last quality she
+had ever expected to colour his tone to her, "what was she like, before
+she went out?"
+
+"Oh, verra bright," said Ellen, with conscious acidity. "She was all for
+making arrangements for you and me to go up to town with her to-morrow
+and see a play, and I don't know all what. And she had the cook in to
+tell her about some aluminium saucepans that we're going to buy
+to-morrow if we go."
+
+"Oh!" He was manifestly relieved. "Well, I suppose it's all right."
+
+"Yes, it's all right," she told him pettishly; and then tried to make
+amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion. "I can understand why your
+mother thought it would do her good to go out. If you've lived all your
+life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you. No
+doubt," she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she
+was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion's more pathetic aspect,
+"the poor thing's gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit
+of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young. Richard,
+Richard, what have I said?"
+
+He looked at her coldly. "Nothing. What could you have said?" But he
+went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him
+hasten, and opened it and stepped outside. Against the moonlight he was
+only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to
+the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful
+look of rage which had made her cry aloud. He stepped in again and said:
+"I'm sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her."
+
+She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with
+him. "May I come with you?" she asked through tears.
+
+"No, no, it wouldn't be any fun for you," he answered fussily,
+"scrambling about these fields in the dark."
+
+"Let me come with you!" she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows
+knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be
+to him sombre with the day's events, and cried: "I shall feel afraid,
+waiting here."
+
+"Very well. Go and put your things on. But be quick."
+
+He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged
+the time spent in waiting for her. Wearily she followed him out of the
+window. From what her mother had told her about men, she had always
+known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of
+worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that
+she was being tiresome when she was not. But she would never have
+believed that it could come so soon. And it was spoiling her. She no
+longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of
+her own nobility. Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by
+pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which
+tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his
+presence no matter at what price. There was no knowing where all this
+would end.
+
+But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it
+had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had
+handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard,
+while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like
+walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised
+a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated
+with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like
+ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard
+piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white
+paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled
+hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had
+gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into
+the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and
+led her up in a slanting course towards the top of the elm-hedge that
+striped the hill. It was rough walking over the steep frozen hummocks,
+and she wished he would not walk so fast. But it was lovely going up
+like this, and with every step widening the wide, whitely-blazing view.
+The elm trees stood like chased toys made by silversmiths where the
+light struck them; and in the darkness seemed like harsh twiggy nets
+hung on tall poles to catch the stars. Scattered over the polished
+harbour, the black boats squatted on their shadows and the tide licked
+towards them with an ebony and silver tongue. But far out in the fairway
+a liner and some lesser steamers carried their spilling cargo of orange
+brightness, and the further fringe of the night was spoiled by the
+comprehensive yellow wink of a lighthouse; and these things tainted the
+black and white immaculacy of the hour. It was not on earth but overhead
+that the essence of the night displayed itself. Light rushed from the
+moon into the sky like a strong wind, carrying before it some shining
+vapours that might have been angels' clouts blown off a heavenly line.
+It was as if some horseplay was going on among the ethereal forces; for
+the stars, dimmed by the violent brilliance of the moon, were like
+tapers seen through glass, and were held, perhaps, by invisible beings
+who had been drawn to their windows by the sound of carnival. To its
+zenith the night was packed with gaiety.
+
+"Richard, Richard, is it not beautiful?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, yes," he answered.
+
+They reached the topmost elm in the row, and opened a gate into a field
+which stretched inland from the hill's brow. Under the shadow of its
+seaward edge they still walked westerly, the ploughed earth looking like
+a patch of grey corduroy lying to their right. It struck her that he was
+moving now like a hunter stalking his quarry, as if the lightness of his
+feet were a weapon, as if he were looking forward to an exciting kill.
+At the corner of the field they stopped before a gap in the hedge.
+Triple barbed wire crossed a vista of close-cropped grass running to
+trees that lifted dark spires against the pale meridian starlight.
+
+"Wait," said Richard.
+
+He went forward and stamped down the long grasses at one side of the
+gap, and then bent nearly double and seemed to be pressing against
+something with his hands and his knee. The barbed wire began to hum, to
+buzz excitedly; there was the groan of cracking wood, and the grunt of
+his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her
+face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am
+like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be
+true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced
+and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the
+stake which supported it.
+
+"Come on," he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They
+walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was
+hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled
+by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide
+Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads.
+It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who
+was walking on ahead, though there did not seem any reason why they
+should walk in single file, for the ground was level and the grass
+short. There was indeed a suavity about this place which was not to be
+found in fields or commons. The line of trees towards which they were
+going was only a spur of a dense wood that stretched inland, and light
+from some moonflooded place beyond outlined their winter-naked bodies
+and showed them beautiful with a formal afforested grace.
+
+"Is this a park?" she whispered, running forward to his side.
+
+"Yes. My father's park."
+
+"Oh!" she breathed in surprise; then, flaming up in loyalty, cried:
+"What a shame it isn't yours!"
+
+He made an exclamation of anger and disgust, and said coldly: "Can't you
+understand that I am glad that nothing which was his is mine?"
+
+Meekly she murmured: "That's natural, that's natural," and fell behind.
+
+They passed the lacy clump of withered bracken, casting a shadow much
+more substantial than itself, which was the last dwindled outpost of
+the screen of trees; and Richard hissed over his shoulder, "Hush!"
+though she had not spoken. But nothing could spoil this. The silver
+forest waited in a half circle round a clearing that looked marshy with
+moonbeams; and in the centre of the arc, set forward from the trees,
+shone a small temple, looking out to sea. It had four white pillars,
+which were vague with excessive light, columns of gleaming mist; and
+these upheld a high pediment, covered with deep stone mouldings which
+cast such shadows and received such brightness that it looked like a
+rich casket chased by some giant jeweller. That it should last longer
+than a sigh did not seem possible.
+
+But it endured, it endured; until the urgent advocacy of romance which
+was somehow inherent in its beauty, and which was not likely to be
+fulfilled, caused an ache. She caught her breath in a sob.
+
+"You think it beautiful?" asked Richard, close to her ear.
+
+"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"
+
+"I had a summer-house in that villa of mine at Rio," he said, hotly and
+defiantly, "which was just like this, but much more beautiful."
+
+He stepped forward and began to move towards the temple with that air of
+stalking a quarry. She followed him wearily, feeling that it was not
+right that they should have come here like this. They should have come
+in some different way. At each step the temple grew higher before them,
+more candid, more immaculate, but its beauty did not soften his
+inexorable aspect. When they could see the pale wedges which the moon
+drove in between the columns he paused and stared, and drew from his
+pocket something dark which lay easily in his hand. "What's that? What's
+that?" she asked in panic. "Only an electric torch," he muttered,
+without surprise at her suspicion, and went with springing, silent,
+detective gait up the three steps of the temple.
+
+She remained without, drooping. Would he find his mother there? She
+hoped so, for then they could all go home and leave this place, which
+she felt despised her. The tall trees of the forest, lifting their bare
+branches like antlers against the stars, seemed to be holding their
+heads high in contempt of her defeat. For so to be forgotten was defeat.
+
+No sounds came from the temple, and she timidly went up the steps and
+passed into the interior, which was cut by the colonnade into narrow
+chambers of shadows and broader chambers of light. At first she could
+not see him anywhere, and cried in alarm: "Richard!"
+
+"I'm here," he answered. He was standing beside her, leaning against a
+pillar, but put out no hand to soothe her fear.
+
+"Have you not found her?" she quavered.
+
+He let the yellow circle of the electric torch travel over the cracked
+stucco-wall that faced them, the paintless door at its left extremity,
+the drift of dead leaves on the stone floor.
+
+"What does that door open on to?" asked Ellen, forgetting the reason for
+their search in the queerness of the place.
+
+"A staircase up to the room above."
+
+"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the
+existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up
+there, do you think?"
+
+He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.
+
+"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall
+high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I
+stood up there, wouldn't it?"
+
+There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like
+a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has
+she told you anything about it?"
+
+"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just
+thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You
+take me up too quick."
+
+His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course
+she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's
+what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here
+together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely
+he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche,
+though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular
+soilure.
+
+"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand
+on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those
+bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"
+
+"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered,
+sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to
+slow thoughts.
+
+She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands,
+close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted
+by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out
+towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the
+woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the
+trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene
+in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and
+the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little
+thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud
+laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree
+and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands,
+and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered
+with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw
+suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a
+dancing lantern.
+
+She ran back to the temple. All she cared for really was pleasing him.
+"Richard, Richard! I've found her! She's down there on the marshes!"
+
+He was out beside her in a second. "Where? How do you know?"
+
+"I saw her lantern down on the marshes!"
+
+When they got back to the hill's edge the light was still to be seen,
+bobbing along towards the elm brow. Richard clipped Ellen's waist to
+show her how well pleased he was with her. "Ah, that'll be Marion!" he
+said. "Nobody else would be on the marshes at this hour." Then a little
+wind of anger blew over his voice. "Has she been to his tomb? Can she
+have been to his tomb in the time? It's a steep climb for her. I
+wonder.... I wonder...."
+
+The lantern bobbed out of sight behind the elm row. Feeling that they
+were again alone together, Ellen raised her lips to be kissed, but he
+had already turned away. "Let's go home now!" he said urgently. "I want
+to know where she's been."
+
+The place seemed far more beautiful to her than it had done before. "Oh!
+Now you're sure she's quite safe, mayn't we stay here a little?" she
+begged.
+
+"No, no. Some other night. I'll bring you to-morrow night. But not now,
+not now."
+
+She followed laggingly, looking about her with infatuation. There was
+something religious about the scene. Rites of some true form of worship
+might fitly be celebrated here. All appeared more majestic and more
+sacred than in the strained, bickering moments before she showed him the
+lantern. Now she perceived that it was the silver circle of trees which
+was the real temple, and that the marble belvedere was but a human
+offering laid before the shrine. It was in there, along the ebony paths
+which ran among the glistening thickets, that one would find the
+presence of the divinity.
+
+"Oh, Richard! It will never be so beautiful as this on any other night!
+Let us stay!"
+
+"No. It will be just as good any moonlit night. I swear I'll bring you.
+But now I want to get back home."
+
+He slipped her arm through his to make her come. She stumbled along,
+turning her face aside towards those mystic woods. At the end of those
+paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all
+sides by the forest; and there was something there.... Another temple? A
+statue? An event? She did not know. But if they found it, they would be
+happy for ever....
+
+"Richard--"
+
+"No."
+
+He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the
+ploughed field. When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row
+they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard
+gate, the bobbing lantern.
+
+"She's going fairly quickly," he said softly, speculatively. "I wonder
+if she's been to his tomb? Do you think she's had time?"
+
+"I don't know," Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when
+he must be aware she could not tell.
+
+"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and
+bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth
+at their feet. "We'll find out when we get home. Let's hurry back."
+
+They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread
+that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite
+nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance. The
+humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at
+shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the
+lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She
+was the lucky woman, Marion.
+
+"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in
+fine style."
+
+"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to
+ask her where she has been."
+
+"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull,
+drilling persistence.
+
+When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she
+standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such
+extraordinary things?"
+
+Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the
+left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady
+rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she
+said pettishly.
+
+He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which
+pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment
+there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed
+on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed
+past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in
+the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"
+
+The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen
+crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and
+prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight
+beams were still unclouded.
+
+"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a
+revolver.
+
+Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a
+doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.
+
+"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"
+
+It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's
+sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and
+wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown
+some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.
+
+"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm
+Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my
+married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would
+auntie give us the clothes she was making?"
+
+The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the kitchen
+brightness at them.
+
+"Where is your mistress?" Richard asked them, cutting into the girl's
+sweet, silly speech. "Has she come back?"
+
+The servants all started making twittering, consequential noises. "No,
+sir, she isn't." "We didn't know, any of us, you was out till the lady
+and gentleman come."
+
+"What lady and gentleman?"
+
+The two younger women shrunk back and left the cook to answer. "Mr.
+Roger Peacey, sir, and the lady." From the hindmost girl there came a
+giggle.
+
+That was why they had not heard the knocking at the door. They had all
+been sitting laughing at his mother's other son and going over the
+family history. Ellen shrank back from the light. Marion's misfortunes
+made things very ill to deal with; they seemed to bring out the worst in
+everybody. And how the whole affair was hurting Richard! He turned on
+his heel and walked back to the trellis arch and went through it without
+waiting for her. By the time she had followed him round the corner of
+the house he was opening the French window into the dining-room. He
+found it quite easy to open; again she thought with rage and contempt of
+the way that Marion had fumbled with the handle. She had to run along
+the path lest in his forgetfulness he shut her out into the night.
+
+She found him halted just within the room, pulling off his gauntlets
+and forcing a white smile towards Roger, who was standing swaying on the
+hearthrug, his cheeks dribbled with tears. Poppy stood beside him,
+staring sullenly at a blank wall, her mouth a little open with distaste
+for him.
+
+"So you're giving us another visit," said Richard, in that hollow
+conscientious tone of kindness he had used to them in the afternoon.
+
+Roger opened his mouth but could not speak; then flapped his hands to
+make it plain this was an occasion of importance, and cried bleatingly:
+"I've come to say that I forgive you all."
+
+"Forgive us!" exclaimed Richard, swept away to the bleak extremity of
+rage. Then checked himself. "Oh, for not coming to your meeting. We
+hoped you would. Ellen was tired."
+
+"I couldn't bear to think of you p'raps going to bed and feeling that I
+was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I've got
+Jesus I'll forgive anything that anybody does against me!" His voice
+wallowed rhapsodically. "So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of
+going straight back to the Colony."
+
+Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to
+disassociate herself from him, from the situation.
+
+"That was good of you," said Richard.
+
+"And now"--the whistling tone came back in his speech--"I want to tell
+mother!"
+
+"You can't do that. She isn't in."
+
+"What, weren't you all out together? Didn't she come home with you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then, love o' goodness, where is she at this time of night?"
+
+"Down on the marshes," said Richard casually. "She had a headache. She
+thought a walk in the night air would do her good." Slowly and
+deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the
+table.
+
+"Oh," murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and
+straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the
+wood. Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his
+brother's face. "Here! What's the matter with mother?"
+
+"Nothing! Nothing!" exclaimed Richard in exasperation. "She's down on
+the marshes, having a walk."
+
+"Oh, but you can't take me in that way!" the pallid creature cried,
+wringing his hands. "I can see you're frightened about mother!"
+
+"I'm not," said Richard vehemently.
+
+"You needn't try to fool me. I'm stupid about everything else, but not
+about mother! And I could always feel what was going on between you two.
+Many's the time I've had to leave the room because you two were loving
+each other so and I felt out of it. And now I know you're frightened
+about her! You are! You are!"
+
+"I'm not!" shouted Richard.
+
+Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and
+had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight. "If you'd got
+Jesus," he said tartly, "you'd learn to be gentle. Like He was." He
+recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy's hand, which she tendered him
+deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for
+orders. "Now you'd better tell me what it is about mother that's making
+you frightened. She'd not be pleased, would she, if she came in and
+found you treating me like this, as if I hadn't a right to know anything
+about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?"
+
+That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see. He looked down at his
+white knuckles and unclenched his hands. "It's really nothing," he told
+Roger in that false, kind voice. "I went upstairs after dinner to look
+over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here. When I
+came back Ellen told me she'd gone out for a walk on the marshes. It
+struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went
+out and had a look round, but couldn't see her anywhere. There's not the
+slightest occasion for worry."
+
+Roger stared at him, sucking his front teeth. "But you're frightened!"
+he said explosively.
+
+"I am not."
+
+"You are. You think she's come to some harm down on the marshes." He
+slipped past him and flung open the French window, calling in a thin,
+whistling voice that could not have been heard fifty yards away:
+"Mummie! Mummie!"
+
+A convulsion of rage ran through Richard. With one hand he jerked Roger
+back into the room by his coat-collar, with the other he slammed the
+French window. "Be quiet. I tell you she's all right. I know where she's
+gone."
+
+"Where, then?"
+
+"Never mind."
+
+"Where? Where?" His hands fumbled for the doorhandle again.
+
+"Oh, stop that!" Richard loosed hold of him with the expression of one
+who had grasped what he thought to be soft grass and finds his palms
+scored by a fibrous stalk. He said, and Ellen could see that he liked
+saying it as little as anything that he had ever said all his life long:
+"If you must know, I think she's gone up to my father's tomb."
+
+Roger shook his head solemnly. "No. You're wrong. She hasn't gone there.
+And she's come to harm."
+
+"Why in God's name do you say that?" burst out Richard.
+
+"I know. I've known all the evening. That's really why I came back here
+after the service. That talk about forgiveness was just something I made
+up as an excuse. I knew quite well that something was wrong with
+mummie." His pale eyes sought first Richard and then Ellen. "Don't you
+believe a person might know if something happened to another person," he
+asked wistfully, "if they loved them enough?"
+
+There was indeed such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard
+and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it
+is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of
+the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really,
+Roger, she was quite bright before she went out. Ellen, tell Roger...."
+
+But Roger stared out at the empty silver garden and whimpered
+inattentively: "I can't help it. I want to go down to the marshes and
+look for her."
+
+"Very well," agreed Richard, blinking. The sight of the love in those
+weak eyes made his voice authentically kind. "We'll go down. She ought
+to be easy to find as she's carrying a lantern. You're quite sure she
+has got a lantern with her, Ellen?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Ellen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back
+and looked through the window."
+
+"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"
+
+"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his
+mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the
+door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the
+glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went
+away."
+
+"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in
+amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a
+reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before
+she went out."
+
+She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her
+that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all
+in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about
+us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and
+talked to her about saucepans."
+
+"What saucepans?"
+
+"Aluminium saucepans."
+
+"But what about them?"
+
+She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple
+in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the
+narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on
+hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get
+them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."
+
+For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her
+because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She
+really was all right, Ellen?"
+
+"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."
+
+Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure
+of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring
+things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was
+not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it
+had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned
+towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face,
+which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will
+most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."
+
+Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He
+turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here,
+Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so
+preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for
+Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."
+
+They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than
+their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate
+into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but
+he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop
+about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and
+Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and
+hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.
+
+Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an
+extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do
+that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."
+
+"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the
+exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.
+
+"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the
+teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and
+drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:
+"Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with
+her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the
+flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life
+was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk
+restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly:
+"That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in
+the sky. Is that Chatham?"
+
+With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that
+those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered
+what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in
+Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it
+was."
+
+"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed
+her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was
+quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.
+
+Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What
+chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this
+woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so
+wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's
+brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and
+ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes
+fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned
+out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the
+moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she
+was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and
+crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night
+searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.
+
+She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had
+whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window
+into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and
+advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the
+farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound
+of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there
+was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was
+no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family
+had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been
+unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran
+downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she
+begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the
+parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in
+her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut
+on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had
+been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look
+like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.
+
+There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was
+sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the
+night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on
+the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections
+of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as
+pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head
+on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly
+enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the
+breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that
+had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood
+Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered
+about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o'
+you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear
+nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went
+in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said:
+"Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the
+fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was
+held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it
+were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became
+more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture
+of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her
+wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"
+
+That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped
+back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he
+muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric
+switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her
+hands.
+
+"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"
+
+"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the
+sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it
+difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In
+the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the
+right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there
+over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for
+years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right
+up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."
+
+Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked
+foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story,
+"But when did you find the lantern?"
+
+"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way
+along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon
+as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the
+lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."
+
+They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any
+moment it might move or speak.
+
+"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the
+light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of
+those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened
+yet!"
+
+He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."
+
+"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"
+
+He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead.
+There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's
+dead."
+
+It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if
+he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly
+unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and
+hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously
+stricken by a disease one sits and waits.
+
+"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank
+into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick
+and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her
+flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but
+the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken
+all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat;
+and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously
+exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food."
+He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked
+round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling
+in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.
+
+"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."
+
+He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head
+mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a
+thing on my stomach."
+
+"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying
+for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."
+
+That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor
+Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.
+
+Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he
+laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did
+you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"
+
+"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."
+
+"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing
+but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."
+
+"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to
+worry."
+
+"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone.
+"It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled:
+"Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to
+the sallowness of the morning.
+
+When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his
+hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was
+saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you
+silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"
+and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.
+
+Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.
+"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.
+
+"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"
+
+But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had
+been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's
+mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
+me?"
+
+"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was
+deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."
+
+She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for
+persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint,
+barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife
+for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been
+alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a
+charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should
+understand her sacrifice and grieve.
+
+"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so
+that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.
+"She wore high heels for her age--"
+
+That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She
+was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the
+chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.
+This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she
+had gone back on it.
+
+"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on
+the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."
+
+Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room
+where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to
+the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much
+longer."
+
+"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly
+when she was unhappy."
+
+His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not
+know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal
+her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear,
+you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."
+
+"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."
+
+Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.
+Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do
+nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in
+the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a
+theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as
+anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must
+notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and
+final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of
+force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that
+never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect
+crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always,
+till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell
+him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring
+were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering
+nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the
+window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the
+ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had
+seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his
+inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate
+her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her
+life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he
+would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained
+inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened
+women....
+
+"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it
+was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate
+and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which
+chair?"
+
+"Yon, at your hand."
+
+He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out
+of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she
+wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very
+upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And
+for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just
+because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily
+enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they
+needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him stroking the soft
+velvet, laying his cheek against it.
+
+"And the desk? You say she sat there while she talked to cook?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She hated the way he sat down in front of it; in a heap, like a tired
+navvy. By her death Marion deprived her of her beautiful lightfooted
+lover. But she must wait. He would come back. She became aware that
+Roger was speaking to her. It appeared that he had sobbed in his cup and
+had sent jets of tea flying over the tablecloth, and he was now
+apologising.
+
+"Never heed," she told him comfortingly; "we'll have a clean one for
+lunch." "I didn't mean to," he quavered piteously, but she checked him.
+Richard had turned over his shoulder a white face.
+
+"She sat here?..."
+
+"Yes. While the cook stood talking to her, she sat there."
+
+"She ... You didn't notice ... when she was sitting there ... if she was
+scribbling on the blotter?"
+
+"Yes, she did. I noticed that."
+
+"Ah ... ah...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was beside him in the time of a breath. But he had not fainted,
+though his head had crashed down on the wood, for his fingers, buried in
+his hair, still laced and interlaced. She did not dare touch him; but
+she grovelled for the blotter, which at the moment of his groan had
+fallen to the floor, and stood staring at it. For a second her attention
+was dispersed by a shudder of disgust, for she felt Roger's noisy
+mouth-breathing at her ears. Then the proof leapt to her eyes. There was
+a rim of plain paper round the calendar on the inside of the cover, and
+this was covered with words and phrases written in the exquisite small
+script of Marion. "This is the end. Death. Death. Death. This is the
+end. I must die. Give him to Ellen. I must die."
+
+Roger tumbled back towards Poppy. "The awful sin of self-destruction!"
+he wailed.
+
+This proof struck through her with an awful, unifying grief. She had had
+evidence of Marion's intention which had convinced her mind, but it was
+all derived from ugliness: from the awkwardness of the woman's talk, the
+plainness of the face against the glass, the intrusive loitering of a
+squat figure in the garden. The soul had hearkened to these ugly
+messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it
+had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as
+briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the
+power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at
+its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living
+might grieve for any that is dead, now knew the sorrow appropriate to
+the destruction of Marion's wide, productive body. For what her spirit
+learned and admitted it had always known of that burning thing which had
+been Marion she looked round the room in reverence, since she had lived
+there. The light on the handle of the French window caught her eye, and
+she wept. She had been annoyed with Marion because she could not turn
+it. But who would not find it difficult to open a door if it was death
+on which it opened?
+
+"Richard, I love your mother!" she sobbed. "I love your mother so!"
+
+He muttered something. In case he was speaking to her she bent down and
+listened. But he was repeating over and over again in accents of irony:
+"Give him up to Ellen. Give him up to Ellen. Oh, mother, mother...."
+
+By the passion for Marion that was wringing her she could measure the
+flame that must be devouring him. There was a strong impulse in her to
+feel nothing but pity for him; to apprehend with resignation that there
+might be a period ahead during which he might feel hatred for her,
+loathing her for being alive when his mother, who deserved so well, was
+dead. She stepped backward from the desk so that he need not be vexed by
+any sense of her. Yet she had a feeling as she moved that she was
+taking a step infinitely rash, infinitely dangerous....
+
+She became aware that behind her Roger was shaking words out of his
+weeping body. "You ought to be on your knees, you two! You've killed my
+mummie with your wickedness!"
+
+"What's that?" she murmured, turning on him. "What's that?" She was not
+quite attentive. A picture was forming in her consciousness which, when
+it was clear, would tell her why it was perilous to leave Richard to his
+grief....
+
+"Aw, shut up!" hissed Poppy, and tugged at his arm.
+
+But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She
+saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out
+what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught
+you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said
+pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till
+Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it
+wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."
+
+Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual
+shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when
+she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far
+worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been
+appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because
+there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain
+the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a
+thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was
+glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were
+reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being
+evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself
+the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose
+dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd
+accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it
+was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is
+felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious
+man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in
+her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has
+come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and
+a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over
+the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with
+resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there
+should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and
+perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round
+which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but
+of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned
+against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery
+of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses
+which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she
+had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would
+have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always
+suspected to be danger....
+
+"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I
+thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that
+she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her
+for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you
+weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you,
+and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers
+thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first
+service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."
+
+It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell
+her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to
+his passion.
+
+"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I
+suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay
+here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave
+you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"
+
+Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother,
+shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of
+the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which
+housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel
+dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly
+as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly,
+but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who
+allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than
+themselves to dwell in their men's attention.
+
+"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark
+what your brother's saying of us!"
+
+He stirred. He sat up.
+
+"He says we're bad."
+
+He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face,
+though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.
+
+"It's no use you looking at me like that," said Roger tearfully but
+resolutely. "I'm as good as you. In fact, I'm better now that I've got
+Jesus. And I tell you straight, you've killed my mummie with your
+beastly lust. Mind you," he cried, in a tone of whistling exaltation
+inappropriate to his words, "I'm not pretending I'm without sin myself.
+I did evil once with a woman at Blackburn, but I saw the filthiness of
+my ways. Old man, I do understand your temptations!"
+
+What was Richard's hand searching for on the breakfast table? She bent
+forward to see, so that she might give it to him.
+
+Richard had found what he wanted. His fingers tightened on the handle of
+the breadknife.
+
+"Let's put an end to this," he said.
+
+He drove the knife into Roger's heart.
+
+"Mummie!" breathed Roger. Meekly, but with no sign that he had any other
+quarrel with the proceedings save that they were peremptory, he sank
+down on the chair beside him and fell forward, his head lying untidily
+among the tea-cups. This, no doubt, was the disorder which Marion had
+always foreseen; to prevent which she had practised her insane tidiness.
+
+He held the attention much less than one had thought a dead man could.
+
+"God," said Poppy, "this is a copper's business. I'm off before they
+come. They think I know something about a thing that happened down in
+Strood last Easter, though God help me I don't. They kind of mixed me
+up with someone else. Let me go."
+
+"Right," said Richard, and put his hand into his pocket and brought out
+a fistful of coins. "Take this. Good luck."
+
+She snatched it, and with no further look at any of the company, ran out
+by the French window.
+
+They stood looking down on Roger. Death revealed no significance in him.
+The smallness of his head, the indefinite colour of his hair, palliated
+what had occurred and made them feel incredulous of their knowledge that
+presently much importance would be attached to it.
+
+Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Well, it's all cleared up now,"
+he murmured. "It is as if she had never seen Peacey...."
+
+Ellen broke into sobs. "'Tis I who made you do it. I thought of my poor
+mother and how she'd suffered through not making my father think of her
+first and last--and you were sitting there thinking of nothing but
+Marion--and I knew if you heard what Roger was saying about us you'd
+think of me, so I made you listen. If I hadn't given you yon dunts on
+your shoulders you never would have heard him and never would have
+killed him. Oh, my love, what I have done to you, and me that would have
+died rather than hurt you! But I saw my mother plain--"
+
+"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his
+arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"
+
+"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."
+
+"But there's nothing left."
+
+"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."
+
+"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's
+something still."
+
+He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes
+roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked
+thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it
+and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.
+
+"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.
+
+There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and
+contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's
+infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like
+for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the
+kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not
+to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."
+
+At the door he turned.
+
+"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.
+
+She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure,
+as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no
+going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about
+her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it
+was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror
+of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but
+horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there
+broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the
+miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home
+in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in
+brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago
+dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged
+but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.
+
+He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.
+
+"Come," he said. "Come."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...
+
+Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no
+tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the
+seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the
+further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it
+confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds
+pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they
+could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to
+take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden
+staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they
+could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the
+grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and
+she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his
+shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be
+there when he returned.
+
+But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what
+life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a
+corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread
+between two human tendencies: the insane sexual caprice of men, the not
+less mad excessive steadfastness of women. Roger had died, Richard was
+about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female
+faults--Harry and Marion ... Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and
+father.... And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life's
+disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous. Her love had not been
+able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love; and
+how like a doom that love had lain on him.... Since life was like this,
+she would not do what Richard asked. She tried to rise that she might
+flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs
+of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.
+
+But she could not move. Although her mind was still arguing the matter,
+all the rest of her being had consented. She was going to do this thing.
+In panic she looked along the wall at Richard, wishing he would come
+back to her. But he was going on talking to the fishermen, though he
+held their waders in his hand. She quite understood why he was doing
+that, and watched him through tears. This was the last time he would be
+able to exercise that charm of which he was a little vain, since on all
+his few future days his intercourse with his fellows would be strictly
+specialised; so he was taking the opportunity. In watching him and the
+reflection of his magnificence in the fishermen's smiling subjugation,
+she was shot through by a pang of pride and exultation. Though the night
+should engulf Richard and Marion, the triumph was not with the night. In
+throwing in her lot with them and with the human race which is
+perpetually defeated, she was nevertheless choosing the side of
+victory....
+
+She leaned back against the slope and waited. This was a good place to
+wait. The call of the redshanks, the cloud shadows that moved over the
+marshes like the footprints of invisible presences, made her feel calm.
+
+Nevertheless her heart could not help but beat quick with fear. She
+wished that he would come and comfort her. But though he had left the
+fishermen he was not coming straight to her. He had climbed the sea-wall
+and was looking out to the east, to the open sea, over the country of
+the mud. He was thinking of Marion, and wondering where the tide had
+carried her. The inexorable womb was continuing to claim its own. She
+wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his
+obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in
+the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out
+before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the
+safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant
+demand.
+
+She sat and looked at the island, and wondered whether it was a son or
+daughter that waited for her there.
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Judge, by Rebecca West</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Judge</p>
+<p>Author: Rebecca West</p>
+<p>Release Date: June 24, 2005  [eBook #16125]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGE***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (https://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>THE JUDGE</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>REBECCA WEST</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER"</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h5>NEW YORK<br />
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h5>
+
+<h4>1922</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>TO</h3>
+
+<h3>THE MEMORY OF</h3>
+
+<h3>MY MOTHER</h3>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<ul>
+<li> <a href="#BOOK_ONE">BOOK ONE</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li> <a href="#BOOK_TWO">BOOK TWO</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2I">CHAPTER I</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2II">CHAPTER II</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2III">CHAPTER III</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2IV">CHAPTER IV</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2V">CHAPTER V</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2VI">CHAPTER VI</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2VII">CHAPTER VII</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2IX">CHAPTER IX</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2X">CHAPTER X</a></li>
+<li class="subitem"> <a href="#CHAPTER_2XI">CHAPTER XI</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_ONE" id="BOOK_ONE"></a>BOOK ONE</h2>
+
+<p class='center'>"Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
+crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it
+as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The
+office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those
+decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of Edinburgh
+New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that opened just
+opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock
+and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the
+southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that
+strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it
+keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the
+cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy
+with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and
+remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms
+beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was
+ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched
+it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
+weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
+the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
+proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
+regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
+bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate
+and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly
+night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of
+dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a
+past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
+And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
+lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and
+said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
+monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
+Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
+of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
+shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
+appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
+look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
+shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
+myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
+the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
+make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
+am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
+succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
+they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
+to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
+themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
+spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
+part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one
+had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it
+its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough
+stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked
+desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was
+nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months
+since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by
+this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in
+Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult
+people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known
+as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.
+Less than that would do: just to see people's faces doing something else
+than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something
+else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got
+people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no
+part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had
+first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too
+comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert
+beginning.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this
+rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere
+congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did
+the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time
+she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy
+of the twilight.</p>
+
+<p>Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those
+Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at
+school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville
+had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket
+with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
+they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
+steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
+squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
+delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
+the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
+was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
+and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
+known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
+come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
+terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
+Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
+and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
+flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
+be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
+keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
+terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
+rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
+slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
+the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
+unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
+for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
+after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
+off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
+salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
+channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
+protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
+face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
+his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
+Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the
+Irish&mdash;a people of whom she had a low opinion&mdash;(Mr. Melville had been an
+Irishman)&mdash;but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
+disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
+get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
+gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
+fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
+Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
+into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
+to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
+round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
+death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
+the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.</p>
+
+<p>From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
+sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
+when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
+mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
+green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
+Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
+where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
+seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
+had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
+that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
+feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
+had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
+feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
+mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
+beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
+and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
+might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the
+landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed
+ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers
+of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset
+swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and
+lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would
+sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.</p>
+
+<p>She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would
+reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with
+a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to
+see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not
+come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.
+But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light
+again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of
+her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent
+that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in
+Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of
+inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk
+with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She
+thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the
+Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept
+them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay
+white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had
+seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak
+to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though
+there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out
+of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,
+constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild
+capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified
+by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and
+she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their
+nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose
+thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised
+it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching
+vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a
+Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord
+Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed
+out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish
+swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and
+the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the
+aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she
+was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had
+worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather
+pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer
+than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing
+in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had
+two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever
+girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen
+had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She
+was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin
+brown paper out of <i>Weldon's Fashions</i> on to stuff that must not on any
+account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with
+the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her
+shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the
+good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her
+thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had
+always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,
+as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now
+dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in
+Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been
+hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
+wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
+among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
+cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
+wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
+spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
+hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used
+to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the
+housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered
+it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At
+the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these
+accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....</p>
+
+<p>The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly
+on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles
+against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their
+persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the
+representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised
+his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most
+impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,
+and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a
+high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing
+his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right
+of way, and Menzies &amp; Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at
+Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"&mdash;that greeting by which Scot links himself
+to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.
+Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth
+he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that
+led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would
+prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the
+respected townsman. He had meant from the first to end with a paunch.
+But now wealth was inalienably his and Beauty could beckon him on no
+strange pilgrimages, his soul retraced its steps and contemplated this
+bright thing as an earth creature might creep to the mouth of its lair
+and blink at the sun. And there was more than that to it. He loved her.
+He had never had enough to do with pitiful things (his wife Elizabeth
+had been a banker's daughter), and this, child had come to him, that day
+in June, so white, so weak, so chilled to the bone, for all the summer
+heat, by her monstrous ill-usage....</p>
+
+<p>He said, "Nelly, will your mother be feared if you stop and take a few
+notes for Mr. Philip till eight? There is a chemist body coming through
+from the cordite works at Aberfay who can't come in the day but Saturday
+mornings, and you ken Mr. Philip's away to London for the week-end by
+the 8.30, so he's seeing him the night. Mr. Philip would be thankful if
+you'd stop."</p>
+
+<p>"I will so, Mr. James," said Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"You're sure your mother'll not be feared?"</p>
+
+<p>"What way would my mother be feared," said Ellen, "and me seventeen
+past?"</p>
+
+<p>"There's many a lassie who's found being seventeen no protection from a
+wicked world." He emitted some great Burns-night chuckles, and kicked
+the fire to a blaze.</p>
+
+<p>She said sternly, "Take note, Mr. James, that I haven't done a hand's
+turn this hour or more, and that not for want of asking for work. Dear
+knows I have my hand on Mr. Morrison's door-knob half the day."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. James got up to go. "You're a fierce hussy, and mean to be a partner
+in the firm before you've done with us."</p>
+
+<p>"If I were a man I would be that."</p>
+
+<p>"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good
+man comes by."</p>
+
+<p>She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to
+defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,
+but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late. Sometimes
+she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an imaginary
+group of people whom she desired to be with&mdash;well-found people who would
+disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and beautiful results;
+who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid social life that had
+been previously nurtured by separate tender intimacies at hearths that
+were more than grates and fenders, in private picture-galleries with
+wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries adorned with big-nosed
+marble busts. She knew that that environment existed for she had seen
+it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League picnic in the grounds of an
+Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the secretary had taken her up to the
+house. They had waited in a high, long room with crossed swords on the
+walls wherever there were not bookshelves or the portraits of men and
+women so proud that they had not minded being painted plain, and there
+were French windows opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on
+an ornate balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many
+flowering trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so
+broad the intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered
+river-bed below. On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few
+unnecessary fires she had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity
+that the books lying on the great round table were mostly the drawings
+of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to
+them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the
+pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee
+that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society
+of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin
+like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and
+whose hair had no short ends round the neck.</p>
+
+<p>But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
+specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had
+chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and
+restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the
+plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh
+to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town
+she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there
+flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad
+in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a
+more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,
+than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a
+string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her
+neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody
+of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the
+Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the
+pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious
+stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down
+into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,
+but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it
+dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
+that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
+since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
+nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by
+the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the
+town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the
+English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade
+unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir
+Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a
+facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on
+the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested
+that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and
+dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of
+which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as
+inadequately represented by &AElig;neas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at
+the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the
+corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace
+ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked
+G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as
+noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the
+Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept
+undisguisedly.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the
+gas and seen that she was crying.</p>
+
+<p>At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to
+this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that
+she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards
+the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in
+it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her
+motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So
+she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and
+bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way
+she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always
+felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at
+the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman
+whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the
+expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has
+forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,
+but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through
+an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,
+dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed
+by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his
+train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired
+himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on
+her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would
+presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite
+uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially
+conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man
+going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at
+her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it
+radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the
+sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was
+characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He
+had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a
+great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a
+tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day
+when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped
+towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It
+was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked
+her very much.</p>
+
+<p>He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what
+should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"</p>
+
+<p>She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of
+shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh
+accent and always carried an umbrella. He was so like hundreds of young
+men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an
+air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow,
+that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other
+representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the
+impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity,
+for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his
+half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So
+she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are
+awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he's a
+doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and
+going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy. I don't
+know what's the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and
+see new people. This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw
+the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit
+heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was near
+turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go
+hang!"</p>
+
+<p>They were both law-abiding people. They saw the gravity of her case.</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I want the Pentlands. Dear knows I love the place, but I want
+something more than those old hills. I want to go somewhere right far
+away. The sight of a map makes me sick. And then I hear a band play&mdash;not
+the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott's poetry, which I never
+could bear, but a band. I feel that if I followed it it would lead me
+somewhere that I would like to go. And the posters. There's one at the
+Waverley station&mdash;Venice. I could tear the thing down. Did you ever go
+to Italy, Mr. Philip?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I go with the girls to Germany every summer."</p>
+
+<p>"My patience!" said Ellen bitterly. "The way the world is! The people
+who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany. And I&mdash;I'll die if I don't
+get away."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, I often feel like this," said Mr. Philip. "I just take a week-end
+off at a hydro."</p>
+
+<p>"A hydro!" snorted Ellen. "It's something more like the French
+Revolution I'm wanting. Something grand and coloured. Swords, and people
+being rescued, and things like that."</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing going on like that now," he said stolidly, "and we
+ought to be thankful for it."</p>
+
+<p>"I know everything's over in Europe," she agreed sadly, "but there's
+revolutions in South America. I've read about them in Richard Harding
+Davis. Did ever you read him? Mind you, I'm not saying he's an artist,
+but the man has force. He makes you long to go."</p>
+
+<p>"A dirty place," said Mr. Philip.</p>
+
+<p>"What does that matter, where there's life? I feel&mdash;I feel"&mdash;she wrung
+her inky brown hands&mdash;"as if I should die if something didn't happen at
+once: something big, something that would bang out like the one o'clock
+gun up at the Castle. And nothing will. Nothing ever will!"</p>
+
+<p>"Och, well," he comforted her, "you're young yet, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Young!" cried Ellen, and suddenly wept. If this was youth&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>He bent down and played with the fire-irons. It was odd how he didn't
+want to go away, although she was in distress. "Some that's been in
+South America don't find it to their taste," he said. "The fellow that's
+coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he
+doesn't mean to go back."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, how can he do that?" asked Ellen unsteadily. The tears she was too
+proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby. "Property in Rio de
+Janeiro! It's like being related to someone in 'Treasure Island.'"</p>
+
+<p>"'Treasure Island!' Imph!" He had seen his father draw Ellen often
+enough to know how to do it, though he himself would never have paid
+enough attention to her mental life to discover it. "You're struck on
+that Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn't so much. My Aunt Phemie was
+with him at Mr. Robert Thompson's school in Heriot Row, and she says he
+was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and
+gossiping with the cabmen on the rank. She wouldn't have a word to say
+to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when
+all the English were licking his boots. I'm not much on these writing
+chaps myself." He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he
+had disposed of art.</p>
+
+<p>"And who," asked Ellen, with temper, "might your Aunt Phemie be?
+There'll not be much in the papers when she's laid by in Trinity
+Cemetery, I'm thinking! The impairtinence of it! All these Edinburgh
+people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once,
+just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of
+Edinburgh!" She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak
+shutter.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Philip chuckled. When a woman did anything for itself, and not for
+its effect on the male, it seemed to him a proof of her incapacity to
+look after herself, and he found incapacity in women exciting and
+endearing. He watched her with a hard attention that was his kind of
+tenderness, as she sat humped schoolgirlishly in her shapeless blue
+overall, averting her face from the light but attempting a proud pose,
+and keeping her grief between her teeth as an ostler chews a straw.</p>
+
+<p>"He had a good time, the way he travelled in France and the South Seas.
+But he deserved it. He wrote such lovely books. Ah," she said, listening
+to her own sombre interpretation of things as to sad music, "it isn't
+just chance that some people had adventures and others hadn't. One makes
+one's own fate. I have no fate because I'm too weak to make one." She
+looked down resentfully on her hands, that for all her present
+fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on
+her lap, and thought of Rachael Wing, who had so splendidly departed to
+London to go on the stage. "But it's hard to be punished just for what
+you are."</p>
+
+<p>He wondered whether, although she was the typist, there was not
+something rare about her. He could not compare her in this moment with
+his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for
+bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing
+to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with
+which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and
+violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have
+evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than
+that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they
+could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite
+distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she
+was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name
+that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of
+beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed
+for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform
+these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because
+human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. Suddenly he
+wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of
+naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying
+there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh
+his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a
+thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was
+but for participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so
+suspicious of her vividness that he felt furtive and red-eared while he
+searched in the purse of his experiences to find the coin that would
+admit him to her world. The search at first was vain, for most of them
+that he cared to remember were mere manifestations of the kind of
+qualities that are mentioned in testimonials. But presently he gripped
+the disappointment that would buy him her pity.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "I'm right sorry for you, Miss Melville. But you know ... We
+all have our troubles."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to go into the Navy."</p>
+
+<p>"You did? Would your father not let you?" She said it in her red-headed
+"My-word-if-I'd-been-there" way.</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, he would have liked it fine."</p>
+
+<p>"What was it then?" She leaned forward and almost crooned at him. "What
+was it then?"</p>
+
+<p>His speech became more clipped. "My eyes."</p>
+
+<p>"Your eyes!" she breathed. He suddenly became a person to her. "I never
+thought."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm as short-sighted as a bat."</p>
+
+<p>"They look all right." She frowned at them as though they were traitors.</p>
+
+<p>He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the
+University."</p>
+
+<p>She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how
+sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well,
+well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed
+to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw
+you capped."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."</p>
+
+<p>"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw
+your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll
+be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when
+I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He
+vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I did at school&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you go to dances?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.</p>
+
+<p>With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he
+could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her
+brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come
+to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his
+own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible
+to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the
+daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,
+the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville
+unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he
+wished he could dance with her.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances
+for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to
+enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and
+steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black
+ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about
+with in "La Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.
+Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which
+was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,
+just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without
+attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint
+meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse
+his private satisfaction. He was still aware that he was Mr. Philip of
+the firm, so he was not going to tell her that for two nights after he
+had heard the decision of the Medical Examiners he had cried himself to
+sleep, though he was fourteen past. But it was exquisite to know that if
+he had told her she would have been moved to some glorious gesture of
+pity. His imagination trembled at the thought of its glory as she turned
+to him with a benignity that was really good enough, and said
+diffidently, because her ambition was such a holy thing that she feared
+to speak of his: "Still, there are lots of things for you to do. I've
+heard...."</p>
+
+<p>He was kindly and indulgent. "What have you heard?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why,
+that you're going to stand for Parliament."</p>
+
+<p>"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.</p>
+
+<p>"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me
+something safe."</p>
+
+<p>"But what will you do?"</p>
+
+<p>He didn't follow.</p>
+
+<p>"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed
+with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to
+do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are
+you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence.
+"We've always been Liberals."</p>
+
+<p>"Ach! <i>Liberal!</i>" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep
+the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards
+by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed
+again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to
+discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on
+her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her
+clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to
+the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's
+heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"It is so. I asked her to do a chop for me, so that I won't need to dine
+on the train...."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy me! We'll see the fine cook she is!" She ran out to the landing
+(she had never known he was so nice). Mr. Philip found that her absence
+acted curiously as a relief to an excitement that was beginning to buzz
+in his head. Then she came back with the tray, her cheeks bright and her
+mouth pursed, for she and the caretaker had been sandpapering each
+other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil
+a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's
+not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father,
+who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the
+place."</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment.
+There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was
+putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that
+were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt
+absolutely right.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when
+he lunches in?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's
+room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him,
+fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
+Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt
+for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the
+bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went
+back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not
+be, as he put it, <i>infra dig</i>. And sure enough, when he entered the room
+a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got
+the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling
+himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and
+she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and
+a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."</p>
+
+<p>He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he
+said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join
+me...."</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing
+there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was
+behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face
+was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her
+mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping
+quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to
+something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will
+you have some Burgundy?"</p>
+
+<p>She was shocked. "Oh no!"</p>
+
+<p>He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although
+principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to
+it. Instead, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she
+oughtn't to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "But it's so pretty!" He could not imagine why he should have
+said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an
+argument that would weigh with her.</p>
+
+<p>She sighed as who makes a concession. "Oh yes, it's pretty!" And then,
+to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose. She was absorbed
+in the red beauty in his glass.</p>
+
+<p>It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing. "You'll have a
+glass?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll surely have a taste?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Just a drop...."</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure
+she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising
+her infinite pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.</p>
+
+<p>He passed her his glass.</p>
+
+<p>"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"</p>
+
+<p>Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink
+it up! Drink it up!"</p>
+
+<p>She raised the glass to her lips and set her head back that the sin
+might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice,
+but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for
+such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind
+cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is
+played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....</p>
+
+<p>"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the glass down on the table. "It's
+horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her
+knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought
+wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth.
+And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at
+school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as
+this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading
+her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she
+hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of
+the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the
+light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only
+just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he
+marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its
+close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the
+wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably,
+"Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk&mdash;!" Again he felt
+that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her,
+walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud
+knocking at the outer door.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked
+as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just
+part of his sea-going air.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I
+want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr.
+Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked
+interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable
+occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself
+she stopped as they went along the passage and begged, "You'll not make
+him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here
+on the very clap of eight."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they
+stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a
+customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh,
+certainly; he shall leave on the very clap of eight," he replied
+earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke without an accent and was most romantically dark. Ellen
+wondered whether Mr. Philip would like him&mdash;she had noticed that Mr.
+Philip didn't seem to fancy people who were very tall. And she perceived
+with consternation as they entered the room that he had suddenly been
+overtaken by one of his moods. He had taken up the tray and was trying
+to slip it into the cupboard, which he might have seen would never hold
+it, and in any case was a queer place for a tray, and stood there with
+it in his hands, brick-red and glowering at them. She was going to take
+it from him when he dunted it down on the window-seat with a clatter.
+"What for can he not go on with his good chop?" thought Ellen. "We're
+putting on grand company manners for this bit chemist body, surely," and
+she pulled forward a chair for the stranger and sat down in the corner
+with her note-book on her knee.</p>
+
+<p>"You're Mr. Yaverland?" said Mr. Philip, shooting his chin forward and
+squaring his shoulders, and looking as though his father were dead and
+he were the head of the firm.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Richard Yaverland. Mr. Frank Gibson said you might be good enough
+to see to my affairs for me. I've got a letter from him...."</p>
+
+<p>Decidedly the man had an air. He slid the letter across the table as if
+he did not care in the least whether anybody ever picked it up and
+retreated into a courteous inattention. She felt a little cross at Mr.
+Philip for not showing that Edinburgh too understands the art of
+arrogance, for opening the letter so clumsily and omitting to say the
+nice friendly thing. Well, if he was put about it was his own fault for
+not going on with the chop, it being well known to all educated persons
+that one cannot work on an empty stomach. If this man would go soon she
+would run down to Mrs. Powell and get her to heat up the chop again. She
+eyed him anxiously to see if he looked the kind of person who left when
+one wanted him to, and found herself liking him for the way he slouched
+in his chair, as though he wanted to mitigate as much as possible his
+terrifying strength and immensity. What for did a fine man like him help
+to make cordite, the material of militarism, which is the curse of the
+nations? She wished he could have heard R.J. Campbell speak on peace the
+other night at the Synod Hall; it was fine. But probably he was a
+Conservative, for these big men were often unprogressive. She examined
+him carefully out of the corner of her eye to estimate the chances of
+his being brought into the fold of reform by properly selected oratory.
+That at least was the character of contemplation she intended, but
+though she was so young that she believed the enjoyment of any sensory
+impression sheer waste unless it was popped into the mental stockpot and
+made the basis of some sustaining moral soup, she found herself just
+looking at him. His black hair lay in streaks and rings on his rain-wet
+forehead and gave him an abandoned and magical air, like the ghost of a
+drowned man risen for revelry; his dark gold skin told a traveller's
+tale of far-off pleasurable weather; and the bare hand that lay on his
+knee was patterned like a snake's belly with brown marks, doubtless the
+stains of his occupation; and his face was marked with an expression
+that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she
+could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not
+hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and
+yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent
+demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly
+satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a
+drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the
+controlled but embarrassed movements of a highly-bred animal approached
+by a stranger, that he knew she was watching him, and she took her gaze
+away. But she had to look again, just to confirm her feeling that
+however fanciful she might be about him his appearance would always give
+some further food for her imagination; and presently, for though she was
+the least vain person in the world she was the most egotistical, began
+to compare the large correctness of his features with the less academic
+spontaneity of her own. "Lord! Why has everybody but me got a straight
+nose!" she exclaimed to herself. "But it's all blethers to think that an
+indented chin means character. How can a dunt in your bone have anything
+to do with your mind?" She rubbed her own chin, which was a little white
+ball, and pushed it forward, glowering at his great jaw. Then her
+examination ended. She noticed that all over his upper lip and chin
+there was a faint bluish bloom, as if he had shaved closely and
+recently but the strong hair was already pressing through again. That
+disgusted her, although she reminded herself that he could not help it,
+that that was the way he was made. "There's something awful like an
+animal about a man," she thought, and shivered.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, aye!" said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset,
+for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by
+exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred
+in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some
+well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property
+in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it
+appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five
+years' lease, which had nearly expired. There was no likelihood of Capel
+requiring any extension of this lease, for he was going back to the
+States. So now Yaverland wanted to sell it. There ought to be no trouble
+in finding a buyer, for it was a famous house. "Everybody in Rio knows
+the Villa Miraflores," he said. She gasped at the name and wrote it in
+longhand; to compress such deliciousness into shorthand would have been
+sacrilege. After that she listened more eagerly to his voice, which she
+perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with
+suppressed laughter. The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a
+straight face than he found in using the flat phrase. And as she
+gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his
+speech slipped the business leash. There were hedges of geranium and
+poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless
+palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the
+courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many
+fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of
+precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house
+was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a
+<i>rastaqou&egrave;re</i>. "Mhm," said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral
+slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined
+<i>rastaqou&egrave;re</i> to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost. She would have
+laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still
+upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he
+would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable
+expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had
+noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and
+cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been "done."</p>
+
+<p>But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland's answer.
+He hadn't the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa. It happened
+this way. He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk! Tchk!" said Mr.
+Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his
+waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the
+atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt
+no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to
+try to show that he wasn't a Jew. Ellen hated him for that. She believed
+in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as
+a propagandist measure. And then he had remembered that a friend of his,
+de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move. Even
+Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he'd given it plenty of fun.
+There had been great times at the villa. His phrases, which seemed to
+have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine
+on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale's snout, and
+hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in
+his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this
+delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that
+time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money
+from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the
+servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a
+sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the
+dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing
+white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the
+Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of
+birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he
+so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and
+were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a
+good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed
+by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment,
+that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about
+somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she
+herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect
+crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a
+piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their
+inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to
+honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed
+towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all
+respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific
+manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "Tits,
+tits, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the
+woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the
+impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers
+Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were,
+as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by
+the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by
+intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the
+cosmic process. It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the
+truth....</p>
+
+<p>Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had
+knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had
+posted to his agents without reading. He had only the vaguest idea how
+much money had changed hands. Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled
+knowingly, "Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in
+Scotland," and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of
+the property: the orange grove, for instance. At that Yaverland was
+silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered
+insolence that he couldn't see why he should, since he wasn't a
+marmalade fancier. "Besides, that's an impossible proposition. It's like
+selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium
+bed...." In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation
+of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed
+under a tooth while one was eating a good cake. She was disturbed and
+wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy
+by talking like that. And the reflection came to her that it would be
+sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever,
+that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected
+of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way. But it
+struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose
+that he would be interested. His talk was in the nature of a monologue.
+He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.</p>
+
+<p>Still, he was wonderful. She did not take it as warning of any coldness
+or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a
+human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are
+pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being
+particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out
+his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have
+no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he
+was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.
+Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the
+Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a
+packet of letters. "They hold the title-deeds and you'll see how things
+are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a
+difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on
+the correspondence?"</p>
+
+<p>"Och, we can send out to a translator&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one
+side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had
+suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many
+moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled
+world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely
+to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river
+just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the
+countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for
+women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was
+improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just
+when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women
+being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there
+had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her
+obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the
+prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm
+and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.
+For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth
+in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering
+innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on
+the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after
+being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a
+gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Philip," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark
+glance on her.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Philip," she said. He looked across at her with a blankness she
+took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at
+Skerry's. I took a first-class certificate. Maybe I could manage the
+letters?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" exclaimed Yaverland explosively. He appeared to be about to make
+some objection, and then he bit back the speech that was already in his
+mouth. And as he tried to find other words the beauty of her body caught
+his attention. It was, as it happened, very visible at that moment. The
+fulness of her overall had fallen to one side as she sat on the high
+stool, and so that linen was tightly wrapped about her, disclosing that
+she was made like a delicate fleet beast; in the valley between her high
+small breasts there lay a shadow, which grew greater when she breathed
+deeply. He looked at her with the dispassionateness which comes to men
+who have lived much in countries where nakedness offers itself unashamed
+to the sunlight, and said to himself, "I should like to see her run." He
+knew that a body like this must possess an infinite capacity for
+physical pleasure, that to her mere walking would give more joy than
+others find in dancing. And then he raised his eyes to her face and was
+sad. For sufficient reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of
+women, and he knew it was a tragedy that such a face should surmount
+such a body. For her body would imprison her in soft places: she would
+be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than
+births. But her face was haggard, in spite of its youth, with appetite
+for travel in the hard places of the world, for the adventures and
+achievements that are the birthright of any man. "It's rotten luck to be
+a girl," he thought. "If she were a boy I could get her a job at Rio....
+Lord, she has lovely hair!" He perceived sharply that he was not likely
+to be of any more use to her than most men would. All he could do would
+be to avert the humiliation which the moment seemed likely to bring down
+on her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, this is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people
+studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful
+too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a
+marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too
+manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the
+reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded
+himself. "It's the language to learn," he said aloud. "It's the language
+of the future. Ever been in Spain, Mr. James?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Mr. Philip, "but I was thinking of going there&mdash;or mebbe
+Italy&mdash;ma Easter holidays." Ellen smiled brilliantly at him, for she
+knew that he had had no such thought till that evening's talk with her;
+she had converted him to a romantic. He caught her eye, only to glare
+coldly into the centre of her smile.</p>
+
+<p>It was Yaverland's opportunity, for he had spent two years as chemist at
+the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of
+talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly
+literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain,
+but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of
+social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance
+them. "The mines are Baird's, you know&mdash;Sir Milne Baird; it's a Glasgow
+firm...." "Mhm," said Mr. Philip, "I know who you mean." Detestable,
+thought Yaverland, this Scotch locution which implies that one has made
+a vague or incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence
+of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself
+suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its
+disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater
+willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the
+commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their
+own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by
+Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general,
+which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of
+Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.
+Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad
+political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the
+national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over
+the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.)
+Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few
+difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was
+sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who,
+though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better
+by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself
+Algodonales on the map and calls itself Aooae.</p>
+
+<p>He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.</p>
+
+<p>It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by
+forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,
+as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and
+a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her
+mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed
+through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to
+Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a
+dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt
+attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks
+deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,
+describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow
+decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled
+with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the
+Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius
+Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women
+that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered
+by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He
+was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase
+that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such
+things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,
+advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip
+could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere
+foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the
+country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows
+what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks
+and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and
+carnations&mdash;<i>violetas y claveles</i>...." Then a chill and a dimness passed
+over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as
+though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had
+scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes
+became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader
+streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the
+tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became
+charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The
+people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating
+themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or
+cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.</p>
+
+<p>He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of
+loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had
+revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to
+the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and
+had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any
+of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and
+the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to
+match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of
+being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone
+into a caf&eacute; and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a
+wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of
+an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who
+had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not
+lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night,
+forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit
+here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl
+who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and
+famined...."</p>
+
+<p>But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay
+account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had
+framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily
+pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the
+long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland
+that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding
+path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly
+in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a
+forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a
+Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and
+asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at
+another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their
+dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers
+of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time there was
+trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was
+treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the
+rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the
+many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to
+the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its
+snowy crest. Ah, such a country!</p>
+
+<p>He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged
+bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation
+settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely
+they're crool. Bullfights and that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He could not let that pass. "You don't understand. It's different over
+there."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.
+Philip.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in
+space...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much
+crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of
+view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other
+and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's
+life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there were the
+horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from
+the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that
+gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,
+rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it
+wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far
+back in time. It was hard for us&mdash;"for you, especially," he amplified,
+with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your
+unparalleled Scotch system of education"&mdash;to comprehend the mentality of
+a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its
+governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence
+till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't
+attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our
+civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the
+experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his
+magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and
+yet was as substantial as any man of action.</p>
+
+<p>Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of
+primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest
+swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The
+echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching
+sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it
+wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found
+his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and
+eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions
+were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy
+over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp
+fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,
+envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he
+was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be
+the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some
+night the position might not be reversed&mdash;that it would not be he who
+stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some
+happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That
+was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even
+now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;
+and Ellen thrilled to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to
+a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to
+persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern
+history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the
+visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and
+the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling
+lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times
+existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive
+man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the
+bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were
+the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much
+decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of
+meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and
+dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't
+see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by
+the number of people who never saw.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get
+over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."</p>
+
+<p>Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and
+perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk
+in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is
+buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread
+out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.
+Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,
+thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for
+themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they
+repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had
+responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't
+perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this
+fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that
+all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a
+national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns
+sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the
+British Empire&mdash;keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and
+blows to mules and dogs.</p>
+
+<p>It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new
+that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He could give them another
+illustration of that. He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a
+flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo&mdash;"that's a street,"
+he interjected towards Ellen, "called after a statesman they
+assassinated, they don't quite know why." In the flat there lodged a
+priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning,
+as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an
+automobile and took him away for an hour. Presently he was told the
+story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had
+listened to it as one didn't often listen to twice-told tales, for it
+was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra
+Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the
+Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the
+roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode. The man in the
+automobile had lost his wife. He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he
+had gone through a good deal to get her. When he first met her she was
+another man's wife. He said nothing to her then, but presently the way
+that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the
+Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and
+her husband called him out. The duel was fought on some sandy flat down
+by the river, and the husband was killed. It was given out that he had
+been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who
+had killed him. In another year she was dead of fever. Her husband gave
+great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house
+where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable
+gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad. When he returned
+he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it
+except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say
+Mass over the woman's bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.
+Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years
+since she had died. That was a queer enough story for the present day,
+with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the
+lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it
+was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron. But
+the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the
+automobile. For he was the Marquis d'Italica, the finest Spanish
+aviator, a man not only of the medi&aelig;val courage one might have guessed
+from the story, but also of the most modern wit about machines....</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland bit his lip suddenly. He had told the story without shame, for
+he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the
+bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman's
+bed may sometimes be an altar. But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and
+his ears were red. Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.</p>
+
+<p>For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen. "I had forgotten
+she was a girl," he thought miserably. "I thought of nothing but how
+keen she is on Spain. I don't know how girls feel about things...." But
+she was sitting warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at
+a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder. She had
+liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made
+her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her
+sex always did. But the rest she had thought lovely. It was a beautiful
+idea of the Marquis's to turn the bed into an altar. Probably he had
+often gone into his wife's room to kiss her good-night. She saw a narrow
+iron bedstead such as she herself slept in, a face half hidden by the
+black hair flung wide across the pillow, a body bent like a bow under
+the bedclothes; for she herself still curled up at nights as dogs and
+children do; and the Marquis, whom she pictured as carrying a robin's
+egg blue enamelled candlestick like the one she always carried up to her
+room, kneeling down and kissing his wife very gently lest she should
+awake. Love must be a great compensation to those who have not political
+ambitions. She became aware that Yaverland's eyes were upon her, and she
+slowly smiled, reluctantly unveiling her good will to him. It again
+appeared to him that the world was a place in which one could be at
+one's ease without disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was
+gripping Mr. Philip's hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his
+face. "Ah, there's one thing," he said quite lightly, though the vein
+down the middle of his forehead had darkened. "You see from those
+letters that a Se&ntilde;or Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house.
+He's not to have it. Do you understand? Not at any price."</p>
+
+<p>The effect of this restriction, made obviously at the behest of some
+deep passion, was to make him suddenly sinister. They gazed at him as
+though he had revealed that he carried arms. But Ellen remembered
+business again.</p>
+
+<p>"Those letters," she reminded Mr. Philip, "had I not better read them
+over before Mr. Yaverland goes?"</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland caught his breath, then spoke off-handedly. "You're
+forgetting. They don't speak Spanish in Brazil, but Portuguese." And
+added confidentially, "Of course you were thinking of the Argentine."</p>
+
+<p>She was as hurt by the revelation of this vast breach in her omniscience
+as the bright twang of knowingness in her voice had told him she would
+be.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said unsteadily, "I was thinking of the Argentine."</p>
+
+<p>He shook hands with Mr. Philip, and she took him down the corridor to
+the door. She blinked back her tears as he stood at the head of the
+stair and put up his collar with those strange hands that were speckled
+like a snake's belly, for it seemed a waste, like staying indoors when
+the menagerie procession is going round the town, to let anything so
+unusual go away without seeing as much of it as possible. Then she
+remembered the thing that she had wanted to say in the other room, and
+wondered if it would be bold to speak, and finally remarked in a voice
+disagreeable with shyness, "The people up on the Pentland Hills use that
+word you said was in Shakespeare. Snow-broth. When the hill-streams run
+full after the melting of the snows, that's snow-broth."</p>
+
+<p>He liked women who were interested in queer-shaped fragments of fact,
+for they reminded him of his mother. He took pains to become animated at
+her news.</p>
+
+<p>"They do, they do!" Ellen assured him, pleased by his response. "And
+they say 'hit' for 'it,' which is Anglo-Saxon."</p>
+
+<p>He noticed that her overall, which she was growing out of, fitted
+tightly on her over-thin shoulders and showed how their line was spoilt
+by the deep dip of the clavicle, and wondered why that imperfection
+should make her more real to him than she had been when he had thought
+her wholly beautiful. Again he became aware of her discontent with her
+surroundings, which had exerted on her personality nothing of the
+weakening effect of despair, since it sprang from such a rich content
+with the universe, such a confident faith that the supremest beauty she
+could imagine existed somewhere and would satisfy her if only she could
+get at it. He said, with no motive but to confirm her belief that the
+world was full of interest, "You must go on with your Spanish, you know.
+Don't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine
+stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to
+whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young
+girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who
+had landed on his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.</p>
+
+<p>He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in
+something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She
+attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first
+excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in
+bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village
+street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the
+ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold
+rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining
+with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a
+yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not
+imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and
+long scrolls.</p>
+
+<p>Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a
+second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on
+his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to
+lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not
+half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up
+your chop, if you'll wait."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.</p>
+
+<p>She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and
+winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days
+before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her
+departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes
+came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was
+watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a
+conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was
+standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though
+he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not
+step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was
+set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew
+what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the
+door. Because the thing that he had meant to do seemed foul when he
+looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,
+he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to
+have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that
+had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always
+thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,
+dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with
+such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which
+she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they
+became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until
+it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him
+stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than
+the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was
+making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his
+degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and
+the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then
+she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this
+trouble she had brought on him.</p>
+
+<p>When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.
+Yaverland's a most interesting man."</p>
+
+<p>He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for
+his heart was making him very uncomfortable. He wished some crude
+gesture, some single ugly word, would do it. "You thought him an
+interesting man?" he asked naggingly. "You don't surprise me. It was a
+bit too plain you thought so. I'll thank you not to be so forward with a
+client again. It'll give the office a bad name. And chatting at the door
+like that!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the
+hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the
+needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he
+placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for
+emergencies, a book of court plaster.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I'll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville," he
+said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of
+the door. "Good night."</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.</p>
+
+<p>"It can't hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She
+wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of
+Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered
+the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's
+blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip
+can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm
+a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world
+except the enfranchisement of women and getting on...."</p>
+
+<p>She felt better. "There's nothing in life you can't get the better of by
+thinking about it," she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes
+with her handkerchief. She could easily pass off her tearstains as the
+marks of a bad cold. "It's a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body's
+affliction, but sometimes I'm glad mother's so short-sighted.</p>
+
+<p>"He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how," she thought,
+with a sudden renewal of rage. "Now I should have minded awful if he had
+noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish. It was a
+mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine." But
+indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure
+that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent. She began to
+recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against
+a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a
+marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through
+a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of
+solidification of a sunset. Dreamily she moved to the little house in
+the corner....</p>
+
+<p>It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were
+the man of the house.</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy, Ellen, you're late! I was getting feared!" cried her mother, who
+had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in
+the lock. She liked that sound. Ellen thought herself a wonderful new
+sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been
+surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how
+much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own
+soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend
+her daughter was a son.</p>
+
+<p>"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with
+masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold <i>Votes for Women</i> in Princes Street,
+and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green
+poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.
+This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for
+it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should
+be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been
+sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as
+there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady
+Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many
+bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had
+lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty
+she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a
+careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the
+passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to
+tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.
+For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds,
+which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the
+black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the
+dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic
+shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because
+the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and
+made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to
+appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the
+people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her
+silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her
+by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the
+height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,
+if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous
+causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous
+old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had
+been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and
+her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel
+women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for
+personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments
+irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung
+scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian
+environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the
+smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant
+ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought
+Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to
+do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."</p>
+
+<p>She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it
+with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're
+mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her
+teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got
+thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad
+as you, my dear, thinking you look like Phyllis Dare with yon wee, wee
+pigtail. You evidently haven't realised that a Scotch girl can't help
+looking sensible. That graceful butterfly frivolity that comes so easy
+to the English, and, I've haird, the French, is not for us. I think it's
+something about our ankles that prevents us." She looked at the girl's
+feet, said "Ay!" in a manner that hinted that they confirmed her theory,
+and turned away, remarking over her shoulder, "Mind you, I admire your
+spirit, setting out to look like one of these light English actresses
+when your name's Davidina Todd." The wind was trying to tear the poster
+from the cord that held it to her waist, the cold was making her sniff,
+and as she gave her back to this flimsy little fool she caught sight of
+a minister standing a yard or two away and giggling "Tee hee!" at her.
+It was too much. She darted down on him. "Are you not Mr. Hunter of the
+Middleton Place United Free Church?" she asked, making her voice sound
+soft and cuddly.</p>
+
+<p>He wiped the facetiousness from his face and assented with a polite
+bob. Perhaps she was the daughter of an elder. Quite nice people were
+taking up this nonsense.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you preach last Sunday," she said, glowing with interest. He
+began to look coy. Then her voice changed to something colder than the
+wind. "The most lamentable sairmon I ever listened to. Neither lairning
+nor inspiration. And a <i>read</i> sairmon, too."</p>
+
+<p>As his black back threaded through the traffic remorse fell upon her.
+"Here's an opportunity for doing quiet, uncomplaining service to the
+Cause," she reproached herself, "and I'm turning it into a fair picnic
+for my tongue." Everyone was rubbish, and she herself was no exception.
+Her hair was nearly down. And she had to stay there for another hour.</p>
+
+<p>But she determined to endure it; and Richard Yaverland, who afar off had
+formed the intention of stopping and speaking to the girl with the
+poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and
+romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on
+the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come
+into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had
+distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh.
+He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his
+emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being
+and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his
+desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for
+their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it
+was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does
+not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was
+not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and
+kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but
+powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to
+himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying.
+Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I
+must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until
+he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.</p>
+
+<p>And Ellen thought, "Why, here is the big man who has been in Spain and
+South America and has the queer stains on his hands! How big he is, and
+dark! He looks like a king among these other people. And how wonderful
+his eyes are! He is miles away from here, seeing some distant beautiful
+thing. Perhaps that mountainside he told us about where the reflection
+of the sky is like a purple shadow on the snow. A poet must look like
+that when he is thinking of a poem. But&mdash;but&mdash;if he keeps on staring up
+there he won't see me and buy a paper. I should like to interest him in
+the Cause. And I daren't speak to him." She flushed. Though Mr. Philip's
+claw had not done all the hurt it hoped, it had yet mauled its victim
+cruelly. "That would look bold."</p>
+
+<p>But in the nick of time his eyes fell on her. He gave a start of
+surprise and said in his kind, insolent voice:</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning. So you're a Suffragette."</p>
+
+<p>She was pleased to be publicly recognised by such a splendid person, and
+answered shyly; but caught a glint in his eyes which reminded her that
+she wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of
+the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it
+possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not
+have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had
+given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her
+brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with
+such a pliable profile.</p>
+
+<p>"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the
+change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I
+think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all
+these blighters going by."</p>
+
+<p>"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one
+hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for
+the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark
+Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But
+you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally
+clear and audible speakers. Women are."</p>
+
+<p>"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair,
+or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff
+that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never
+admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she
+was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment
+someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a
+schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.
+But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen
+past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."</p>
+
+<p>"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded
+it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better
+write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow
+and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of
+person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket
+they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she
+wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get
+it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that
+vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find
+out about this little girl&mdash;I who don't care a damn about anything or
+anybody?"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she
+had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her
+signature. Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most
+beautiful people who have ever lived. It was like climbing to a towered
+castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called
+"Seaview." She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey
+weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night
+before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female
+creature would have worn. But she had looked even younger then; he
+remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and
+receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a
+party. It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had
+been having in that dreary office could possibly be. And into the pretty
+print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising
+through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little
+solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the
+beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and
+twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he
+had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.
+He looked at her sharply and said to himself: "I wonder...."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, surely not! The note of her face was pure expectancy. As yet she had
+come upon nothing fundamental of any kind. He had no prepossessions in
+favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same
+class as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved. He would have hated
+this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.</p>
+
+<p>There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any
+longer. "Good-bye; I hope I'll see you at the meeting," he said; and
+then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, "and
+look after my villa for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we'll do that," she said competently, and looked after him with
+smiling eyes. "Oh, he looks most adventurous!" she thought. "I wonder,
+now, if he's ever killed a man?"</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>"Is my frock hooked up all the way down?" wondered Ellen, as she stood
+with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall. "Not that I care a button
+about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry
+was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind,
+for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings. She had
+taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling
+up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss
+Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had
+spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her
+grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of
+love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the
+hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and
+up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near
+unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people
+were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as
+herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic
+women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by
+sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were
+making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl's
+penknife and more like a soldier's sword. "I'm being a politikon Zoon!"
+she boasted to herself. She had always liked the expression when she
+read it in <i>The Scotsman</i> Leaders.</p>
+
+<p>And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause
+and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their
+way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a
+viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered
+her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of
+the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a
+heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of
+dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark
+Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved
+swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily
+choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous
+of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to
+say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone
+might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there
+was no doing anything for them.</p>
+
+<p>But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances
+on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a
+peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a
+heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring
+at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against
+his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent
+interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the
+woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of
+the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took
+his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like
+him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."</p>
+
+<p>She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his
+neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and
+oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes
+maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the
+platform. "How long he is looking at them!" she said to herself
+presently. "No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle. I believe such
+men are very susceptible to beautiful women. I hope," she continued with
+sudden bitterness, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will
+take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at
+Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he
+went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed
+otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which
+made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet
+when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his
+attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with
+panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes. She did not permit herself
+irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not
+terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and
+stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently: "What have I to do
+with this man? I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.
+Then I suppose I will have to use them as pawns in my political and
+financial intrigues."</p>
+
+<p>Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman's
+speech. Dr. Munro had just sat down. Her sensible square face looked red
+and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and
+from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what
+she had been doing. This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen,
+who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic
+of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its
+affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the
+bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and
+untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality
+but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet
+this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which
+nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn
+a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered
+activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"
+she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the
+grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the
+doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner
+all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a
+community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly
+be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was
+content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her
+perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous
+and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend
+with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought,
+and her heart turned over with fear.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain
+against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very
+far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends
+in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with
+its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its
+shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a
+sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great
+music. Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind
+bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses
+hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying&mdash;for
+already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from
+the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her
+followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the
+hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were
+imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and
+how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells,
+huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats, clad in nothing but
+coarse vests because they would not wear the convict clothes, breathing
+the foul sewage-tainted air for all but that hour when they were carried
+up to the cell where the doctor and the wardresses waited to bind and
+gag them and ram the long feeding-tube down into their bodies. This they
+had endured for six weeks, and would for six weeks more. She spoke with
+a proud reticence as to her sufferings, about her recent sojourn in
+Holloway, from which she had gained release by hunger-striking a
+fortnight before.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I could die for her!" cried Ellen to herself, wet-eyed with
+loyalty. "If only it weren't for mother I'd go to prison to-morrow." Her
+love could hardly bear it when Mrs. Ormiston went on, restrained rage
+freezing her words, to indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her
+and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous
+education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional
+distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the
+meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind
+her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things
+Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life
+with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views
+confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt
+an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had
+always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were
+sombre, such as deep symphonies of an orchestra, the black range and
+white scaurs of the Pentland Hills against the south horizon, the idea
+that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns
+cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of
+life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the
+field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in
+eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she
+rapturously recognised that same authentic quality.</p>
+
+<p>But what good was it if one woman had something of the dignity of nature
+and art? Everybody knew that the world was beautiful. She sent her mind
+out from the hall to walk in the night, which was not wet, yet had a
+bloom of rain in the air, so that the lights shone with a plumy beam and
+all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock
+was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the
+mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the
+lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that
+would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass
+that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end
+of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's
+pictures&mdash;the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a
+fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking
+in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made
+loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at
+the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong
+hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there
+was no question!</p>
+
+<p>But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly
+parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could
+hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the
+Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure
+motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face
+about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like
+that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was
+seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.
+Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride
+up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that
+shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting
+policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could
+not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in
+geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat
+brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and
+she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her
+yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at
+the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones
+lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen
+had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John
+Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of an&aelig;mia or
+spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within
+themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of
+hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of
+actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to
+assert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts
+were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling
+kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater
+earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of
+establishing their sex. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type,
+who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political
+abasement before the male, a new way of calling attention to what
+otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would
+detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the
+Government and the majority of respectable citizens were on the side of
+this pale, sickly, mad young woman against the brave, beautiful Mrs.
+Ormiston. People were horrible.</p>
+
+<p>And there was Mr. Philip.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, why had she thought of him? All the time that she had been in the
+hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her
+untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for
+her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the
+accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not
+then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that
+anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers
+sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror
+of the event, called massacres. She had begun to know better late last
+Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room after taking down
+some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick,
+ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr.
+Mactavish James's desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom
+that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before
+she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you come straight off the train?" it was in her mind to say. "Will
+I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?" But he looked strange. The
+driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the
+shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was
+performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and
+hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his
+breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and
+has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved,
+and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead
+to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the
+clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle
+that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and
+whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one,
+and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this
+accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity,
+and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making
+advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.</p>
+
+<p>"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else
+for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the
+umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously,
+and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no
+need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of
+hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could
+not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit
+he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top
+window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a
+cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her
+alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual
+refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and
+ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's
+all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence
+fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are
+you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in
+typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness
+with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.
+Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always
+made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a
+gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and
+drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made
+him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and
+set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you,
+lassie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her
+shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be
+well spoken of. But there was worse than that&mdash;something so bad that she
+would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought
+of it in a harsh, short sentence. <i>"When Mr. Morrison went out of the
+room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."</i>
+Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip
+being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I
+will kill him...."</p>
+
+<p>There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had
+finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.
+Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of
+the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.
+Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped,
+but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the
+advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in
+the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call
+sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced
+that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.
+Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument
+between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an
+indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment
+against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried
+mothers.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of
+unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of
+woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that
+she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl
+and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had
+only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And
+she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There
+was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the
+world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,
+that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them
+for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she
+came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the
+garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves
+and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's
+houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.
+Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for
+somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was
+the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in
+pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she
+would not know.</p>
+
+<p>Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna
+McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair
+and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about
+married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had
+broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and grass and
+daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by
+the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's
+books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words
+on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was
+wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering
+had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her
+hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove
+her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But
+there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret
+with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was leaning against
+the wall in that dark place beyond the window laughing at her, partly
+because she was such a wee ninny not to know, and partly because when
+she did know the truth there would be something about it which would
+humiliate her. She cast down her eyes and stared at the floor so that
+none might see how close she was to tears. She was a silly weak thing
+that would always feel like a bairn on its first day at school; she was
+being tormented by Mr. Philip. Even the very facts of life had been
+planned to hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, to be like that man from Rio! It was his splendid fate to be made
+tall and royal, to be the natural commander of all men from the moment
+that he ceased to be a child. He could captain his ship through the
+steepest seas and fight the pirate frigate till there was nothing
+between him and the sunset but a few men clinging to planks and a
+shot-torn black flag floating on the waves like a rag of seaweed. For
+rest he would steer to small islands, where singing birds would fly out
+of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run
+aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long,
+loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while
+he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed;
+at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there
+would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful
+kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away
+from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died
+there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and
+princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern
+face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now
+they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of
+course, but it was a joy to think of him.</p>
+
+<p>She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his
+motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this
+ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors
+in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas
+made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd;
+that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was
+coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he
+was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure
+had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the
+half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen
+Melville. The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that
+it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was
+wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the
+eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had
+remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as
+a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her
+profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was
+very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile
+than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was
+something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him
+feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the
+spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other
+beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.</p>
+
+<p>The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping
+reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found
+that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman
+with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand
+and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which
+manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not
+beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had
+she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or
+small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and
+believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious
+pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been
+stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the
+ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far
+forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how
+vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking&mdash;as just for the moment that
+the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he
+certainly had thought&mdash;that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the
+discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.
+The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a
+cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch
+face&mdash;the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the
+world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was
+sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the
+<i>Gondomar</i>, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that
+medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from
+Mukden. Harsh things she was saying&mdash;harsh things about the decent
+Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London
+for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being
+shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for
+solicitation.</p>
+
+<p>He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the
+Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the
+world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian
+man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the
+celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same
+stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.
+For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag
+to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at
+their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of
+pity.</p>
+
+<p>The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because
+she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection
+of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her
+beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the
+audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in
+which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather
+than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways
+that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly
+and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their
+intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to
+fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict
+with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then
+they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and
+touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was
+neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had
+the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this
+irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,
+half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed
+on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey
+suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was
+vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She
+was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their
+beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from
+the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.
+She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made
+a garden of his soul, had any right to be.</p>
+
+<p>That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at
+grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of
+shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of
+the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as
+she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under
+her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him
+haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he
+nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught
+her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious
+swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention
+to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way
+she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged
+body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his
+mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was
+one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern
+for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often
+thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by
+those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the
+chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting
+their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the
+tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening
+to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.</p>
+
+<p>The resemblance went no further than this spiritual attitude, for this
+woman was second-rate stuff. Her beauty was somehow shoddy, her purple
+gown the kind of garment that a clairvoyant might have worn, her
+movements had the used quality of photographers' poses. Publicity had
+not been able to change the substance of the precious metal of her soul,
+but it had tarnished it beyond all remedy. She alluded presently to her
+preposterously-named daughters, Brynhild, Melissa and Guendolen, and he
+was reminded of a French family of musicians with whom he had travelled
+on the steamer between Rio and Sao Paulo, a double-chinned swarthy
+Madame and her three daughters, C&eacute;line, Roxane and Juliette, who sat
+about on deck nursing musical instruments tied with grubby scarlet
+ribbons, silent and dispirited, as though they were so addicted to
+public appearance that they found their private hours an embarrassment.
+But he remembered with a prick of compunction that they had made
+excellent music; and that, after all, was their business in life. So
+with the Ormistons. In the pursuit of liberty they had inadvertently
+become a troupe; but they had fought like lions. And they were giving
+the young that guarantee that life is really as fine as storybooks say,
+which can only be given by contemporary heroism. Little Ellen Melville,
+on the other side of the hall, was lifting the most wonderful face all
+fierce and glowing with hero-worship. "That's how I used to feel about
+Old Man Guthrie of the <i>Gondomar</i> when I was seventeen," he thought.
+"It's a good age...."</p>
+
+<p>When he was seventeen.... He was not at all sure that those three years
+he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life. It came back to
+him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the
+ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on
+the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open
+sea. The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the
+sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a
+brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a
+sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the
+southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were
+at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen's dreams of land,
+but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith
+Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the
+flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.
+He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the
+island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the
+storms should take him. There were the four crumbling grey towers of
+Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint
+spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling
+white speck which he knew to be his father's tomb. He hated that he
+should be able to see it even from here. All his life that mausoleum had
+enraged him. He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have
+died before his son was a man. He suspected him of creeping into his
+coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his
+son's revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive
+tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.</p>
+
+<p>Eastward, a few fields' length along the ridge, was the belvedere on his
+father's estate. He had not looked at it for years, but from here it was
+so little like itself that he could bear to let his eyes dwell on it. It
+was built at the fore of a crescent-shaped plantation on the brow of the
+hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like
+great green wings spread by a small white bird. And eastward yet a mile
+or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of
+Yaverland's End. Under that thatch was his mother. She would be asleep
+now. Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn. With a
+constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now,
+lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head
+and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn
+across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.
+Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead. At the picture
+he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for
+having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid
+sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on
+the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors. Then he
+recognised the necessity of this adventure. It was his duty to her to go
+out into the world and do great things. He had said so very definitely
+to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.
+So that boy, thirteen years before....</p>
+
+<p>He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to
+do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had
+done nothing and was nothing. He saw his soul as something detached from
+his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and
+acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in
+reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and
+cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the
+woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon
+him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,
+grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her
+distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he
+remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were
+those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father
+Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation
+were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from
+the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of
+fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were
+the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick
+men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists
+and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the
+strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions
+and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
+They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better
+than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a
+suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.
+"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with
+himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied
+tartly.</p>
+
+<p>There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably
+good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington
+till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of
+adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his
+imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the
+result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women
+about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite
+with heat and that only with concussion&mdash;these facts had from his
+earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it
+had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere
+diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had
+read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But
+now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of
+no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the
+special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches
+without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his
+results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors,
+who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to
+work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all
+species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of
+beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings
+of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that
+would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was
+lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had
+felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest
+discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but
+a Spirit.</p>
+
+<p>But now none of these things mattered. He was caught in the net of life
+and nothing that was above it was of any use to him; as well expect a
+man who lies through the night with his foot in a man-trap to be
+comforted by the beauty of the stars. The only God he could have any use
+for would be the kind the Salvationists talk about, who goes about
+giving drunken men an arm past the public-house and coming between the
+pickpocket and Black Maria with a well-timed text. There was nothing in
+Science that would lift him out of this hell of loneliness, this
+conviction of impotence, this shame of achievementless maturity. He
+perceived that he had really known this for a long time, and that it was
+the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his
+day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to
+be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage
+at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine
+movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared
+at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break
+the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly
+over the commercial uses that were to be made of his work. What was the
+use of sweating his brains so that one set of fools could blow another
+set of fools to glory? Oh, this was hell!...</p>
+
+<p>The detestable blonde was now holding the platform in attitudes such as
+are ascribed to goddesses by British sculptors, and speaking with a
+slow, pure gusto of the horrors of immorality. For a moment her
+allusions to the wrongs of unmarried mothers made him think of the proud
+but defeated poise of his mother's head, and then the peculiar calm,
+gross qualities of her phrases came home to him. He wondered how long
+she had been going on like this, and he stared round to see how these
+people, who looked so very decent, whom it was impossible to imagine
+other than fully dressed, were taking it. Without anticipation his eyes
+fell on Ellen and found her looking very Scotch and clapping sturdily.
+Of course it must be all right, since everything about her was all
+right, but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying
+to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was
+just the final proof of how very much all right she was. Only a girl so
+innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical
+presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and
+made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind
+was white as her hair was red.</p>
+
+<p>He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was
+powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no
+good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that
+makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men
+act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an
+end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that
+these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women
+whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most
+casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's
+entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he
+was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her
+honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but
+would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their
+responsibilities.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten
+how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a
+transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio;
+back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner
+at old Hermes Pess&ocirc;a's preposterous house, that was built like&mdash;so far
+as it was like anything else on earth&mdash;the Villa d'Este mingled with the
+Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an
+end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the
+guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old
+Pess&ocirc;a, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so
+that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to
+the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed
+out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling
+that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the
+brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood
+six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that
+smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red
+dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this
+mad new house, in this mad new society. He had pulled one out and lain
+back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was
+beating violently. He hated being there, but he had to make sure. Much
+rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of
+those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay. "Then
+marriage is right," he said to himself. "Where there is real love one
+wants to go to church first."</p>
+
+<p>Others who had wearied of the party drifted down to this recess of
+peace. An elderly Frenchman with a pointed black beard, and a slim, fair
+English boy with tears on his long eyelashes, sat themselves down in two
+of these great chairs, with a bottle of wine at their feet and one
+glass, from which they drank alternately with an effect of exchanging
+vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all
+never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the
+Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally,
+mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not
+grieve. It is always thus when one forgets the Church."</p>
+
+<p>There came later another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who
+sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of
+elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him
+alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson
+brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the
+high windows, black with the outer night but streaked and oiled with
+reflections of the inner feast. Opposite there hung a Bouguereau, which
+irritated him&mdash;nymphs ought not to look as if they had come newly
+unguented from a <i>cabinet de toilette</i>. Below it stood an immense
+Cloisonn&eacute; vase, about the neck of which was tied a scarlet silk
+stocking. He remembered having seen it there on his last visit six
+months before. She must have been an exceptionally careless lady. Out
+here there were many ladies who were careless of their honour, but most
+of them were careful enough about tangible possessions like silk
+stockings. A fresh outburst in the babel at the other end of the room
+did not make him turn round, though the French banker had cried in an
+ecstasy, "<i>Tiens! c'est atroce!</i>" and had bounded up the hall. He sat
+on, hating this ugly place of his delay, while the Frenchman and the boy
+kept up an insincere, voluptuous whisper about God and the comfort of
+the Mass....</p>
+
+<p>At last he rose to his feet. It was a quarter to twelve, and time for
+him to go. He went up the hall, treading on lobster claws and someone's
+wig, and looking about him for a certain person. He could not see him
+among the group of revellers that stood in the space before the large
+folding-doors, and for a minute a hand closed over his heart as he
+feared that for once the person whom he sought had gone home before
+morning. But presently he saw a long chair by the wall, and on its
+cushions a blotched face and a gross, full body. He bent over the chair
+and whispered, "De Rojas, de Rojas!" But the fat man slept. Hatred
+gushed up in him, and a joy that the night was secure, and he passed on
+to the folding-doors. But from the little group that was gathered round
+the table, which before the dinner had supported the Winged Victory that
+now lay spread-eagled on the floor, there stepped Pess&ocirc;a. He bade him
+good-night and thanked him for a riotous evening, but perceived that
+Pess&ocirc;a was waving a cocked revolver at him and saying something about
+L&eacute;onore. What could he be saying? It appeared incredible, even to-night,
+that he should really be saying that every departing guest must kiss
+L&eacute;onore's back and swear that it was the most beautiful back in Brazil.</p>
+
+<p>He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see
+how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor L&eacute;onore.
+She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her
+breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled
+down to her waist so that her back was bare. Such a broad, honest back
+it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood
+as a model for Millet's "Angelus." She looked over her shoulder and
+smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy.
+They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had
+gone with hopes of having a good night's rest for once, since Hermes was
+giving a stag-dinner. They had not even given her time to wipe off all
+the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples,
+or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some
+white snippets of the <i>Jornal de Commercio</i>. She bore no malice, the
+good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she
+likes to stay there: still, men are men, and mad, so what can one
+expect?</p>
+
+<p>He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one
+woman. He flicked the revolver out of Pess&ocirc;a's hand and flung it through
+the nearest window. The thick glass took a little time to fall.</p>
+
+<p>"My friends will wait on you in the morning," Pess&ocirc;a had spouted, and he
+had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to L&eacute;onore, and
+kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she
+smiled sleepily, and said in English, "Go on, you bad man!" She spoke so
+slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a
+foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost
+that had found a lodging in her broad mouth. Then the men fell back to
+let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the
+Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple
+livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass
+of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays
+of light which were pollutions of the moonlight. He thought of that
+blotched face, that gross, full body.... It was a night of strong
+moonlight. He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where
+the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness. Palms stood up
+glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight
+fantasy of form. The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas'
+villa gleamed like the spears of heroes. He stared between them at the
+red fa&ccedil;ade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there.
+The thought struck him with terror. If she were not waiting for him the
+moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his
+heart-beat turn to stillness.</p>
+
+<p>Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores. This was his house. Yet he
+entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall
+that enclosed his own gardens. The magnolias stood blazing white on the
+lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the
+poising fireflies' weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a
+smoke. He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but
+he did not dare to go out into the light. He passed the door that led
+from his to de Rojas' garden, which had been made when a father and son
+had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up
+because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours. If it had not been
+unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty.... He stood in
+the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple,
+not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his
+mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if
+Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to
+him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her
+to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the
+summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw
+the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his
+woman in his arms, finding her lips....</p>
+
+<p>It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember
+nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its
+ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He
+knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it
+meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved
+Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the
+magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.
+Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her
+fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go
+on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable
+of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to
+remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything
+that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan
+a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan
+to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy
+if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind
+himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.
+Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real
+to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest
+had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a
+blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these
+Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.</p>
+
+<p>He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that
+last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one
+she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this
+unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour
+should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out
+their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two
+children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting
+each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and
+unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his
+comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church,
+who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her
+not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two
+tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only
+promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought
+of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her
+were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest
+of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They
+stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from
+the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon
+immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of
+life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the
+courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that
+questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated
+brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats
+that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars
+because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately
+because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality
+that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet
+surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who,
+if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either
+bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it,
+but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film
+of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one
+could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a
+chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came
+to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could
+laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with
+speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this
+woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing
+satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.
+He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite
+lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen
+Melville.</p>
+
+<p>He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at
+him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set
+eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she
+was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the
+face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she
+couldn't come it over <i>him</i>. And he asked if he might see her home.</p>
+
+<p>She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some
+tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air
+of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you
+stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian
+Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park
+Square out by the Meadows!"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a
+queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I
+suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit
+down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the
+takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought
+R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has
+paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so
+full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured
+velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal
+for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a
+minute."</p>
+
+<p>He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became
+melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to
+summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place
+were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood
+about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on
+the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown
+surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would
+jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left
+higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And
+doubtless, if there is a beneficent Providence that really picks the
+world over for opportunities of kindliness, halls which are habitually
+let out for political meetings are allowed means of relieving their
+feelings which are forbidden to other collections of bricks and mortar.
+But he mustn't say that to Ellen. To her political meetings were plainly
+sacred rituals, and in any case he was not sure whether she laughed at
+things.</p>
+
+<p>She called to him from the doorway, "I'm through, Mr. Yaverland!" She
+was wearing a tam-o'-shanter and a mackintosh, which she buttoned right
+up to her chin, and she looked just a brown pipe with a black knob at
+the top, a mere piece of plumbing. He thought it very probable that
+never before in the history of the human race had a beautiful girl
+dressed herself so unbecomingly. But that she had done so seemed so
+peculiarly and deliciously amusing that as he walked by her side he
+could hardly keep from looking at her smilingly in a way that would have
+puzzled and annoyed her. And outside the hall, when they found that the
+mist, like a sour man who will not give way to his temper but keeps on
+dropping disagreeable remarks, was letting down just enough of itself to
+soak Edinburgh without giving it the slightest hope that it would rain
+itself out by the morning, he caught again this queer flavour of her
+that in its sharpness and its freshness reminded him of the taste of
+fresh celery. He asked her if she hadn't an umbrella, and she replied,
+"I've no use for umbrellas; I like the feel of the rain on my face, and
+I see no sense in paying three-and-eleven for avoiding a positive
+pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>By that time Ellen was almost sure that he was smiling to himself in the
+darkness, and was miserable. It was a silly, homely thing to have said.
+"Ah, what for can he be wanting to see me home?" she thought helplessly.
+"He is so wonderful. But then, so am I! So am I!" And as they went
+through the dark tangle of small streets she turned loose on him her
+enthusiasm for the meeting, so that he might see that women also have
+their serious splendours. Hadn't it been a magnificent meeting? Wasn't
+Mrs. Ormiston a grand speaker? Could he possibly, if he cared anything
+for honesty, affirm that he had ever heard a man speaker who came within
+a hundred miles of her? And wasn't Mrs. Mark Lyle beautiful, and didn't
+she remind him of the early Christian martyrs? Didn't he think the women
+who were forcibly fed were heroines, and didn't he think the Liberal
+Governments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times?
+"Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only
+give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy
+barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed
+little things about her. She had had very little to do with men,
+perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not
+naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft
+and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do.
+Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as
+though she trod on grass.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you
+must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's
+fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with
+herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she
+was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear
+infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could
+listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My
+mother's keen on the movement."</p>
+
+<p>"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she
+speak, or organise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a
+little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary
+gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his
+mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland
+was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the
+stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and
+weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived
+as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the
+darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the
+infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor
+souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which
+disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It
+makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there
+in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any
+more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be
+continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware
+that those questions existed. He simply noted that she was being happy.
+Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each
+other, going home in the rain.</p>
+
+<p>They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like
+shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope.
+"Edinburgh's a fine place," he said. "It can handle even an asphalt
+track with dignity."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from
+it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman
+want to go wandering about the world?</p>
+
+<p>From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you
+a sailor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."</p>
+
+<p>Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"</p>
+
+<p>"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he
+was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she
+thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of
+men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a
+channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man
+who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his
+head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a
+mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the
+reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked
+like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She
+wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her,
+which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that
+even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were
+passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything,
+when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that
+softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel
+anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for
+there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that
+was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of
+soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors. If she lived
+near here she must be very poor. But without embarrassment she turned
+to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and
+pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by
+the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained
+window, to be a very mean little house. "The Square's through here," she
+said. "Come away in and I'll find you a membership form for the Men's
+League...."</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the archway lay the queerest place. It was a little box-like
+square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat
+houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its
+shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its
+neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews. They sent out in front
+of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a
+paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a
+lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as
+a terrier shakes a rat. Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued
+bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins. On the
+fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public
+park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by
+garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and
+beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with
+that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night. He,
+too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible
+that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole
+business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were
+sleeping in these little houses. They were probably poor little people,
+for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one
+lighted window. And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in
+the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he
+had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner
+house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon,
+the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the
+door and invited him in with something of an air.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness,
+"Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out
+light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said,
+"What's that you say, Ellen?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a
+minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client
+from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find
+him a membership form."</p>
+
+<p>She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and
+fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew
+she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to
+carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a
+little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it
+were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr.
+Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit."
+A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook
+his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a
+large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured
+by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that
+someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too
+gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had
+not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as
+well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare
+bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet
+once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a
+fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip,
+though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no
+present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.
+The aged are terrible&mdash;mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which
+none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered
+round them.</p>
+
+<p>She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had
+been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes
+and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so
+dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself.
+The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the
+wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so
+unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather
+upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big
+steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse
+climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by
+signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers
+Bibles&mdash;engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and
+there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn
+from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand
+dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered
+somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if
+he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had
+been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite
+she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made
+when they heard that his work lay among high explosives. And Ellen's
+rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper
+stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, "Ellen, it
+beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy
+girl about the house!" and Ellen exclaimed, "Och, drat the thing, it
+must be upstairs!" and ran out of the room with her face turned away
+from them.</p>
+
+<p>They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises
+overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on
+the floor. "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly. She began
+to look him over with a maternal eye. "For all you've been six months in
+the North, you've not lost your tan," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America," he answered.
+Their eyes met and they smiled. In effect she had said, "Well, you are a
+fine fellow," and he had answered, "Yes, perhaps I am."</p>
+
+<p>"I like a man to travel," she went on, tossing her head and looking
+altogether fierce Ellen's mother. "I never go into the bank without
+looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on
+their high stools." She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat
+him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the
+mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a
+sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him. "I hope
+you don't think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all
+alone. It's not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for
+this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused. I'm not much of a
+companion to her. I'm getting on, you see. She was my youngest."</p>
+
+<p>"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only
+child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.</p>
+
+<p>"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was
+born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and
+I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as
+the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot
+of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he
+was taken ill."</p>
+
+<p>He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."</p>
+
+<p>"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his
+age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I
+knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New
+Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of
+the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed
+by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There
+was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and
+disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back
+of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave
+birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was
+disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her
+protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very
+meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had
+been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she
+was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody
+would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.
+Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional
+people who are old or not perfectly happy.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he
+knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a na&iuml;ve and
+touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as
+he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now
+that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming
+into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex
+for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that
+most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent
+people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother
+was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"</p>
+
+<p>It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on
+a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin
+dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed. Only the continued calm of Mrs.
+Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through
+the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial
+human activity.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger," said Mrs. Melville. "We
+hardly hear it now. You see, they've turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs
+on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they
+make with their feet. It's not a nice place. 'Gentlemen a shilling,
+ladies invited,' it says outside. Still, we don't complain, for the
+noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent."</p>
+
+<p>This was a masterpiece of circumstance. By nothing more than a thin wall
+which shook to music was this little home divided from a thick-aired
+place where ugly people lurched against each other lustfully; and yet it
+had been made an impregnable fort of loveliness and decency by this
+virtuous ageing woman, whose slight silliness was but a holy abstinence,
+a refusal to side with common sense because that was so often concerned
+in cruel decisions, by this girl who was so young that it seemed at the
+sight of her as if time had turned back again and earth rolled unstained
+by history, and so beautiful that it seemed as if henceforth eternity
+could frame nothing but happiness. The smile of Ellen had made a faery
+ring where heavy-footed dancers could not enter; her gravity had made a
+sanctuary as safe as any church crowned with a belfry and casketing the
+Host. And he, participating in the safety of the place, pitied the men
+behind the shaking wall, and all men over the world who had committed
+themselves to that search for pleasure which makes joy inaccessible.
+They had chosen frustration for their destiny. Because they desired some
+ecstasy that would lighten the leaden substance of life they turned to
+drunkenness, which did no more than jumble reality, steep the earth in
+aniline dyes, tinge the sunset with magenta. Because they desired love
+they sought out women who, although dedicated to sex, were sexually
+cancelled by repeated use, like postage-stamps on a much re-directed
+letter, who efficiently went through the form of passion, yet presented
+it so empty of all exaltation that their lovers left them feeling as if
+they were victims of a practical joke.</p>
+
+<p>And here, not half a dozen yards from some of these seekers, was one who
+could bring to these desires a lovelier death than they would meet on
+the dirty bed of gratification or the hard pallet of renunciation.
+Because the untouched truth about her could give ecstasy one would not
+lose the power of seeing things as they are, and she made one forget the
+usual sexual story. Although she was formed for love and the intention
+of being her lover was now a fundamental part of him, she was so busy
+with her voice and body in playing quaint variations on the theme of
+herself that he did not mind how long might be the journey to their
+marriage. She was more interesting than any other person or thing in the
+world. She was going to have more interesting experiences; because her
+unique simplicity comprehended a wild impatience with lies she would
+have a claim on reality that would give her unprecedented wisdom. Now he
+could understand why saints in their narrow cells despise sinners as
+dull stay-at-homes.</p>
+
+<p>And when she burst into the room again he saw that all he had been
+thinking about her was true. It might be that everybody else on earth
+would see her as nothing but a red-haired girl in an ill-fitting blue
+serge dress with an appalling tartan silk vest, but still it was true.</p>
+
+<p>"Here you are," she said, "you put your name <i>there</i>." She bent over him
+as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how
+magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor
+old lady was yawning behind her knitting. He rose and said good-bye,
+wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how
+he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that
+he came for love. If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and
+daughter how easy it would have been! The elder woman's eyes would have
+crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her
+daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they
+contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle
+hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have
+stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty,
+very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if
+to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she
+knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything. But here was
+Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would
+drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that
+warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she
+would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh
+inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people
+delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored
+them because they were difficult.</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the
+courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw
+that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the
+evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an
+honoured guest. They were dear people.</p>
+
+<p>As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open
+the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have
+been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings,
+which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to
+picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the
+coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a
+tea-biscuit.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to admire Burns," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of
+the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a proposition he never butted up against&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.
+You're one of Time's revenges...."</p>
+
+<p>She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with
+pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully
+wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some
+disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to
+stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a
+queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some
+nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness
+beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it
+could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had
+second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that
+something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.
+"Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man
+being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in
+the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony
+transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this
+glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes
+blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be
+subject to death.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night," he said. He did not know why her breath had failed and why
+she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was
+doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were
+beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on
+till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful. "Good-night," he
+said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path
+simply that they might speak to each other again. "You must shut the
+door. You're letting in the rain and cold."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.</p>
+
+<p>He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married
+and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his
+marriage.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from
+a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry's College, and sat down
+in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the
+kitchen, "Ellen, I've got the grandest surprise for you!"</p>
+
+<p>These fanciful women! "And what's that?" she cried back tolerantly,
+though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees. She thought
+she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had
+sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing.
+But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and
+ask like a little anxious mouse, "You're sure you've not said anything,
+dear? You're sure you've been a careful girl with your work, dear?" and
+would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating
+misfortune. "Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post
+we must just manage." So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though
+that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.</p>
+
+<p>"Away into the dining-room and see what it is," said Mrs. Melville,
+coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand. She had put on her brighter
+shawl, the tartan one.</p>
+
+<p>"You look as we'd been left a fortune," said Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"No fear of that. If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred
+pounds that's all we can expect. But there's something fine waiting for
+you. Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come. Now!"</p>
+
+<p>She flung open the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Roses!" breathed Ellen. "Mother&mdash;roses!"</p>
+
+<p>On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled
+with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long
+held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection
+joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars.
+Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of
+the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have
+jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed
+her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. The flowers
+were beautiful in so many ways. They were beautiful just as roses,
+because "roses" is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white
+because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose
+has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first
+white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that
+dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled,
+attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in
+stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a
+faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.</p>
+
+<p>They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against
+the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.</p>
+
+<p>They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers. They were an outburst
+of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to
+anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here
+though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an
+immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very
+enjoyably if one had the money to buy things. It really was worth while
+struggling to get on....</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, where did they come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said Mrs. Melville waggishly.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, tell me! I don't imagine you went out and pawned the family
+jewels. Och, do tell me! Come on!"</p>
+
+<p>"A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist's, this morning. I could
+have fallen down when I opened the door. And the wee brat of a boy tried
+to convey to me that he wasn't used to coming to such a place. He wore a
+look like a missionary in Darkest Africa. They were left for Miss
+Melville, mind you. Not for your poor old mother. And they're from Mr.
+Yaverland. Yon's his card sticking up against your grandmother on the
+mantelpiece."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen's hands, outspread over the roses, dropped to her side.</p>
+
+<p>"I would have thought he had more sense," she said sulkily. "If he'd
+money to burn he should have sent this lot to the infirmary."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, Ellen, are you not pleased?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's the man thinking of to fill us up with flowers as if we were an
+Episcopal church on Easter Sunday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen, you've no notion of manners. Gentlemen often send flowers to
+ladies they admire. When your Aunt Bessie and I were girls many's the
+fine present of flowers we got from officers at the Castle."</p>
+
+<p>"I've neither time nor taste for such things. It makes me feel like a
+hospital. He'll be sending us new-laid eggs and lint bandages next. The
+man's mad."</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen, you're a queer girl," complained. Mrs. Melville. "If this
+argy-bargying about votes for women makes you turn up your nose at bonny
+flowers that a decent fellow sends you I'm sorry for you&mdash;it's just
+tempting Providence to scorn good mercies like this. I'll away and take
+the fish-pie out of the oven."</p>
+
+<p>It was strange that as soon as her mother had left the room she began to
+feel differently about the roses. Of course they were very beautiful;
+and they were contenting in a quite magic way, for besides satisfying
+her longing for pretty things, they seemed to have deprived of urgency
+all her other longings, even including her desire for a vote, for
+eminence of some severe sort, for an income of three hundred pounds a
+year (which was the most she believed a person with a social conscience
+could enjoy), for a perpetual ticket for the Paterson Concerts at the
+MacEwan Hall, and for perfect self-possession. She felt as if these
+things were already hers, or as if they were coming so certainly that
+she need not fret about them any more than one frets about a parcel that
+one knows has been posted, or concerning some desires, as if it did not
+matter so much as she had thought whether she got them or not.
+Especially that dream of being one of a company of men and women whose
+bodies should be grave as elms with dignity and whose words should be
+bright as butterflies with wit struck her as being foolish. It was as
+idle as wanting to be born in the days of Queen Elizabeth. What she
+really wanted was a friend. She had felt the need of one since Rachael
+Wing went to London. Surely Richard Yaverland meant to be her friend,
+since he sent flowers to her. But she wished the gift could have been
+made secretly, and if he came to pay a visit she should be quite alone.
+For no reason that she could formulate, the thought of even her mother
+setting eyes on them together seemed a threat of disgrace. She wished
+that they could be standing side by side at the fire in that five
+minutes when it is sheer extravagance to light the gas but so dark that
+one may stare as one cannot by day, so that she might look at what the
+driving flamelight showed of his black, sea-roughened magnificence. At
+her perfect memory of him she felt a rush of exhilaration which left her
+confused and glad and benevolent.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, dear," she said, for Mrs. Melville had come back with the
+fish-pie, and was bidding her with an offended briskness to sit forward
+and eat her meal while it was hot, "they're the loveliest things. I
+can't think what for I was so cross."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither can I. There's so little bonny comes our way that I do think we
+might be grateful when we get a treat."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry. I can't think what came over me."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind. But, you know, you're sometimes terribly like your father.
+You must fight against it."</p>
+
+<p>They sat down to supper, looking up from their food at the roses.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, the gas is awful bad for them. Carbonic acid is just murderous
+to flowers."</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking that myself. It was well known that gas was bad for
+flowers even when I was young, though we didn't talk about carbonic
+acid. But if you don't see them by gaslight you'll never see them, for
+it's dark by five. They must fall faster than they would have done."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, no! I'd rather you had the pleasure of them by day, and let the
+poor things last. I must content myself with a look at them at
+breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense! They're your flowers, lassie. But do you not think it would
+do if we brought in the two candles and turned out the gas? It'll be a
+bit dark, but it isn't as if there were many bones in the fish-pie."</p>
+
+<p>And that is what they did. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for then
+there was a bright soft light on the red and white petals, and a drapery
+of darkness about the mean walls of the room, and a thickening of the
+atmosphere which hid the archness on the older woman's face, so that the
+girl dreamed untormented and without knowing that she dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well!" sighed Mrs. Melville after a silence, with that air of irony
+which she was careful to impart to her sad remarks, as if she wanted to
+remove any impression that she respected the fate that had assailed her.
+"I don't know how many years it is since I sat down with roses on the
+table."</p>
+
+<p>"I never have before," said Ellen.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the
+declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park
+Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the
+careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had
+meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when
+the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every
+time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood
+red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew
+more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he
+wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that
+he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused
+consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present
+course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in
+open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There
+was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his
+love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man
+commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research.
+Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh
+he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her
+youth could hold.</p>
+
+<p>But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter;
+and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was
+in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and
+exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was
+larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like
+that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of
+sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her
+something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting
+of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and
+characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great
+pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace
+with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He
+found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a
+complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his
+return in the New Year, which was a breach of her habitual pretence,
+which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for
+that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her
+as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room,
+which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver
+fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map.
+Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of
+power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just
+finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her
+merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have
+made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin
+leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene
+she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face
+would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness
+would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had
+reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she
+and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along
+the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east
+sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the
+bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she
+had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of
+starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his
+head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.</p>
+
+<p>It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it
+seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because
+he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover
+would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably
+glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet
+suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant
+wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his
+mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to
+Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.</p>
+
+<p>And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else
+happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him
+with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch
+that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten
+minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its
+inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling
+wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood
+spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from
+the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village
+three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be
+need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood
+by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's
+suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was
+disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little
+fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland
+himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known
+from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen
+they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand
+the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay
+among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily
+of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave
+conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell
+spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.</p>
+
+<p>But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when
+it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the
+door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage
+where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He
+shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had
+heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was
+twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of
+his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he
+was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a
+lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but
+went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail
+all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so
+he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out
+into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking,
+lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.</p>
+
+<p>She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she
+stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows
+were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as
+well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the
+marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without
+intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the
+death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac
+and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the
+bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen
+panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their
+coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not
+spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those
+books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and
+dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled
+his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It
+must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the
+hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that
+this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she
+had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew
+followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet
+three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued
+scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his
+arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He
+held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to
+the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But
+I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face
+away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to
+talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a
+thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so
+far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded
+the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly,
+glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if
+you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had
+slept....</p>
+
+<p>And she was going through a bad time like that now.</p>
+
+<p>When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not
+greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not
+reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any
+particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this
+afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.
+But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist
+desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of
+the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He
+certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so
+wonderful as he had remembered her.</p>
+
+<p>But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to
+solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the
+Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the
+white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast
+of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the
+summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by
+his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to
+Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up
+to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous
+thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her
+immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly
+conscientious woman would have gone on selling <i>Votes for Women</i> for at
+least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her
+mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because
+after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the <i>Scotsman's</i>
+report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an
+impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed
+even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock
+came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told
+herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there
+had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew
+nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the
+other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of
+him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.</p>
+
+<p>The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much
+lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and
+pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea,
+though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want
+any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation
+to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or
+cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but
+always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill.
+The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically
+irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the
+right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it
+all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how
+he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious
+and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of
+phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative
+gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word
+contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually
+turned on the rest of the world....</p>
+
+<p>But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by
+candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her
+mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less.
+"But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That
+was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious
+and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an
+excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of
+course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll
+keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop
+you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."</p>
+
+<p>He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had
+given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their
+stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in
+their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the
+fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented
+them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering
+murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at
+all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed
+that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very
+pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the
+wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers,
+and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had
+been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of
+tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period
+of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention,
+which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.</p>
+
+<p>But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift.
+They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them
+wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall
+and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic
+("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to
+her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and
+laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by
+those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of
+the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey
+into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the
+happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a
+magical power to give each other the things they wanted.</p>
+
+<p>But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed
+perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the
+frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"</p>
+
+<p>She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last
+instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if
+anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy
+and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh
+evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of
+malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr.
+Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her,
+things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark
+thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."</p>
+
+<p>"Ju&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that
+C&aelig;sar was much addicted to."</p>
+
+<p>When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had
+put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the
+mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the
+glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the
+coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,
+evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while
+her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as
+if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same
+time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would
+come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures
+of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she
+should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden
+tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to
+be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on
+the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to
+add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she
+smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one
+beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,
+and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it
+became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into
+a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or
+say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because
+he perfectly knew what she did not.</p>
+
+<p>One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of
+shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed
+to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to
+each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an
+exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that
+his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But
+there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it
+killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was
+inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an
+exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light,
+and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a
+richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold
+her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail
+substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out
+like comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to
+crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set
+out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of
+course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world
+was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the
+table, and she seemed very real.</p>
+
+<p>She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I
+can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her
+pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched
+a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go
+on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went
+and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the
+path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the
+evening as if it were a refuge from him.</p>
+
+<p>But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had
+a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes
+and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a
+trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their
+appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about
+George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had
+he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the
+privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat <i>ss. Glory</i> with
+Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her
+that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of
+London, and not a few came from the special schools for the
+feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper
+that makes a good boxer.</p>
+
+<p>So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was,
+he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other
+place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops
+that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took
+the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its
+narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked
+briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed
+at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other
+trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their
+slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was
+aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent
+than going home to supper.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering
+black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the
+midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east
+wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy
+quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much
+aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery&mdash;such a
+marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that
+resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and
+circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a
+shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an
+iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a
+wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as
+though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of
+a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever
+seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's
+carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled
+to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the
+price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that
+he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen,
+and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such
+occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy
+texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness
+in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was
+plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual,
+intellectual energy.</p>
+
+<p>In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put
+in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that
+hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like
+a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under
+the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.
+Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage,
+for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it
+seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his
+white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however,
+in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was
+the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary
+life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that
+magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life. The old man
+seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said,
+"If that's the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately."
+Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not
+so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations. But after they
+got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his
+mind: "Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?"</p>
+
+<p>"Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay."</p>
+
+<p>They had come to the end of Ellen's shopping list and she was taking him
+home through St. Patrick's Square. "Look at that lighted window, where
+they've got a blue blind! That's where de Quincey stopped!" she said
+excitedly, and he answered, "Oh, is it?... I say, why did the old chap
+offer to give you change in halfpence?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to-morrow's Sunday, you see."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I don't. I'm stupid. Why do you want halfpence more on
+Sunday than on any other day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, for the plate. For the collection. In church. But we always put in
+threepenny-bits. Mother's picked up a lot of English ways. What's taken
+you?" She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her
+that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly
+English taunt that the Scotch are mean. "Och, you don't understand," she
+began to stammer hastily. "I didn't mean that exactly."</p>
+
+<p>And then a hot rage came on her. Why should she make excuses for her own
+people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to
+giggle? Wasn't he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences
+in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness,
+which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to "come it over"
+her? She said acidly, "I'm glad you're amused. I suppose you don't do
+such things in England?" and at his laughing answer, "I don't know; I've
+never been to Church in England. But I shouldn't think so," her
+neatly-brushed and braided temper came down. She came to a sudden stop.
+They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of
+tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had
+none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate
+with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs
+she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping
+from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of
+her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side
+lest he should drop any parcels.</p>
+
+<p>He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that
+it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his
+mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as
+she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were
+held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that
+English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers,
+and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were
+no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the
+implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than
+the English, had defended a larger country....</p>
+
+<p>He woke up at that. He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for
+though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry. She was
+running away from him, but in a circle.</p>
+
+<p>"Scotland bigger than England!" he jeered. "Think of the map! Bigger
+than England!"</p>
+
+<p>She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round
+dismayed hole. But she was not to be beaten. "I was alluding to its
+surface," she said coldly. "It being such an elevated country, there
+must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking
+hardly any space on the map. Consequently I was correct in saying that
+Scotland is bigger than England." She drew breath to go on, but her lips
+began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she
+began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined
+her. They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their
+laughter, from which they did not wish to move. They were standing quite
+still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other's faces,
+trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the
+strong moonlight. It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not
+quite know what to do with it. They did not even know whether to be
+grave or gay. It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue
+and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its
+merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.</p>
+
+<p>But indeed they had no choice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I
+didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person
+all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an
+expense."</p>
+
+<p>He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur
+the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last
+manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face,
+which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high
+cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I
+didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said
+could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that
+wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of
+tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all
+delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and
+self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to
+acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance,
+accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a
+boy.</p>
+
+<p>And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that
+Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of
+wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she
+should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of
+course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and
+turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these
+desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would
+look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward
+tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the
+ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that
+she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be
+able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would
+prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men
+are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or
+persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which
+he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of
+everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body
+to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in
+spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though
+that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly
+disliked that obligation.</p>
+
+<p>She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And
+Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig.
+Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands
+yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs
+hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The
+water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."</p>
+
+<p>"Take me there, Ellen."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you like to come? Let's go next Saturday. I've got the whole day
+off. Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I've been
+doing. It'll be lovely. I've had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing
+went to London. But would you truly care to come? It's just moors.
+You'll not turn up your nose at it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Anywhere I went with you I'd like."</p>
+
+<p>She started and began to walk on. It was as if the sheet of tissue had
+grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it. Although he
+went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he
+found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly
+answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by
+its collar. Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so
+eagerly? And ought he to have called her by her Christian name? Of
+course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to
+do it. When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a
+light in the dining-room window and said, "Mother's home before us."</p>
+
+<p>She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her
+life. For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed,
+and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because
+soon they would no longer be alone together. Perhaps something like fear
+would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with
+victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of
+timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to
+star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how
+even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily
+contriving their immediate marriage. For there was a steely quality
+about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive
+purpose.</p>
+
+<p>It was apparent to him, when they went in, that Mrs. Melville understood
+what was going on, for she threw him a glance which was not quite a wink
+but which clearly suggested that had she been just a common body it was
+conceivable that she might have winked. As soon as they were alone he
+told her that he loved Ellen, that he wanted to marry her, that he had
+plenty of money, that he was all right, that they must marry at once.
+She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had
+tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her
+with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of
+moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the
+walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and
+the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob
+like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and plainly trusted him, but
+at the same time she was pitifully alarmed. "Mercy me! you've not been
+long.... Well, you've caught a Tartar and no mistake. Never say I didn't
+warn you.... But you'll let the bairn bide for a wee bit longer! She's
+but a bairn!"</p>
+
+<p>It was as if she quite saw that a husband was necessary for Ellen, and
+wanted her to have one, and at the same time believed that any husband
+would inevitably bring her pain. He set it down as one of the despondent
+misinterpretations of life that the old invent in the depression of
+their physical malaise, and answered, reassuringly, insincerely, "Yes,
+yes, I'll wait...." But why should they wait? They were going to be
+radiantly and eternally happy. It might as well begin at once.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed
+at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping
+from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she
+had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland
+an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing
+that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the
+village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and
+now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by
+daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke
+and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the
+upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men
+working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural
+disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of
+the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them,
+laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do;
+there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had
+seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought
+tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to
+the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person
+who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic
+hues.</p>
+
+<p>But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there
+had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the
+trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in
+face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward
+was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a
+slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black
+hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields,
+set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road
+dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate
+frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of
+clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines
+against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride
+and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of
+mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its
+immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it
+was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and
+it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he
+had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood
+showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather,
+and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of
+response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under
+changing skies even as the seas.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting
+towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the
+coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly,
+"Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity,
+and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which,
+when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs
+and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind
+was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of
+wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a
+track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously
+between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old
+lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her
+bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes
+had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a
+new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed
+on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted
+everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country,
+these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a
+voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up
+to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed
+a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind
+without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was
+glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the
+hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at
+his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her
+velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler
+that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big
+for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of
+large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of
+flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort
+of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the
+slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she
+would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music
+heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of
+his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the
+whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the
+range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would
+tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine
+what manner of place it would be&mdash;whether there would be grass or
+heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if
+we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes," said Ellen. "We'd
+best step forward. I'm glad you like the place. I love it. And this bit
+of the road's bonny. When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the
+ploughman's cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one
+day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four. And if
+you'll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as
+bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians. The poor things
+ran like the wind when they saw us. I wish we could have explained we
+meant no harm, for I suppose it's the one time in the day when they
+count on having the world to themselves."</p>
+
+<p>"I've felt like that about a jaguar," he said. "Came on it suddenly, on
+a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina. It had been tidying up a
+monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy. Lord, the sick fright
+in its eyes when it saw me. I'd have given anything to be able to stand
+it a drink and offer to see it home."</p>
+
+<p>"Och!" she murmured abashed. "Me talking about rabbits, and you
+accustomed to jaguars. I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit
+except to look down your nose at it. But we can't rise to jaguars in
+Scotland. But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt."</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen a red deer too," he said, "when I was motorcycling up to Ross
+this summer." It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across
+the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and
+then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, "The sunset was
+on it. It looked the colour of your hair."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if it did," she cried with sudden petulance, "pity me, that has
+to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast's back. Och,
+come along! Let's run. I like running. I'm cold. There's a bonny bridge
+where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir. Let's run." And for a
+hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then
+stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath. "I don't like
+this," she said half laughingly. "I've a poor envious nature. I'm used
+to running everybody else off their feet, and here you're holding back
+to keep with me. I feel I'm being an object of condescension. We'll
+walk, if you please."</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland said, "Oh, what nonsense! I was just thinking how rippingly
+you ran."</p>
+
+<p>"Havers!" she replied. "You were thinking nothing of the sort. You were
+wondering what for I carried an iron-monger's shop in my pocket. But
+yon rattling's just a tin with some coconuts I've in it that I made last
+night and slipped in in case you'd like it, rubbing up against my
+protractor."</p>
+
+<p>"But why in Heaven's name," Yaverland asked, "do you carry a protractor
+about with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch,
+and I just keep a protractor handy."</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland stopped. "Ellen," he said, "I haven't known you very long."
+There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, "I
+may call you Ellen, mayn't I? This modern comradeship between men and
+women...." "Och, yes," beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic
+catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her
+pure enthusiasms for his own purposes. Sometimes he was conscious of a
+detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not
+respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but
+he could not take back the insincerity. "As I say, I haven't known you
+very long. But may I ask you a favour?"</p>
+
+<p>"Surely," said Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"Turn out your pockets."</p>
+
+<p>"But why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to see what's in 'em."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Ellen resignedly, "there are worse vices than
+inquisitiveness. Both pockets?"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor,
+please."</p>
+
+<p>"It's too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you'll have to
+take them from me as I get them out. Well, there's the protractor, and
+there's the coconut ice. Have a bit? Ah, well, I notice that
+grown-up&mdash;that people older than me don't seem to care for sweeties
+before their dinner. I wonder why. And there's a magnetic compass I
+picked up on George the Fourth Bridge. There's a kind of pleasure in
+finding the north, don't you think? And&mdash;fancy this being here! I
+thought I'd lost it long ago. It's a wee garnet I found on the beach at
+Elie. I was set up all the afternoon with finding a precious stone. I
+would like fine to be a miner in the precious stone mines in Mexico. If
+I was a boy I would go. And the rest's just papers. Here's notes on a
+Geographical Society lecture on the geology of Yellowstone Park I went
+to last spring. Very instructive it was. And here's a diagram I did when
+I was working for the Bible examination on the Second Book of Kings&mdash;the
+lines of the House of Israel and the House of Judah drawn to scale on
+square paper, five years to a square and set parallel so that you can
+see which buddy was ruling on the one throne when another buddy was on
+the other. I came out fifth in all Scotland. And this is a poem I wrote.
+It's not a good poem. The subject was excellent&mdash;reflections of an
+absinthe-drinker condemned to death for the murder of his mistress&mdash;but
+I couldn't give it the treatment it desairved. No, you will <i>nut</i> see
+it. I'll just tear it up. There. It'll do the whaups no harm scattering
+over the moor, for they've no &aelig;sthetic sensibilities. But I shouldn't be
+surprised if you had, though I've heard that the English don't care much
+for art. I'm not much good at the poetry, but I have the grace to know
+it, and so I've just given it up. I make my own blouses, though I know I
+can't equal the professional product that's sold in the shops, because
+it comes cheaper. But with the Carnegie library handing out the
+professional product for nothing, I see no reason why I should write my
+own poems. That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the
+other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen
+gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole
+in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real
+nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it
+can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No
+wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the
+English if they're all as easily amused as you."</p>
+
+<p>"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like
+a boy."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing
+before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were
+nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because
+she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?
+Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!
+And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I
+came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A
+bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!
+Is it not just fine?"</p>
+
+<p>Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he
+perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than
+anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as
+bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.
+He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,
+and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,
+represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing
+for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody
+fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and
+swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her
+soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this
+country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like
+her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that
+stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was
+fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills
+around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with
+some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and
+utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a
+glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the
+very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into
+shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue
+that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the
+hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not
+unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.</p>
+
+<p>But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort
+which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt,
+some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it
+could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden
+from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and
+jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy
+might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible
+lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating
+of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat
+under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the
+thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see
+if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the
+south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and
+said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."
+To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone
+spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.</p>
+
+<p>There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn
+floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an
+invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.
+But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than
+anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy
+and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight
+squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her
+balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky,
+the stern grey stream, the amber grasses that shook perpetually in the
+stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the
+water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.</p>
+
+<p>There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened
+every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a
+windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the
+Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy
+confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its
+yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this
+brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it
+an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath
+the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a
+kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will
+that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall
+from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.
+Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should
+sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow
+lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined
+in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of
+whitish grasses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the
+unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake
+perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It
+suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed passion of malice. It was
+like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in the log
+bubbles slowly floated up through the dark water, wavered a little under
+the glassy surface, and then popped up and made a dirty trail of spume.
+That was like the way Mr. Philip sat in the dark corner beyond the
+fireplace and showed by the way the whites of his eyes turned about that
+something bad had come into his mind, and let a space of silence fall so
+that one thought he was not going to say it after all, and then it would
+come out suddenly, cool and as mean as mean could be and somehow
+unanswerable.</p>
+
+<p>With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver
+birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless
+on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of
+malice. Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed
+with the grassy rottenness beside the whitish grasses. It had had no
+chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that
+although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time
+when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and
+stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave
+him the chance to make a fool of her. It was all right to be here on the
+Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and
+work under Mr. Philip. She could not go on like this. She would have to
+kill herself. She would jump over the Dean Bridge. Mother would just
+have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the
+rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you
+talk about? Aren't you still pals?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's
+gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on.
+She's never written since the first month."</p>
+
+<p>"Probably she's having hard luck."</p>
+
+<p>"Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside
+her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.
+She's not a bit like me."</p>
+
+<p>"But that's just what you look like."</p>
+
+<p>"Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as
+the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the
+presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the
+disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with
+success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to
+her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face
+and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he
+followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.</p>
+
+<p>When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and
+taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her
+breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she
+said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you cut yours off then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she
+answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun
+that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all
+right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere
+nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little
+child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while
+yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl
+was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from
+womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He
+would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right
+angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds
+marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her
+scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman
+smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from
+a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning
+herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult
+love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by
+some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and
+they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.</p>
+
+<p>He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before
+her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary
+austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he
+recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she
+still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss
+her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when
+she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands
+roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as
+children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was
+a woman the passion between them was so strong that the delight of
+touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to
+support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that
+they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and
+invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was
+what he had to say....</p>
+
+<p>It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He
+could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening
+of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great
+height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He
+found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul
+shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let
+his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the passing moment
+as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from
+a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that
+rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life
+because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a
+relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black
+regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt
+of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to
+brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did
+not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness
+than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever
+known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.
+And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness,
+the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race
+among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.
+She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of
+women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon
+her lips.</p>
+
+<p>Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you,
+she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think
+that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in
+the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless
+moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South
+America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her
+mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was
+too young.</p>
+
+<p>There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was
+with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long
+way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the
+whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two
+servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes,
+the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down
+on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that
+distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the
+whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all
+human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin
+along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked
+by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited
+to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder
+of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where
+there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely
+perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the
+clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on
+either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain
+herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated
+animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the
+extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on
+ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her
+pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor,
+her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so
+greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight
+over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he
+wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course
+he never had. There was no one in the world like her.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried
+back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun
+to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown
+waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with
+an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in
+the hills where the Logan Burn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark
+polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee
+one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose&mdash;was it
+not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into
+his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here
+than anywhere else in the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted,
+uninterested in the loving things that he had said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."</p>
+
+<p>"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for
+adventure, "I will go there some day...."</p>
+
+<p>That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern
+himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train
+of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it
+like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the
+waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled
+by a ready, embarrassed murmur from her.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't...."</p>
+
+<p>He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had
+been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly:</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? You've got nailed boots."</p>
+
+<p>But she continued to stand stiffly on a rock by the edge of the red
+pool, and stared over his head at the spray and repeated, "I can't."</p>
+
+<p>He wondered from her blush if in his ignorance of girls he had done
+something to offend her, and turned away; but she misunderstood that,
+and cried fierily:</p>
+
+<p>"Och, I'm not feared! I've done it twenty times. But I took a vow. Oh,"
+she faltered, suddenly the youngest of all articulate things, "you'll
+laugh at me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I won't!" he answered fiercely and gripped one of her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"It was like this," she said, looking round-eyed and dewily solemn like
+a child in church. "Climbing up there used to be a great pleasure to me.
+I used to come here a lot with Rachael Wing. And then I heard Victor
+Grayson speak&mdash;oh, he is a wonderful man; he seemed hardly airthly; you
+felt you had to make some sacrifice. I made a vow I'd never climb it
+again till I had done something for the social revolution. And I've not
+done a thing yet."</p>
+
+<p>They exchanged a long, confiding look, a mutual pressure of their souls;
+but before he could say something reverently sympathetic she had uttered
+a sharp exclamation, and was looking past him at the waterfall, which a
+sudden gust of wind had blown out from the rock like a lady's skirt. "If
+we were climbing that now, yon spray would be on our faces, and I love
+the prick of cold water!" she burst out. "Whatever for did I make that
+daft-like vow? A lot of good it's like to do the social revolution! I
+really am a fool sometimes!"</p>
+
+<p>Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if
+he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite
+exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal
+they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to
+him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.
+She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the
+early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her
+beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her
+soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of
+her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have
+been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional
+languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces
+expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about
+the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so
+busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the
+lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave
+naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing
+the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more
+certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing
+with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of
+the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough
+stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made
+him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead
+for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had
+come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the
+loch.</p>
+
+<p>"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this
+bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig.
+The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a
+gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a
+good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies."
+But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him,
+though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black
+wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile
+long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of
+desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art;
+one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist
+divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human,
+grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so
+thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked
+like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this
+there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that
+it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of
+hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing
+that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no
+ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its
+graveyard.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on
+Bell's Hill&mdash;do you see it?&mdash;told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising
+up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most
+interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit
+of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in
+Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own,
+and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said,
+"A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what
+cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears
+came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the
+Scotch is your one accomplishment."</p>
+
+<p>But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between
+them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a
+sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical
+changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call
+his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This
+was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world
+became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a
+dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long
+steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and purple leaves looked like
+snips of painted tin; and the Glencorse Burn on the other side of the
+field was overhung by bare trees of gold. Every window of the farmhouse
+across the valley was a loophole of flame; and here it was evident, from
+the passing of a multitude of figures about the farm buildings and a
+babblement that drove in gusts across the valley, there was happening
+some event that matched the prodigiousness of the strange appearance
+lent it by the sunset.</p>
+
+<p>"There's an awful argy-bargying at Little Vantage," said Ellen, "I
+wonder what's going on."</p>
+
+<p>When they crossed over the burn and turned into the road that led back
+to the farmhouse they found the dykes plastered with intimations of a
+sale of live stock. "Ah, it's a roup! Old Mr. Gumley must be dead, poor
+soul!" And indeed the road was lined with farmers' gigs, paint and
+brass-work blazing with the evening light till they looked like fiery
+chariots that would presently lift to heaven. About the yard gate there
+was a great press of hale farmers, gilt and ruddy from the sunset they
+faced, and vomiting jests at each other out of their great bearded
+mouths; and in the yard sheep with golden fleece and cattle as bright as
+dragons ran hither and thither before the sticks of boys who looked like
+demons with the orange glow on their faces, and who cursed and spat to
+show they would some-day be men. Richard and Ellen had to stand back for
+a moment while a horse was led out; and as it passed a paunchy farmer
+jocularly struck it between the eyes and roared, "Ye're no for me, ye
+auld mare, wi' your braw beginnings of the ringbone!" And there was so
+much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much
+patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the
+incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster
+who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest
+sound of a whimper from Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening
+sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was
+something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was
+so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from
+which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is
+like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. "A lot of beefy, red-faced angels
+buying us up and taking us off to their own places without a word to us
+of where we're to go to, and commenting most unfeelingly on all our
+failings...."</p>
+
+<p>"You funny person," he murmured, "you're tired. Probably hungry. Where's
+that cottage you talked about where they'll give us tea?"</p>
+
+<p>"Over yonder," she quavered, "but I'm not wanting any tea."</p>
+
+<p>But just then a gig drew up beside them, driven by an old man and laden
+with a couple of tin trunks and a cornucopia of a woman, who had
+snatched the reins out of the old man's hands. "What's this? A roup at
+Little Vantage! Feyther, what's happened?" The old man shook his head.
+"Feyther, ye niver ken onything." She raised a megaphonic voice.
+"Moggie! Moggie Gumley!" A fat young woman with a soap-shining face ran
+out of the farmhouse. "Wha's calling me? Och, it's you, Mistress
+Cairns!" "Ay, it's me. What's ta'en ye all here? I've been awa' for two
+months keepin' hoose for ma brither Jock while his wife's been in the
+Infirmary wi' her chumer. I didn't think I'd come back to find a roup at
+Little Vantage." "So ye've not haird?" gasped the fat young woman
+delightedly. "Feyther's deid o' his dropsy, and Alec and me's awa' to
+Canady this day fortnight." She panted it out with so honest a joy in
+the commotion, so innocent a disregard of the tragedy of death and
+emigration, that Yaverland and Ellen had to turn away and laugh; and he
+drew her across the road to the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>The door was opened before they got there. "It's me, Mrs. Lawson!" said
+Ellen. "Indeed, I kenned that!" replied the housewife. "I was keeking
+out of the window when you came up the road, and I said to masel',
+'There's Miss Melville, and she'll be wanting her tea,' so I awa' and
+popped the kettle on. Bring your gentleman in. He's a new face, but he's
+welcome. Ye'll pardon the parlour being a' of a reek wi' tobaccy, but
+Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Borthwick cam' in and had a cup o' tea and a bit of
+a crack. They were both bidding at the roup and some business thegither.
+I think Mr. Laidlaw means to buy Cornhaven off Mr. Borthwick and give it
+to his son John, wha's married on a Glasca girl, a shelpit wee thing wi'
+a Glesca accent like skirling pipes played by a drunken piper." They
+watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry
+jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip,
+their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the
+superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them
+they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the
+mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires.
+All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; and farmers
+hawked out their last jests at one another, mounted their gigs and drove
+home; and the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle pattered by, bleating
+and lowing not so heartrendingly.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen rose, went over to the mantelpiece and stroked the china dogs, and
+sat down in an armchair by the fire. "This has been a lovely day," she
+murmured. She joined her hands behind her head and crossed her knees and
+smiled blindishly into the shadow; and his heart turned over in him. All
+his life he would remember her just as she was then: the lovely attitude
+of body that was at once angular and softly sensuous, like a
+blossom-laden branch; the pure pearl colour of her skin, the pure bright
+colours of her hair and eyes and mouth; the passionate and funny, shrewd
+and credulous pattern of her features; and that dozing smile, that
+looked as if her soul had ceased to run up and down enquiringly and was
+resting awhile to enjoy the sweetness that was its own climate. He would
+never forget her as she was looking then. She might turn away from him,
+she might get old, she might die, but the memory of her as she was at
+that moment would endure for ever in his heart, an eternally living
+thing. He was aware, reluctantly enough, for he hated such mystical
+knowledge, and would have given the world to see life as a plain round
+of dicing and drinking and wenching, that real love was somehow a cruel
+thing for women; that the hour when she became his wife would be as
+illimitably tragic as it would be illimitably glorious. But love was
+also very kind to women, since it enabled them to live always at their
+loveliest in their lover's memories, there perpetually exempt from the
+age and ugliness that even the bravest of them seemed pitifully to fear.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, of course love was not so kind to every woman. No one remembered
+his mother as he would remember Ellen. He began to ponder what his
+mother must have been like when she was that age, and it marked a
+certain difference between him and other men, that he was grudgingly
+surprised that the girl he meant to marry was as beautiful as his
+mother. Certainly, he reflected, with a bitter, gloating grief, Marion
+Yaverland must have been beautiful enough to deserve a lodging in some
+man's memory. She must have been brilliantly attractive in the obvious
+physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit
+must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he
+suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that
+other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which
+showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark,
+silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.</p>
+
+<p>There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant
+that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come
+back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had
+grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that
+climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull,
+and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her
+hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then
+spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and
+cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality
+flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had
+not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her
+lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who
+stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good
+repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on
+the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the
+unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their
+cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from
+her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble
+that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost
+strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands
+over her face.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the
+clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to
+catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we
+must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its
+intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that
+almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her
+arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her
+red hair. But when they got into the lane outside she hurried towards
+the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath
+sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run,
+although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See,"
+he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't
+anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware
+that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he
+asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it
+possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark?
+He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she
+had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit
+that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of
+matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her
+ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of
+discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for
+the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of
+self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no
+witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened
+with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them
+between sleeping and waking.</p>
+
+<p>It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely
+impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal
+ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.
+It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things
+which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer
+sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy
+shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He
+perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way
+she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her
+hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver
+with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her
+hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of
+fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated
+with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in
+women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's
+life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of
+worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee
+contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt
+for those other women.</p>
+
+<p>The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and
+lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats,
+who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the
+soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen.
+"And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat
+extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and
+found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.
+Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to
+which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength
+too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the <i>Gondomar</i> had been
+scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a
+cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with
+inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all
+right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an
+hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the
+station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone
+that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half
+asleep."</p>
+
+<p>The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take
+a seat in it while he got the tickets. But she did not. Its carriages
+were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those
+burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want
+to take that train. She would have liked to turn back with him through
+the dark avenues into the Pentlands. The sunset, which had somehow been
+as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before
+the kind, sleepy darkness, undisturbed there in the valley by the
+wee-est cottage light. It would be good to lie down for the night on the
+heather of some ledge on the hillside where one could hear the Logan
+Burn talking as it ran from the fall, and to look up and see Mr.
+Yaverland sitting in that nice slouching way he had, a great black shape
+against the stars. But that was a daft idea. She was annoyed for
+thinking of anything so foolish, and when he came out and chid her for
+standing about on the windy platform she found nothing on her lips but a
+cross murmur.</p>
+
+<p>That did not really matter, for one could not hurt grown-up people. They
+were always happy. Everybody in the world was happy except her. Without
+doubt he would think her quite mad if he knew that she was in the grip
+of a depression that seemed to be wringing misery out of her body and
+brain as one wrings water out of a bathing-dress, so when they got into
+the train she turned away, muttered yawningly that she was very tired,
+and buried her face in the crook of her arm so that he might think she
+slept. It puzzled her that she felt so disappointed. What had she
+expected to happen to-day that hadn't happened? Everything had been
+lovely. Mr. Yaverland had talked most interestingly, and the hills had
+been very beautiful. She was ashamed of all those tears that she shed
+more frequently than one would have expected from an intending rival of
+Pierpont Morgan, but these present tears filled her with terror because
+they were so utterly irrational. Irrational, too, was the sudden picture
+that flashed on her mind's eye of Mr. Philip sitting in the opposite
+corner of the carriage, screwing up his dark face with mocking laughter.
+"Mr. Philip is driving me mad," she thought to herself. "Some day soon
+I'll find myself in Morningside Asylum, sticking flowers in my hair and
+flattering myself I'm Queen Victoria. But I will not go mad. I am going
+to get on. I am going to be great. But am I? I think I am not." Her face
+made a wet contorted mask against her sleeve, and a swallowed sob was as
+sharp in her throat as a fishbone; and there struck through her like an
+impaling sword a certainty which she could not understand, but which was
+surely a certificate that there was to be no more happiness, that even
+if Mr. Philip ceased to persecute her she would still be hungry and
+tormented.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps if she could go to some new country she would escape from this
+misery. She saw a sky like stretched blue silk, stamped with the black
+monograms of palms; a purple bay shaped like a shell and edged with a
+white embroidery of surf. Surely such fair weather killed with sweetness
+such coarse plants as her stupid gloom, as the foul weather here killed
+with its coarseness all sweet-flowering southern plants. She turned to
+Yaverland to ask him if he could help her to find work abroad, but she
+became aware that she was in the grip of an unreasonable emotion that
+prevented her from this. It was as horrible to her to see the coldly
+logical apparatus of her mind churning out these irrational conclusions
+as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in
+drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery
+would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed
+disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery
+unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the
+way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level
+save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that
+he was standing over her, and her heart almost stopped. He said, "I
+think we're just coming into Edinburgh." There was no reason why she
+should feel chilled and desolate when he said that. She must be going
+out of her mind.</p>
+
+<p>And he, since she had shown by the simplicity of her movements that she
+was not afraid of him, was quite happy.</p>
+
+<p>He could see the picture of himself sitting beside the sleeping child as
+if it were printed in three colours on glossy paper. But he was a little
+troubled lest she had walked too far, and as they went up the stone
+steps from the station to Princes Street he bent over her and asked in a
+tone of tenderness that he enjoyed using, "Are you tired?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very tired," said Ellen, drooping her head, and aping a fatigue
+greater than anything she had ever felt in all her young life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Philip was crossing Princes Street when he saw them standing in the
+white circle under the electric standard by the station steps. The
+strong light fell on them like a criticism, and it seemed to him brazen
+the way they stood there being so handsome that the passers-by turned
+about to stare at them. Doubtless, since folks were such fools, they
+were whispering that the two made a fine pair. Surely it was the vilest
+indecency that there, under his very eyes, that great hulking chap from
+Rio bent his head and spoke to Ellen, and she answered him?</p>
+
+<p>"She's standing there making herself as conspicuous as if she were a
+street girl!" he screamed to himself, and other shouts filled his ears,
+and he became aware that a cursing driver had pulled up his horse a foot
+away and that the loafers at the kerb were lifting jeering cries. He
+charged it one more offence to Ellen's account that she had caused him
+to make a fool of himself, and vowed he would never think of her again,
+and ran among the people to see where she had gone. Yaverland was
+leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now
+nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did
+not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and
+a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet
+treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised
+with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this
+was anybody but Ellen&mdash;Ellen, who was far different from every other
+woman in the world and more desirable. She slowly turned, as if her
+spirit had felt this rage at the fact of her running at her heels, and
+wished to have it out with him. He gripped his stick and raised a hand
+to hide his working mouth, and waited for the moment when she would see
+his face, but it did not come.</p>
+
+<p>The man Yaverland had put out his great ham of a hand and hailed a cab.
+When Mr. Philip tried to stop a cab he usually had to run alongside it,
+and often the driver was most impudent, but this swaggering bully
+checked the thing on the instant, and handed in Ellen and drove off in
+style as if he was a duke with his duchess in their own carriage. What
+did they want in a cab anyway? He followed the black trundling square on
+its spidery wheels as it turned round by the Register House to cross the
+North Bridge, and imagined the fine carryings on they were doubtless
+having in the dark in there. He called Ellen a name he had not thought
+of before.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to be done about it. He stood for a while at the
+railing of that strange garden of concrete walks and raised parterres
+and ventilating-shafts that lies at this end of Princes Street, built on
+the roof of the sunk market. Its rectilinear aspect pleased him. It was
+not romantic, the gates were locked, and one could be sure that there
+were no lovers trysting there. Presently he moved along towards the West
+End, keeping still on the side of the street where there were no men and
+girls prancing about and grinning at each other like dirty apes under
+the lights, but only empty gardens with locked gates. What had those two
+been doing? They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very
+long journey it must have been dark before they started. They had been
+in the country alone together when it was quite dark. There came to him
+memories of sounds he had once heard when walking through a twilit wood,
+the crackling of twigs, a little happy cry of distress, and again the
+crackling of twigs; he had been compelled by something, which was not
+specially in him but was a part of the damned way life went, to stand
+and listen, though he knew it was not decent. He saw before him Ellen's
+face lying white on her spilt red hair, and it added to his anguish that
+he could not see it clearly, but had to peer at this enraging vision
+because he could not make out what her expression would be. He had seen
+her look a thousand ways during these last few weeks when she had kept
+on drawing his attention to her with her simpering girl's tricks, but he
+could not imagine how she would look then. It seemed as if she were
+defying his imagination as she defied him every day in the office, and
+he turned his mind away from the matter in a frenzy, but began soon to
+wonder what those two had been doing. They had come in by train. Unless
+they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before
+they started....</p>
+
+<p>He knew he must not go on like this, and looked round him. He had passed
+the classic portico of the Art Gallery and was walking now by the wilder
+section of the gardens, where the street lights shone back from the
+shining leaves of bushes and made them look like glazed paper, and with
+their glare made the trees behind seem such flat canvas trees as they
+set about the stage at theatres when there is need for a romantic glade
+for a lovers' meeting. How often had Ellen met Yaverland?</p>
+
+
+<p>He ran across the road. It would be better among the people. It was not
+so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were. Everybody
+in the world was happy except him. No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were
+just bursting with merriment in that cab. Would they be at home yet? She
+would be telling him all the office jokes. Well, she might, for all he
+cared. He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip
+Hop-o'-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn't give a straw for it. He
+stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to
+bottom of its window with strings of actresses' photographs, and stood
+there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an
+exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that
+indicated the glittering facades of these charmers' smiles, the milky
+smoothness of their bean-fed femininity. Ah, these were the really fine
+women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin
+slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne. Who
+would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the
+world?</p>
+
+<p>But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so
+beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she
+insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who
+had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience
+that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such
+as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller
+than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He
+hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and
+began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his
+mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness
+of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of
+contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and
+what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social
+contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still
+until one had finished swearing at her.</p>
+
+<p>But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that
+Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would
+have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she
+had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in
+Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among
+the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one
+can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside
+the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found
+it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so
+ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage
+of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen
+without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one
+did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at
+one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He
+had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side
+of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she
+took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an
+iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.
+Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not
+been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office
+fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and
+a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had
+fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men. She had been a
+cruel beast. For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might
+have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering
+things so loud. Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to
+those depths.</p>
+
+<p>He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the
+decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense
+to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved
+accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could
+not come to harm. But that would not alter the fact that he had once
+come to harm. As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw
+that a "To Let" board had been put up since the morning. He wondered why
+the Allardyces were leaving it. He had been at school with the boys. He
+and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school
+sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy. He
+remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy
+sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved
+in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all
+behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see
+them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his
+body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh,
+giving him a cold, pure feeling. Well, he was not a boy any longer. The
+Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that;
+nothing would be the same again....</p>
+
+<p>The solidity of his father's house, the hall into which he let himself,
+with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting
+of his mother's father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him
+feel better. He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most
+respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset
+about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the
+dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with
+deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings. There was a very
+handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights
+and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on
+the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table. "Mhm!" he sighed
+contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the
+whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.</p>
+
+<p>The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He
+put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was
+immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red
+hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He
+met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak
+to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so,
+but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.</p>
+
+
+<p>There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from
+top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a
+bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which
+contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary,
+which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a
+manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.
+Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a
+stranded whale, reading the London <i>Law Journal</i> and breathing
+disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when
+in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip
+came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the
+entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr.
+Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking
+this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He
+sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather
+than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only
+sons. But he went at it.</p>
+
+<p>"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the
+faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just
+seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from
+Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."</p>
+
+<p>"What for should they not?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of
+night."</p>
+
+<p>"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn
+over the pages of the <i>Law Journal</i>. "We've not had our dinners yet.
+Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs
+we shouldn't be long."</p>
+
+<p>"Father, people were looking at them. They&mdash;they were holding hands." He
+forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like
+that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."</p>
+
+<p>At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were
+still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a
+good girl, Philip," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those
+inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew,
+where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and
+unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any
+mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial
+tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were
+his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.
+There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his
+urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the
+onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If
+she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her,
+father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the
+discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could
+surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned
+towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to
+Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up
+at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a
+word."</p>
+
+<p>It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father,
+thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office
+discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he
+said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He
+ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had
+always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her
+conduct....</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk
+was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was
+sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and
+staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance
+entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue
+overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and
+the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk
+hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at
+anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in
+Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she
+had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew
+she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still
+knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be
+looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting
+Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the
+desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella
+Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like
+the hand of a young man.</p>
+
+<p>But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose
+the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention
+began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony,
+the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay
+athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when
+I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every
+room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a
+caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it
+like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan
+is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my
+own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I
+keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with
+a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the
+progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright
+head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his
+thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not
+like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both
+very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be
+sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she
+was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I
+had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh
+that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin
+who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a
+suitable marriage."</p>
+
+<p>He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which
+although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have
+behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors
+which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the
+gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could
+turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he
+had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns'
+love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to
+passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had
+persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the
+high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny
+warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening
+years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety
+darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in
+moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been
+to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been
+to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could
+reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her
+who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady
+young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all
+his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.</p>
+
+<p>But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away
+when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to
+marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered
+how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head
+and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she
+forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to
+make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after
+all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed
+himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a
+time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she
+had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark
+eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though
+tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her
+cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such
+modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a
+capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If
+she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would
+have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had,
+although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his
+first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm,
+and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But
+Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.</p>
+
+<p>His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses
+that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been
+the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking
+over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had
+risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear
+her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest
+pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though
+quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl
+must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that
+proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her
+sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things
+were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had
+been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be
+young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and
+know no after-life.</p>
+
+<p>No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one
+depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and
+orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must
+settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is
+quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely
+with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us.
+But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He
+rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs
+with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.</p>
+
+<p>And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were
+going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had
+waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when
+Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had
+gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any
+way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited
+her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She
+had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say
+good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the
+dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look
+that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face,
+which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with
+interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive
+glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts,
+and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some
+imagination that had given him pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from
+him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it
+was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The
+only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking
+walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her
+mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though
+everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy
+terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was
+just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress
+her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said
+courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all
+night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become
+ringing proclamations of indifference.</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that,
+though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see
+one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a
+telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had
+asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead.
+Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet
+very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely
+action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil
+to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an
+infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by
+which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which
+he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her
+hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as
+if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so
+that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would
+draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think
+so malignantly of one who had been so kind&mdash;so much kinder than anybody
+else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she
+knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that
+Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago
+she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she
+saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex,
+her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her
+that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of
+madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her
+cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the
+quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way
+with derision, of Mr. Philip.</p>
+
+<p>He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"</p>
+
+<p>Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity
+he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told
+him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is
+nobody ready to give me work."</p>
+
+<p>He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"</p>
+
+<p>She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale,
+and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that
+she should have to live in this world where everyone was either
+inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers
+that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them
+at once."</p>
+
+<p>For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and
+at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an
+ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate.
+A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and
+said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude,
+but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his
+hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands
+from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had
+need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were
+doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could
+just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But
+it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway
+under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the
+strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied
+that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you
+please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to
+speak to you this afternoon?"</p>
+
+<p>"He usually does," replied Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial
+an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth
+puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held
+in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily,
+making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about
+to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign
+of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to
+it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt
+at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to
+be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered
+at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have
+come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"</p>
+
+<p>She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her
+still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the
+trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had
+dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me?
+Whoever's been complaining&mdash;and no doubt if your clients once began at
+that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock
+gun&mdash;it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm
+practically infallible."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing.
+"Perhaps we might call it your play."</p>
+
+<p>He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick
+whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn
+near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making
+wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in
+darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown
+indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his
+features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything
+about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head
+because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with
+all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville,
+a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have
+been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on
+Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist
+chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving
+away. I won't tell you"&mdash;he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and
+became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before
+he speaks of evil&mdash;"what the client made of it all." And then he bent
+again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in
+an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous
+sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but
+which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and
+she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a
+satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she
+continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this
+misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her
+crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.</p>
+
+<p>But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had
+spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the
+serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her
+tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her
+face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled
+surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably
+precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that
+if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out
+of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to
+a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was
+defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to
+destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it
+was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble
+and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same
+persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and
+planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his
+efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count
+that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety
+was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me
+to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk
+the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my
+time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as
+if she was playing a jig.</p>
+
+<p>He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously,
+"The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now,
+if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through
+her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a
+misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which
+falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the
+recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of
+foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was
+the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could
+effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it
+was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being
+nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had
+talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed
+him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently
+to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his
+shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into
+a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of
+madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that
+in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing.
+For of course it could not be so.</p>
+
+<p>Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my
+wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as
+men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of
+craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no
+mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned
+page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that
+it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always
+gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she
+had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of
+Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in
+her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,
+which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting
+any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt
+in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the
+side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic
+lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding
+bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a
+lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the
+client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes
+Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it
+was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and
+another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and
+flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,
+the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with
+waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and
+tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy
+like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for
+his dealings with his wife's money....</p>
+
+<p>But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one
+thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.
+"Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I
+spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a
+shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months
+to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think
+she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping
+undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were
+just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had
+had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out,
+though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because
+the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a
+quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to
+her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with
+her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her?
+They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man
+on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she
+hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his
+lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she
+rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was
+suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if
+there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string
+was snapping separately.</p>
+
+<p>"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself
+remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the
+world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise.
+"There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to
+sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so
+you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just
+for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had
+been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine,
+which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly
+unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series
+of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the
+dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way,
+and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the
+heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood
+arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by
+the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up
+again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee
+men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought
+proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the
+tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood
+such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.
+It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically
+and mentally.</p>
+
+<p>She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.
+But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on,
+masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of
+that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in
+strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with
+extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running
+red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every
+way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than
+she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast
+for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate
+adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges
+and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would
+take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women,
+hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage,
+who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try
+to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she
+perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.
+When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would
+have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the
+mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house
+on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a
+furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private
+system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a
+key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in
+one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With
+perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the
+garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as
+monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with
+weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick
+his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor;
+he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands
+of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the
+white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the
+creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken
+roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and
+dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark
+ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience.
+Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....</p>
+
+<p>All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or
+had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step
+was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not
+look up from the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."</p>
+
+<p>She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he
+had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been
+talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size
+that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other
+hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought
+she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she
+said mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put
+in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly?
+I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let
+me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not
+know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked
+with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage
+on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his
+cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence.
+"Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box
+as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian
+and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must
+be sickening for something."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger
+stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her
+hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with
+eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a
+woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish
+James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity
+with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with
+pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and
+purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point
+and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his
+chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant
+occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and
+distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this
+creditable pity.</p>
+
+<p>"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."</p>
+
+<p>She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could
+also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into
+the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love
+may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing
+under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets
+describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy,
+and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it
+deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is
+just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just
+luck....</p>
+
+<p>"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a
+client."</p>
+
+<p>He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away.
+All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle
+things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on
+doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which
+did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr.
+Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the
+long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The
+girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of
+life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus
+assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed,
+quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and
+at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a
+child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could
+not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and
+tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell
+you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes
+among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"</p>
+
+<p>"Och, you make fun of me&mdash;!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger
+stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not
+bite it.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing
+seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish
+pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion,
+until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and
+got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this
+delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little
+of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that
+fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a
+wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that
+particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has
+no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure
+as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say
+that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad,
+though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking
+arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a
+great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling.
+"The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars
+and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled
+brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but
+wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It
+flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat
+and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see
+what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must
+admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are
+on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would
+not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she
+started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish
+tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger
+stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to
+gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger
+when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back
+for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll
+have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the
+colour...."</p>
+
+<p>While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers,
+the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and
+rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over
+a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds.
+When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of
+soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick
+to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being,
+and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was
+completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life
+was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now
+she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair,
+which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the
+weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable
+women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the
+same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her
+coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that
+people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions
+that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to
+have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.</p>
+
+<p>To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you
+women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with
+the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a
+fine piece in the <i>Scotsman</i> this morning about one of your Suffragettes
+standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would
+think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing
+slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra
+ladylike, I'm sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he
+sits for Fife."</p>
+
+<p>"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady,
+who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's <i>Votes for Women</i>.
+She's a beautiful girl."</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt it, Nelly."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll bring the photo then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully,
+watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married
+if she is so beautiful?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen,
+admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I
+heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder,
+yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters
+have to be carried out on stretchers."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James,
+and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her
+speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite
+enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while
+we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the
+Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my
+teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't
+admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."</p>
+
+<p>"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his
+eyes on her face.</p>
+
+<p>"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she
+answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her
+arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had
+begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking
+of Yaverland.</p>
+
+<p>She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with
+a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with
+which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off
+her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise,
+and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and
+began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly
+justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it
+until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It
+is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an
+unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is
+performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by
+dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words
+sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance
+and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was
+not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this
+fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his
+mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual
+in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and
+watch his typist dancing.</p>
+
+<p>But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away
+her breath.</p>
+
+<p>She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass,
+and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful
+lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is
+always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as
+soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the
+window-seat and smiled back at the old man.</p>
+
+<p>"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as
+the great Dr. Johnson says."</p>
+
+<p>But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make
+time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was
+just a rude old thing."</p>
+
+<p>"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."</p>
+
+<p>"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked
+with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and
+indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in
+your chair all day and ruining the coats of your&mdash;of your digestion
+drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs.
+Thrale when the poor body married again."</p>
+
+<p>"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a
+substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."</p>
+
+<p>"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way
+they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And
+hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if
+they were blunt wise ones&mdash;that's not sense. And if it were, what's the
+good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on
+your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you
+dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it.
+One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There
+are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get
+romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on
+the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people&mdash;masked
+Touaregs&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a
+pairfect salad of foreign pairts."</p>
+
+<p>It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both
+sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and
+etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I
+should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal
+spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go
+there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and
+went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de
+Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house
+where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.
+"And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the
+big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens,
+and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats.
+I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?&mdash;if I would wear dead
+things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be
+nice, however rich I was&mdash;ways that don't affect me very much, so that
+they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I
+always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and
+jaguars. And&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your
+heart to a keeper at the Zoo."</p>
+
+<p>"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you
+needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he
+steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the
+crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was
+working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some
+other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He
+is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come
+natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said
+nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."</p>
+
+<p>"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling
+stones gather no moss, I've heard."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of
+money. He can beat you even at your own game."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking
+round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it
+contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And
+what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.</p>
+
+<p>He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his
+stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not
+do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.
+"He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."</p>
+
+<p>Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched.
+The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the
+day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if
+they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned
+unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked
+sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away
+from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the
+prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any
+appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling
+intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a
+conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was
+morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain,
+that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For
+Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed
+possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion
+in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two
+establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so
+satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to
+take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things
+he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going
+to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their
+good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece
+of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him
+to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity
+of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness
+which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside
+the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives
+himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked
+back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the
+little helpless working-girl.</p>
+
+<p>He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and
+offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give
+you pleasure when I bought them."</p>
+
+<p>One would always get her that way.</p>
+
+<p>Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove.
+"Oh, Mr. James!"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've
+been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"</p>
+
+<p>"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am
+too free with my tongue."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. James!"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go
+your own way&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at
+the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as
+sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the
+spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you
+are very beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aye," he said, "beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand
+on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were
+focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity
+that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a
+little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.</p>
+
+<p>"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National
+Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing?
+I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an
+actress. Tell me, which am I like?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're like both. That's where you score."</p>
+
+<p>She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."</p>
+
+<p>She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she
+were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if,
+indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.</p>
+
+<p>"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on
+straight?"</p>
+
+<p>"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've
+never looked at yourself before."</p>
+
+<p>She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up
+and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you not beautiful?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and
+stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done
+something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In
+evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux
+Cam&eacute;lias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan&mdash;a big fan of
+ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost
+gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that
+is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I
+suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the
+plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I
+not?"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James,
+"and her you'd better with your tongue."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't
+matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like
+Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's
+merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I
+am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure
+I'll do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.</p>
+
+<p>She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual
+mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh
+dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay.
+"What nonsense we're talking! Do&mdash;for what? It's all pairfectly
+ridiculous&mdash;as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so
+physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too
+quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit,
+abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but
+abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the
+mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit
+buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She
+stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she
+were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than
+they had ever been before, because she was holding them with
+consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her
+frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in
+silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with
+a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that
+there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat
+of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and
+then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding
+herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were
+clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half
+from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to
+this interesting suffering of hers.</p>
+
+<p>Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on
+her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's
+very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're
+talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice
+sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"</p>
+
+<p>She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief.
+"Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell
+back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking,
+shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head
+fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she
+pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this
+office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had
+November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She
+pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if
+she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"</p>
+
+<p>"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.</p>
+
+<p>She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had
+boasted about something that could not come true, that would be
+horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only
+the young can feel.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had
+to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating
+silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."</p>
+
+<p>At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot
+at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy,
+and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her
+chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her
+hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression.
+She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a
+schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had
+married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her
+manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was
+trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her
+mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She
+caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this
+pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the
+window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if
+the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a
+negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the
+bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of
+wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what
+it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid
+on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she
+must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark.
+Surely it's time I was away home?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past
+four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James
+cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a
+bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so
+terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing
+his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella
+Kingan suffered thus?</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the
+hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and
+tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried,
+she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things
+always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as
+she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not
+alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.
+Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the
+blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in
+this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac
+words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their
+brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose,
+that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting
+strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the
+bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.
+At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed
+with hate. He had brought all this upon her.</p>
+
+<p>And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring
+endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as
+to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the <i>tempo
+rubato</i> and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no
+more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the
+wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....</p>
+
+<p>She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his
+presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent
+accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie?
+Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the
+doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all
+right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was
+not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well
+be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and
+forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!"
+she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm
+doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"</p>
+
+<p>He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into
+the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door
+of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran
+down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+
+<p>More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been
+crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she
+had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights
+in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a
+cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture
+does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and
+called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called
+that her mother had that morning said something about spending the
+afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again,
+"Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out
+angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at
+the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was
+perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to
+her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the
+caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff
+tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking
+queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she
+had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to
+the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the
+breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and
+carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in
+digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her
+heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible
+derider.</p>
+
+<p>"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped.
+"Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up
+the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human
+beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get
+myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the
+Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a
+time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk
+and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing
+at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she
+had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the
+larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam
+her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had
+always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being
+chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it
+liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being
+glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an
+exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that
+flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a
+violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was
+silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common
+and precious too.</p>
+
+<p>She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken
+with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the
+touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that
+she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not
+grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully,
+putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my
+strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what
+they've lost...."</p>
+
+<p>The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her
+buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she
+knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only
+because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to
+leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures
+of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp
+brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no
+more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and
+moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the
+plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of
+departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was
+the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could
+imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name
+were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.</p>
+
+<p>Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather
+than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she
+meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare
+plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when
+they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running
+up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River
+Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark
+glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green
+fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss
+that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep
+river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory
+tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat
+and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river,
+overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel,
+weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached
+ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff
+movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired
+merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of
+its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows
+leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were
+somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to
+notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one
+need! Ah, but it was now.</p>
+
+<p>If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be
+impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall
+across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers
+because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of
+the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought
+of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so
+rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled
+with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart.
+She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight,
+that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world
+and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this
+moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster
+the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put
+on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and
+greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks.
+She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....</p>
+
+<p>Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it
+was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived
+there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate
+opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and
+apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed
+deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door
+and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet;
+her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if
+there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.</p>
+
+<p>His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was,
+and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither
+greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down
+into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her
+eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels
+standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver
+rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as
+they had always looked on any night.</p>
+
+<p>"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand
+closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of
+the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.</p>
+
+<p>"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till,
+feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're
+getting wet! Darling, let us go in."</p>
+
+<p>When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark,
+and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze
+he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of
+escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But
+he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and
+drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his
+hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat
+across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call
+me little? I am not little!"</p>
+
+<p>He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his
+fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and
+yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and
+terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not
+know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have
+countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich
+colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going
+to be of some high kind of glory.</p>
+
+<p>He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love
+me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she
+listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he
+pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel
+of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of
+women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to
+make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists;
+they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills
+or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and
+pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face
+wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was
+beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his
+passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the
+sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me,"
+was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She
+held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find
+that she too was whispering.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to
+love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle
+tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She
+loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to
+see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she
+loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts
+the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had
+confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep
+way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told
+you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without
+touching you. Please ... please...."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on
+her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had
+ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never
+thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when,
+between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was
+going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her)
+as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit
+water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on
+marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer,
+soft as the south wind....</p>
+
+<p>But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard,
+interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her
+mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever
+after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more
+subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms
+still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the
+strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage,
+of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things.
+Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another
+on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would
+always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not
+quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it
+was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was
+so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of
+his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish
+that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a
+little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an
+ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.</p>
+
+<p>A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become
+linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed
+under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose
+convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and
+depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose
+unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was
+as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung
+herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her
+happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there
+little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had
+always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became
+more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became
+less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of
+lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of
+his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity:
+"Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."</p>
+
+<p>They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The
+clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little
+room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball
+of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've
+ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself
+about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he
+was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down
+through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you
+... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his
+fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily
+and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood
+between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking
+the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy caf&eacute; table; men bent forward on
+their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men
+who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their
+graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a
+horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the
+filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which
+it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely
+necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk
+at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous
+heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen&mdash;you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that
+comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that
+doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed
+you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And
+yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to
+say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could
+beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to
+watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's
+all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved,
+that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped
+dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as
+your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I
+am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."</p>
+
+<p>He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first
+night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart
+pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic.
+I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love
+God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them
+to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has
+no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear
+prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and
+women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like
+it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which
+he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But
+there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love
+changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves
+up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some
+woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary
+women. <i>Vin Ordinaire.</i> Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female
+stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the
+spell&mdash;you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are
+the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for
+just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so
+great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that
+nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he
+feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity,
+since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this
+richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it
+made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for
+lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it
+had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to
+look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of
+his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his
+inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to
+make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against
+fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick
+sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more
+lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so
+little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself
+nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic
+change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his
+life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same
+revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though
+within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no
+reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover;
+but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of
+disloyalty to some fair standard.</p>
+
+<p>He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as
+an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been
+blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a
+severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an
+accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped
+unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth
+and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as
+if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to
+justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which
+showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of
+those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful
+interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely
+things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to
+him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a
+thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her
+again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me!
+I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested
+love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a
+lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the
+sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"</p>
+
+<p>She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her
+gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you
+think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're
+not miserable, are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes. I have been lately."</p>
+
+<p>"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong&mdash;and
+victorious! But why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."</p>
+
+<p>"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of
+organisation," she gravely told him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken
+particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to
+the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there,
+and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you
+go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do,
+although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of
+having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what
+it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of
+one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes
+one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come
+again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on
+to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he
+had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were
+thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The
+sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers.
+You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that
+in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you
+that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a
+garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what
+you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their
+branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they
+grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very
+edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look
+past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you.
+Dearest, when can we get married?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a
+wife?"</p>
+
+<p>He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep
+two."</p>
+
+<p>She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't
+divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston
+say so."</p>
+
+<p>He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I
+could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of
+things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...."
+She looked down, weighing grave things.</p>
+
+<p>"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I
+will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to
+make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let
+you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and
+whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her
+lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.</p>
+
+<p>"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure
+about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got.
+Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole
+worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls,
+stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of
+disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect
+surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was
+not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with
+precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with
+the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of
+organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for
+his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman
+fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who
+had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before
+the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her
+quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at
+last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory
+that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were
+stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of
+her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he
+went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money.
+Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great
+commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one
+considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure
+science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied
+science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got
+her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that
+sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex
+at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."</p>
+
+<p>She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?"
+she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why
+isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of
+being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money.
+I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the
+conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's
+game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge&mdash;the same kind
+of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a
+person by being with them all the time and loving them very much.
+Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the
+pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But,
+dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to
+marry me."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am
+marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will
+know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if
+you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't
+you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am!
+Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if
+he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were
+still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of
+which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any
+case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you,
+how little I deserve you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd
+been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself
+to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his
+eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer,
+living in a house with you, won't it?"</p>
+
+<p>He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling
+her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was
+outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had
+hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to
+him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the
+light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so
+real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as
+terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a
+helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again&mdash;for he knew she
+did not like him to say it!&mdash;such a little thing. He remembered, with a
+sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had
+sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the
+human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how
+he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated
+Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for
+the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men
+sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the
+way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some
+special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that
+lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.
+He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi'
+our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to
+see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was
+evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a
+world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest
+you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon
+day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed
+succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality,
+felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met
+her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in
+the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old
+men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white.
+"What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow
+to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish
+James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry.
+"Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew
+well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll
+have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had
+thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on
+perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland
+sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the
+narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its
+days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as
+some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had
+arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid
+fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks,
+Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house&mdash;he rolled his tongue round
+the loneliness repellently&mdash;had neither sent the cheque on to her nor
+asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called
+Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of
+property"&mdash;it was evident that he admired such&mdash;saw a prospect of
+getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing
+well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was,"
+and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and
+alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an
+eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.</p>
+
+<p>"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day,
+looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable
+unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find
+out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was
+abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and
+geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing
+standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what&mdash;she
+called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!&mdash;I kenned there was not her like
+under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her
+on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been
+amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing
+aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her
+mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court
+on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which
+she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that
+keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like
+to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?"
+Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her
+fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate
+about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here,
+as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable
+air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry
+laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a
+nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its
+troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."</p>
+
+<p>Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad
+concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie
+alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been
+overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man.
+Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion
+that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He
+had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it
+stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her
+disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could
+pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could
+step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he
+savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the
+sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must
+be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money?
+Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking
+of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had
+risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike
+because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've
+been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by
+the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching
+his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity.
+Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his
+back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her
+delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought
+of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her
+live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its
+primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more
+experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine
+white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny
+had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to
+miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be
+played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a
+r&ocirc;le. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very
+clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His
+heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have
+been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of
+concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this
+before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he
+wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of
+eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that
+his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life
+to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out
+loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow
+wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in
+gratitude, and found her looking at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking
+that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking
+down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."</p>
+
+<p>The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to
+take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh
+goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him
+from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on
+her bosom. "I want&mdash;I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be
+good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee
+and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one
+foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then
+she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands
+behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr.
+Gladstone!</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird,
+appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen!
+And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr.
+Yaverland into the parlour!"</p>
+
+<p>"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a
+guilty little girl.</p>
+
+<p>Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an
+instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never
+do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to
+marry me."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice
+at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at
+the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on
+the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he
+noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful
+to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her
+life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must
+live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent
+allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far
+as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet
+about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because
+now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!</p>
+
+<p>"Let me marry her soon," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had
+said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."</p>
+
+<p>"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.</p>
+
+<p>She became tragic.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house
+at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you.
+Obviously you can't stand this climate."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together
+having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well.
+I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into
+memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always
+practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man
+than anyone has allowed."</p>
+
+<p>They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its
+honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly,
+"Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went
+out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."</p>
+
+<p>"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland&mdash;maircy me, what shall I call
+you now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one
+would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing!
+Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I
+wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take
+Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."</p>
+
+<p>"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly.
+It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R&mdash;Richard, will you take her
+into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not
+hear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen dear!"</p>
+
+<p>"Away now!"</p>
+
+<p>"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the
+best tablecloth after the mending&mdash;and there's nothing but cod-roes, and
+you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away,
+dear&mdash;you'll make Richard feel awkward&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she
+knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+
+<p>He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to
+her three times.</p>
+
+<p><i>"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute
+of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the
+sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red
+hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds,
+and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the
+most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every
+moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a
+waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now
+I do&mdash;that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima,
+you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you;
+we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd
+light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your
+beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my
+lovely red-haired Ellen...."</i></p>
+
+<p>And she had written to him twice....</p>
+
+<p><i>"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what
+you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the
+library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping
+her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as
+hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically
+nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Shelley and Byron. But
+their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please
+come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did
+you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling
+there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of
+life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not
+believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there
+must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one
+another. Do please come soon...."</i></p>
+
+<p>Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and illustrated papers for
+the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.
+Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought
+Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three
+dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he
+saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind
+deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out
+to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw
+extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women
+living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the
+lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.
+Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that
+Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and
+unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the
+door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an
+amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant
+hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of
+the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a
+fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons
+convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase
+creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out
+at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her
+face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in
+lank, curved strands about her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a
+crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.
+They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."</p>
+
+<p>"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I
+knocked that it was diphtheria she had."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with
+wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd
+again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to
+think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in
+her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed
+her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick
+away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the
+staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses.
+"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.
+Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."</p>
+
+<p>"That be damned."</p>
+
+<p>"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled
+into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered
+in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"
+Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than
+any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her
+so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked
+so wee!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her
+so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his
+maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him,
+and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of
+the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no
+sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family
+now. You might have let me do that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you
+see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's
+no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have
+been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was
+her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme
+poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury
+but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the
+beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've
+told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six
+weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all
+the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful
+tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call
+on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her
+mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the
+slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and
+gathered her closely to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.</p>
+
+<p>"You look very beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck
+with a large horn button anything but decent."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm
+past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother
+her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning
+for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for
+my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like,
+though doubtless it would do me good to know."</p>
+
+<p>"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back
+the first thing in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness.
+("Ye've got&mdash;ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me
+feel all&mdash;all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me
+up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully
+before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appetite even when the
+Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work
+against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just
+Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you!
+There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that
+mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her
+terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was
+sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years
+ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot
+think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The
+doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry.
+She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You
+go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the
+kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have
+heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of
+Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go
+off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."</p>
+
+<p>"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come
+with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like
+a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal
+Family."</p>
+
+<p>"But why must you go out?"</p>
+
+<p>"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they
+give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and
+every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health
+Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill,
+friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,'
+'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be
+amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for
+worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my God, can't you telephone?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, of course not. They can't do that in these institutions. They'd
+have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But
+it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I
+never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the
+old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful
+thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although
+she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!"
+She passed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging
+down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the
+table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with
+milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that
+was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great
+grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing
+and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress
+in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just
+wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she
+never got one. Illustrated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing
+intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a
+great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages,
+clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I
+expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."</p>
+
+<p>Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in
+her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't
+I go and look at this board?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I want to go myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some
+place in Princes Street."</p>
+
+<p>"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying
+good-night to Mother."</p>
+
+<p>They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on
+to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.
+She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and
+stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring
+noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just
+lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently
+she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must
+go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing
+in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird
+might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with
+gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose
+you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you
+can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to
+turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not
+handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped
+her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going
+to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there,
+shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's
+easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But
+mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his
+letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets
+old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be
+able to keep it up?"</p>
+
+<p>She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her
+parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh
+Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of
+deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the
+persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious
+gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It
+was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.</p>
+
+<p>He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things
+much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll
+be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet
+there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for
+you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I
+have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ...
+I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...
+something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it
+communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.</p>
+
+<p>They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.
+He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that
+to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she
+was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and
+trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found
+pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind
+region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth
+in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such
+fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.</p>
+
+<p>At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they
+made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it
+travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of
+Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of
+coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since
+there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their
+minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church
+like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is
+doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than
+precious stones.</p>
+
+<p>So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women
+are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern
+women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of
+languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North
+was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their
+bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such
+sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him
+for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so
+sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme
+passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would
+provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he
+had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen
+during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been,
+he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising
+things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen
+would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he
+realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and
+therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by
+telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for
+he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which
+pain surely could not live.</p>
+
+<p>"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it
+you were thinking of saying?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell
+you about myself."</p>
+
+<p>She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her
+heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will
+know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything
+disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted
+that till you met me you were a bad character."</p>
+
+<p>"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother
+and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it,
+and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor
+little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old
+story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with.
+We've got our own lives to lead, thank God!"</p>
+
+<p>She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted,
+and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something
+that you ought to tell me!"</p>
+
+<p>He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm
+illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, God,
+it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She
+probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his
+deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence
+there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him
+want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't
+married to each other...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's
+silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand
+gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the
+others twit you with it?"</p>
+
+<p>Oh, God, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when
+they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is
+always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."</p>
+
+<p>He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage
+meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable
+they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman
+in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she
+herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to
+cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to
+have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that
+everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards
+it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If
+she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that
+solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred
+saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which
+was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking
+of <i>the</i> unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not
+married to my father...."</p>
+
+<p>But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch
+of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel
+of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of
+physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before
+hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either
+not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had
+reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers,
+and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a
+merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and
+undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might
+have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so
+wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There
+appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps
+the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which
+represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff
+and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a
+little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She
+wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth
+and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what
+is she like?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she
+was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity
+as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday
+papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that.
+Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as
+tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea
+of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was
+saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite
+uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might
+have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at
+once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of
+himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the
+Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell
+her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he
+could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned
+his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt
+himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar
+reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to
+his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not
+marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least,
+on her side it was love! On his ... on <i>his</i>...."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was
+trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow
+it's making it happen all over again...."</p>
+
+<p>This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was
+using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when
+he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for
+the argument of phantom passions in her room, and she opened her eyes
+suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him
+grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand,
+but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly,
+I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the
+ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that
+stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was
+not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found
+fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of
+course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion
+became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel
+of his Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me," he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I forgive you."</p>
+
+<p>"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a brave undertaking!"</p>
+
+<p>They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've
+always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing
+I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest
+collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used
+to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her
+tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge.
+Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth
+when it is nearly all bookshops?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her
+breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she
+slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they
+were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with
+drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this
+street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed
+with windows broken or hung with rags.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't this the High Street?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a
+fine Saturday morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the
+Highlanders drilling."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most
+likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only
+taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He
+said I would be just a fule to worry."</p>
+
+<p>He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops
+that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm.
+"You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this
+awful part."</p>
+
+<p>"Is this it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her
+number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon
+in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"</p>
+
+<p>After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your
+mother's number was?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that
+white dog!"</p>
+
+<p>His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the
+sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and
+they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced
+over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her
+being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her
+mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone
+arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness
+through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel
+drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a
+piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the
+gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to
+Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the
+residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good
+omens.</p>
+
+<p>When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with
+ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told
+herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining
+their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one,
+that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of
+an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that
+her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had
+seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away
+from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen
+behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud
+consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the
+same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the
+danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for
+the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and
+of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that
+fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the
+words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was
+that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds
+employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a
+position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a
+nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she
+perceived that he was going to do something which he should have
+delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and
+his office to these two strangers.</p>
+
+<p>As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm
+in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that
+the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the
+little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was
+definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits
+made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth,
+were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that
+followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the
+pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on
+lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they
+passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass
+and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran
+into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind,
+private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone;
+down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of
+different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making
+among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.</p>
+
+<p>This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and
+some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people
+should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and
+the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who
+carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could
+be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:
+"You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on
+the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'
+happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty
+without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted
+itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more
+that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the
+speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in
+the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her
+mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably
+well and wearing the moir&eacute; blouse that she had given her for her
+birthday.</p>
+
+<p>"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door
+that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place
+of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk,
+and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a
+prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not
+see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and
+turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she
+still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being
+rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the
+four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through
+the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind
+but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their
+appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking
+at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they
+saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout
+absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that
+displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now
+convinced her that mother was dying.</p>
+
+<p>There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose
+vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup&mdash;good soup made of meat
+and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall
+and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and
+looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there
+was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin
+body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door
+to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad,
+comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and
+gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly
+come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet
+struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from
+their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work
+if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to
+be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh
+to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to
+that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its
+being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and
+the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising
+doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the
+end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one
+moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which
+dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful
+light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour
+of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman
+parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.
+It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where
+mother was lying.</p>
+
+<p>She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the
+better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She
+wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary
+movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the
+extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.
+"Mother&mdash;mother's a most remarkable woman...."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in
+a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence
+and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical
+terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary
+language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary
+dyspnoea&mdash;settled on her chest&mdash;heart too weak to do a tracheotomy&mdash;run
+a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go
+into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see
+her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was
+hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large
+window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs,
+and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a
+richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several
+sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known
+neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather
+enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she
+would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her
+popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable
+but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and
+minimally furnished as this room.</p>
+
+<p>Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of
+stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the
+screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron
+bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen
+but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to
+have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of
+the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was
+for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two
+glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever
+been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and
+about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth,
+there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the
+slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked
+for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end
+of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that
+sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense
+glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some
+inmost branch of a large tree.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"</p>
+
+<p>From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to
+make her lips meet, and speak.</p>
+
+<p>"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be
+with you. You needn't speak."</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so
+remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths
+commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She
+whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."</p>
+
+<p>Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes
+towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.
+At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his
+lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not,
+and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and
+knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He
+said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be
+poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and
+under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.
+Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she
+dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no
+attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be
+together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with
+Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon
+her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It
+struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and
+inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come
+to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the
+stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in
+fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose
+wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great
+glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.</p>
+
+<p>There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though
+attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the
+exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had
+greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy
+pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!"
+She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about
+life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning
+the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother
+dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they
+had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother
+dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made
+a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that
+she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's,
+patted it.</p>
+
+<p>All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and
+spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint
+pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using
+it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure
+would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want
+all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all
+yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed
+from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and
+thither at the call of speculation, told them consoling things. The
+mother's flesh, touching the daughter's, remembered a faint pulse felt
+long ago and marvelled at this splendid sequel, and lost fear. Since the
+past held such a miracle the future mattered nothing. Existence had
+justified itself. The watchers were surprised to hear her sigh of
+rapture. The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in
+the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to
+embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first
+best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.</p>
+
+<p>There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of
+giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup
+of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange
+because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that
+she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to
+first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had
+played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the
+<i>Student's Song Book</i>, and they had had several glasses of Stone's
+Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly
+berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a
+wonderful faculty for bursts of gaiety, pure in tone like a blackbird's
+song, which brought out whatever gladness might be latent in any person
+or occasion. As twelve chimed out they had stood in front of the
+chimneypiece mirror and raised their glasses above their heads, singing,
+"Auld Lang Syne" in time with the dancers on the other side of the wall,
+who were making such a night of it that several times the house had
+seemed likely to fall in.</p>
+
+<p>When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses,
+Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I
+was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at
+yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had
+held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome
+mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his
+honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got
+another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms
+like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered
+by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow,
+uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy
+with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been
+greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all
+have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember
+ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much
+admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing
+...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly
+twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of
+an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which,
+since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads
+if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the
+hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are
+about work that springs from &aelig;sthetic principles different from their
+own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of
+laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked
+at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was
+somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had
+been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the
+night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.</p>
+
+<p>She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's
+face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any
+gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little
+tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin
+time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling
+every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.
+It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth
+thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and
+on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if
+she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone
+yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into
+a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her
+lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow
+teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the
+tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and
+the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to
+kiss, even though one loved her so much.</p>
+
+<p>Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very
+beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom
+Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited
+girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women
+in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was
+sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl
+in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French
+artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at
+Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a
+portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New
+York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for
+though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more
+out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing
+at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt
+I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to
+his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing
+that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it
+down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed
+Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the
+tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink
+roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had
+often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and
+say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh
+at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."</p>
+
+<p>It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those
+strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred
+Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan
+collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working
+with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was
+intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius,
+and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred
+Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the
+shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a
+diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and
+her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her
+skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and
+setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how
+more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and
+confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile
+of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound
+strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way
+that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick
+silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of
+allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring
+face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard
+again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but
+immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long
+grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had
+had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt
+was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some
+relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a
+professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred
+to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to
+New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman
+jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased,
+deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she
+had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed
+that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed
+that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She
+remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had
+gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror
+and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a
+woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice
+arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs
+singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").</p>
+
+<p>Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding
+the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done
+to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was
+unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the
+eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be
+tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed
+that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had
+simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that
+she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.
+This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature
+behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had
+thought there were three fixed species of people&mdash;the young, the
+middle-aged, and the old&mdash;and she had never before realised that young
+people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this
+arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this
+humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind
+passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer
+the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly
+when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as
+if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm
+against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping
+streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news
+that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her
+knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in
+and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and
+staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen
+perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her
+mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with
+speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach
+into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that
+was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother,
+because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is
+to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way
+the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never
+have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at
+her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the
+recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and
+had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had
+found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom,
+with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown
+her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she
+had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph
+Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your
+father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure
+Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her
+head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was
+horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the
+nurse proof of proper feelings.</p>
+
+<p>She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with
+her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her
+face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor
+and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that
+the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not
+look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by
+diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the
+mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she
+looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient
+performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like,
+all through life&mdash;a good child. She had always walked as if someone in
+authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her
+toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had
+become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she
+had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a
+road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been
+lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were
+innocent.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and
+there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted
+feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared
+occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly
+at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny
+darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little
+rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial
+bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go anywhere for a
+good sunset!"</p>
+
+<p>There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had
+watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring
+torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that
+slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers
+that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers'
+weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation.
+The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in
+a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and
+above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had
+winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled
+about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key
+of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady
+awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had
+stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from
+their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and
+fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of
+bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a
+sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her
+own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"</p>
+
+<p>For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen
+remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night,
+though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green
+glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on
+its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not
+suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village
+that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no
+pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal
+with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was
+untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the
+way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of
+beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in
+Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed
+with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their
+quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that
+be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.</p>
+
+<p>But when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery
+ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is
+a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people
+smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and
+when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at
+the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of
+pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in
+pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been
+rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and
+could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any
+bright scrap of that beauty she adored.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth
+with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her,
+and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle
+on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a
+handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into
+the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was
+not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops,
+trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very
+poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had
+stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love:
+indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have
+taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were
+harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder
+and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she
+felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from
+companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and
+pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to
+linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the
+free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of
+love.</p>
+
+<p>She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the
+Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin
+projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look
+wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By
+neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of
+negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to
+send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before
+lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of
+little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until
+they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last
+saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not
+quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in
+disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this
+neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said
+to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning
+them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.</p>
+
+<p>How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as
+anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to
+Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had
+broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the
+picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?
+Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical
+presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with
+concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow
+forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow,
+repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ...
+and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of
+telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which
+he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the
+sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious
+charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all
+other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation
+on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection
+of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke,
+too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which
+he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore
+uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with
+his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he
+looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always
+overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner
+for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her
+hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then
+bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly
+administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece
+of female imbecility.</p>
+
+<p>Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she
+guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she
+whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you
+quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and
+showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had
+burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands
+with a fierce, jubilant pressure.</p>
+
+<p>How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool.
+That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she
+could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish,
+but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast
+imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that
+was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give
+its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she
+take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real
+wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She
+had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than
+most professed romantics do.</p>
+
+<p>Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to
+Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses
+and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house.
+He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised
+him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at
+losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but
+I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella."
+At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are
+such a wee darling!"</p>
+
+<p>And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all
+Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things?
+It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though
+it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than
+them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she
+undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good&mdash;even divinely good. Life
+had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that
+it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant
+demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child,
+and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her
+hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love
+that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than
+that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a
+little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings
+arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often
+too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest
+possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking
+of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a
+miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!"
+she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother
+got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles?
+Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her.
+It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round
+hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman
+was being allowed to die without having been happy.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the
+universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find
+that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she
+cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until
+the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed
+the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold
+hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and
+when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen,
+whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just
+enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his
+eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard, she's going!"</p>
+
+<p>He could find no consolation to give her but a close, unvoluptuous
+embrace. They stood silent, looking at the fire. "Is it not strange,"
+she whispered, "that people really die?"</p>
+
+<p>Richard did not in the least participate in this feeling. He merely
+looked at her with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone
+should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer
+to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not
+tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him,
+though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might
+see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he
+merely bent to kiss her.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had
+disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."</p>
+
+<p>But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister
+of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of
+anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he
+should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a
+spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen
+mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it
+was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never
+scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it?
+What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen,
+and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was
+so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."</p>
+
+<p>The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said
+gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."</p>
+
+<p>She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said
+wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite sure."</p>
+
+<p>"May I kiss her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't. It isn't safe."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you
+ready?"</p>
+
+<p>As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to
+that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the
+upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all
+you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went
+to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"</p>
+
+<p>"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying
+place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of
+death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in
+electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a
+beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and
+dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.</p>
+
+<p>Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across
+the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in
+sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate
+the plot of the universe. This was a catchment area that drained the
+whole city of terror; and how small it was! Certainly terror was among
+the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking
+they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being
+children of this age, and conscious of humanity's grievance, they
+thought of Him without love. But it was one of the least frequent and
+the most impermanent of His moods. All the people one does not know seem
+to be quite happy. Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally
+closed the story of Mrs. Melville's life, and had to the end shown her
+no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future. It might
+well be that no other life would ever be so grievous. Therefore it was
+with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were
+provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out
+through the iron gates.</p>
+
+<p>The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation. Before
+them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded
+tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the
+hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs;
+and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse
+stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white
+overalls worked among bare trees. Through this grim landscape they
+stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived
+without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going
+to be so glorious.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_TWO" id="BOOK_TWO"></a>BOOK TWO</h2>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2I" id="CHAPTER_2I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p>Now that they had taken the tickets at Willesden, Ellen felt doubtful of
+the whole enterprise. It was very possible that Richard's mother would
+not want her. In fact, she had been sure that Richard's mother did not
+want her ever since they left Crewe. There a fat, pasty young man had
+got in and taken the seat opposite her, and had sat with his pale grey
+eyes dwelling on the flying landscape with a slightly sick, devotional
+expression, while his lips moved and his plump hands played with a small
+cross inscribed "All for Jesus" which hung from his watch-chain.
+Presently he had settled down to rest with his hands folded on his lap,
+but had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his
+waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the
+air. "Mother will laugh when I tell her about that," she said to
+herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead
+six weeks.</p>
+
+<p>This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the
+blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her
+stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers
+henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender
+intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her
+inflexibly honest &aelig;sthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's
+letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever,
+because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word
+written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white
+paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But
+their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come
+like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not
+wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject
+of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was
+really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who
+was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them
+merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were
+strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old
+people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running
+Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her
+as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise
+his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in
+favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it
+to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to
+have been economically independent all the days of her life.</p>
+
+<p>It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical
+ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way
+they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack
+and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that
+they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of
+Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career
+became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which
+had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with
+illegitimacy. She prefigured her swarthy and obese.</p>
+
+<p>She got out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told
+to do. The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through
+which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and
+tarnished darkness. She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed
+and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along
+the ground, and who seemed to be seeking so urgently for cabs and
+porters because their meagre lives had convinced them that here was
+never enough of anything to go round. If she and her mother had ever
+come to London on the trip they had always planned, she would have been
+swinging off now to look for a taxi, just like a man; and when she came
+back her mother would have said, "Why, Ellen, I never would have thought
+you could have got one so quickly." Well, that would not happen now.
+She would have grieved over it; but a train far down the line pulled out
+of the station and disclosed a knot of red and green signal lights that
+warmed the eye and thence the heart as jewels do, and at that she was as
+happy as if she were turning over private jewels that she could wear on
+her body and secrete in her own casket. She was absorbed in the sight
+when she heard a checked soft exclamation, and turning about had the
+illusion that she looked into Richard's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I am Richard's mother. You are Richard's wife?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen repeated, "I am Richard's wife," feeling distressed that she had
+said it, since they were not yet married, but aware that to correct it
+would be trivial.</p>
+
+<p>It was strange to look down instead of up at those dark eyes, those
+brows which lay straight black bars save for that slight piratical
+twist, with no intervening arch between them and the dusky eyelids. It
+was strange to hear Richard's voice coming from a figure blurred with
+soft, rich, feminine clothes. It was strange to see her passing through
+just such a moment of impeded tenderness as Richard often underwent.
+Plainly she wanted to kiss Ellen, but was prevented by an intense
+physical reserve, and did not want to shake hands, since that was
+inadequate, and this conflict gave her for a minute a stiff queerness of
+attitude. She compromised by taking Ellen's left hand in her own left
+hand, and giving it what was evidently a sincere, but not spontaneous
+pressure. Then, turning away, she asked, "What about your luggage?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've just this suitcase. I sent the rest in advance. Do you not think
+that's the most sensible way?" said Ellen, in a tone intended to convey
+that she was not above taking advice from an older woman.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Yaverland made a vague, purring noise, which seemed to imply that
+she found material consideration too puzzling for discussion, and
+commanded the porter with one of those slow, imperative gestures that
+Richard made when he wanted people to do things. Walking down the
+platform, Ellen wondered why Richard always called her a little thing.
+His mother was far smaller than she was, and broad-shouldered too, which
+made her look dumpy. Her resemblance to Richard became marked again
+when they got into the taxi, and she dealt with the porter and the
+driver with just such quiet murmured commands and dippings into pockets
+of loose change as Richard on these occasions, but Ellen did not find it
+in the least endearing. She was angry that Richard was like that, not
+because he was himself, but because he was this woman's son. When Mrs.
+Yaverland asked in that beautiful voice which was annoyingly qualified
+by terseness as her letters had been, "And how's Richard?" she replied
+consequentially, with the air of a person describing his garden to a
+person who has not one. But Mrs. Yaverland was too distracting to allow
+her to pursue this line with any satisfaction. For she listened with
+murmurs that were surely contented; and, having drawn off her very
+thick, very soft leather gloves, she began to polish her nails, which
+were already brighter than any Ellen had ever seen, against the palms of
+her hands, staring meanwhile out of absent eyes at the sapphire London
+night about them, which Ellen was feeling far too upset to enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>There was a tormenting incongruity about this woman: those lacquered
+nails shown on hands that were broad and strong like a man's; and the
+head that rose from the specifically dark fur was massive and vigilant
+and serene, like the head of a great man. Moreover, she was not in the
+least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up
+the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest
+to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry
+them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where
+one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had
+felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever
+happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from
+the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs
+which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running
+slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which
+makes people perform dramas. And everything about her threatened that
+her performances would be too strange.</p>
+
+<p>She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a
+brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her
+in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not
+Edinburgh. The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the
+yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into
+shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.
+They had stopped outside a florist's, in whose dismantled window a girl
+in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of
+chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls
+almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a
+Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open
+street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding
+herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of
+being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an
+occasion of public rejoicing.</p>
+
+<p>Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind
+plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy <i>brise-bises</i> that were as a
+ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a
+divine shamelessness. It couldn't happen up there. There were simply not
+the people to do it. It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged
+men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, "Catch me
+bringing you here again, Elspeth. It's a nice thing to have your dinner
+with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you
+take," and because young men would as constantly have turned to young
+women with the gasp, "I'm sure I saw father passing," it would have been
+a failure. But here it was a success. The sight was like loud, frivolous
+music. And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up
+to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white
+squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy
+and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of
+gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense
+than the North.</p>
+
+<p>She wanted to sit there quietly, savouring the scene. But Mrs. Yaverland
+said in her terse voice: "I've taken rooms at the Hapsburg for to-night.
+I thought you'd like it. I do myself, because it's near the river. You
+know, we're near the river at Roothing." Ellen could not longer turn her
+attention to the spectacle for wondering why Mrs. Yaverland should
+speak of the Thames as if it were an interesting and important relative.
+It could not possibly be that Mrs. Yaverland felt about the river as she
+felt about the Pentlands, for elderly people did not feel things like
+that. They liked a day's outing, but they always sat against the
+breakwater with the newspaper and the sandwich-basket while one went
+exploring; at least, mother always did. Trying to insert some sense into
+the conversation, she asked politely, "Do you do much boating?" and was
+again baffled by the mutter, "No, it's too far away." Well, if it was
+too far away it could not be near. She was tired by the long day's
+travel.</p>
+
+<p>But the hotel, when they alighted, pleased her. The vast entrance hall,
+with its prodigality of tender rosy light, the people belonging to the
+very best families who sat about in monstrously large armchairs set at
+vast intervals on the lawny carpets, were not in the least embarrassed
+by the publicity of their position and shone physically with well-being
+and the expectation of pleasure; the grandiose marble corridors, the
+splendid version of a lift, and the number of storeys that flashed past
+them, all very much the same, but justifying their monotony by their
+stateliness, like modern blank verse, made her remember solemnly her
+inner conviction that she would some day find herself amid surroundings
+of luxury.</p>
+
+<p>The necessity of looking as if she were used to and even wearied by this
+sort of thing weighed heavily on her, for she felt that it was almost
+dishonour not to express the solemn joy this magnificence was giving
+her. So she stood in the fine room to which Mrs. Yaverland took her, and
+after having resolved that the minute she was left alone she would touch
+the magnificent crimson velvet roses that stood out in high relief all
+over the wallpaper, she felt that she could not graciously withhold
+praise from this which was to be her own special share of the splendour.
+She moved shyly towards Mrs. Yaverland, who had gone to the window and
+was looking down in the night, and said shyly, "This is a very fine
+room," but, she knew, too softly to reach such markedly inattentive
+ears. She stood there awkwardly, feeling herself suspended till this
+woman should take notice of her. If her mother had been with her they
+would have had a room with two beds, and would have talked before they
+went to sleep of the day and its wonderful ending in this grand place.
+She sighed. Mrs. Yaverland turned round.</p>
+
+<p>"Come and look at your view," she said, and raised the sash so that they
+could lean out.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath there was a deep drop of the windless, scentless darkness that
+night brings to modern cities; then a narrow trench of unlit gardens
+obscured by the threadbare texture of leafless tree-tops, then a broad
+luminous channel of roadway, lined with trees whose natural substance
+was so changed by the unnatural light that they looked like toy trees
+made of some brittle composition, and traversed by tramcars glowing
+orange and twanging white sparks from invisible wires with their
+invisible arms; at its further edge a long procession of lights stood
+with a certain pomp along a dark margin, beyond which were black flowing
+waters. To the left, from behind tall cliffs of masonry pierced with
+innumerable windows that were not lit, yet gleamed like the eyes of a
+blind dog, there jutted out the last spans of a bridge, set thickly with
+large lights whose images bobbed on the current beneath like vast yellow
+water-flowers. On another bridge to the right a train was casting down
+on the stream a redness that was fire rather than light. On the opposite
+bank of the river, at the base of black towers, barges softly dark like
+melancholy lay on the different harsher darkness of the water, and
+showed, so sparsely that they looked the richer, a few ruby and emerald
+lights. Above, stars crackled frostily, close to earth, as stars do in
+winter.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the river," said Mrs. Yaverland.</p>
+
+<p>She said it as if she desired to be out of this warmth, standing over
+there by the dark parapet marked by the line of lamps close to the
+flowing waters; as if she would have liked all the beautiful bright
+lights to be extinguished, so that there would be nothing left but the
+dark waters.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen went and sat down on the bed. There was a standard lamp beside it,
+whose light, curbed to a small rosy cloud by a silken shade like a
+fairy's frock, seemed much the best thing for her eyes in the room. She
+was sad that in this new life in England, which had seemed so promising,
+one still had to turn for comfort from persons to things. She was aware
+that wildness such as this, such preferences for walking abroad in the
+chill night rather than sitting in warm rooms, for sterile swift water
+rather than the solid earth that bears the crops and supports the
+cities, are the processes of poetry working in the soul. But it did not
+please her in an older woman. She felt that Mrs. Melville, who would
+have been trotting about crying out at the magnificence of the room,
+would have been behaving not only more conveniently, but more decently,
+than this woman who was now crossing the room and not bringing peace
+with her. Her open coat slipped backwards on her shoulders so that it
+stood out on each side like a cloak worn by a romantic actor striding
+across the stage to the play's climax. The ultimate meaning of her
+expression could be no other than insolence, for it gave sign of some
+preoccupation so strong that the only force which could hold her back
+from speaking of it could be contempt for her hearer. Her face was
+shadowed with a suggestion of strong feeling, which was as unsuitable on
+cheeks so worn as paint would have been.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down
+on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a
+movement towards intimacy, and said, "I hope you're not very tired."
+When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the
+words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful
+to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either
+affected or hypocritical. For if that wildness were sincere, and not
+some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English
+were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she
+was doing up Ellen's black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and
+condescension.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pity that she was so very like Richard. When they had gone
+downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the
+plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she
+crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way
+in her resentful recognition of that likeness. She was not, of course,
+so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call "very
+striking-looking." Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at
+once so appropriate and so common. She did not allow herself to
+translate it from commonness and admit that it is a phrase that common
+people use when they want to say a woman's face is the point of
+departure for a fair journey of the imagination. It was true that a
+certain rough imperfection was as definitely a part of her quality as
+perfection was of his, and that there ran from her nose to her mouth
+certain heavy lines that could never at any age befall his flesh with
+its bias towards beauty. But everything that so wonderfully made its
+appearance a reference to romance was here also: that dark skin in which
+it seemed as if the customary pigment had been blended with mystery;
+that extravagance of certain features, the largeness of the eye, the
+luxury of lashes; that manner at once languid and alert, which might
+have been acquired by residence in some country where molten excess of
+fine weather was corrected by gales of adventure. But though so close in
+blood and in seeming to the most beloved, this woman could not be loved.
+She could not possibly be liked. But this was an irrational emotion, and
+Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that
+would justify it.</p>
+
+<p>It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were
+brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders
+that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared
+not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift,
+automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a
+polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. It was evidently a
+habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose,
+for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it,
+although the brows were still sleek. She did it, Ellen told herself with
+a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the
+afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead
+and strums on her knee. It was the only expression the occasion allowed
+for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the
+inordinate beauty of her clothes. They were, she said to herself, using
+a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a
+woman of that age. They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental. The
+very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to
+the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the
+effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she
+was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that
+effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so
+conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to
+accept her middle age. And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her
+colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light
+like amber. Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the
+various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she
+wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever
+about clothes. They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase
+that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a
+pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last
+refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their
+own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat
+seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff
+of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and
+yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was
+sensually heavy with its own richness.</p>
+
+<p>And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows.
+Really, it was terrible that Richard's mother should be so deep in crime
+as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of
+public meetings. She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women
+are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power,
+content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing
+and adorning of it. She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to
+produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest,
+hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life.
+And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and
+saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate:</p>
+
+<p>"You won't like anchovies; those things they're helping you to now."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion,
+and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had
+betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and
+then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp
+bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion
+did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes?
+When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she
+answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please."
+She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or
+white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip
+had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking
+almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners
+had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear
+travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her
+lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again
+till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door.
+Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes
+to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."</p>
+
+<p>The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been
+substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with
+observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was
+disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her
+eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought
+she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things
+with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a
+dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the
+darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant
+physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the
+palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when
+she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images
+seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in
+bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had
+always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her
+in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands;
+pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being
+carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed
+deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended
+over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered;
+bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy
+gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks
+and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights
+with the colour of romance. It would have roused her fatigued
+imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand.
+She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure,
+and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the
+expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear,
+though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.</p>
+
+<p>She coughed to attract attention, and then sighed. "It's terrible," she
+declared, taking good care that her voice should travel across the
+table, "to see all these people being happy like this when there are
+millions in want."</p>
+
+<p>Marion set down her wine-glass with a movement that, though her hands
+were clever, seemed clumsy, so indifferent was she to the thing she
+handled and the place she put it in, and looked round the restaurant
+with eyes that were very like Richard's, though they shone from
+bloodshot whites and were not so bright as his, nor so kind; nor so
+capable, Ellen felt sure, of losing all brilliance and becoming
+contemplative, passionate darkness. She said in her rapid, inarticulate
+murmur, "They don't strike me as being particularly happy."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen was taken aback, and said in the tones of a popular preacher,
+"Then what are they doing here&mdash;feasting?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose they're here because it's on the map and so are they," she
+answered almost querulously. "They'd go anywhere else if one told them
+it was where they ought to be. Good children, most people. Anxious to do
+the right thing. Don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen was unprepared for anything but agreement or reactionary argument
+from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched
+in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her
+emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very
+horrid. Her young mouth was convulsed. And then she reminded herself
+that it could not be horrid, for all grown-up people like it, and that
+there had never been any occasion when it was more necessary for her to
+be grown-up, so she continued to drink. Even after several mouthfuls she
+did not like it, but she was then interrupted by a soft exclamation from
+Mrs. Yaverland.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, this wine is abominable. Don't you find it terribly sour?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I was thinking so," said Ellen, "but I didn't like to say."</p>
+
+<p>"It's dreadful. It must be corked."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I think it must," said Ellen knowingly.</p>
+
+<p>She called a waiter. "Would you like to try some other wine? I don't
+think I will. This has put me off for the night. No? Good. Two lemon
+squashes, one very sweet."</p>
+
+<p>That was a good idea of Mrs. Yaverland's. The lemon squash was lovely
+when it came, and Ellen had time to drink it while they were eating the
+chicken, so that there was no competitive flavour to spoil the ice
+pudding. While they were waiting for that Mrs. Yaverland smoothed her
+eyebrows once again, and gave her nails one more perfunctory polish, and
+opened her mouth to speak, but caught her breath and shut it again; and
+said, after a moment's silence, "I hope I've ordered the right sort of
+pudding. It's so hard to remember all these irrelevant French names. I
+wanted you to have the one with crystallised cherries. Richard used to
+be very fond of it." She looked round the restaurant more lovingly. "He
+liked this place when he was a boy. We used to come here once or twice
+every holiday and go to a theatre afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that: when he opened his
+mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly,
+"Darling, I do love you." He had done it the very night before, in
+Grand-Aunt Jeannie's parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to
+tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his
+father before he was born. "It was not her fault. My father didn't stand
+by her. He was all right about money. But when he heard about the child,
+he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the
+Colonies. And he didn't come back. So she lost her nerve"; and that he
+had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a
+success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland. She was dying
+to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to
+admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had
+probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but
+because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly,
+"Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?"</p>
+
+<p>The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full
+of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason
+delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered. "How you see through
+me, dear!" she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate,
+charged with an astringent form of love. "All that I wanted to say was
+simply that I am so very glad you have come. Perhaps for reasons that
+you'll consider tiresome of me. But Richard has been so much away, and
+even when he's at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the
+time, that I've often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house,
+who'd talk to me occasionally and be a companion. Perhaps you'll think
+it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much
+older. But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.
+You're eighteen, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Eighteen past," Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain
+compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen. But
+her birthday had been a fortnight ago.</p>
+
+<p>"And I was nineteen when Richard was born. So you see to me a girl of
+eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling
+everything. So I hope you won't mind if I treat you as an equal." She
+raised her wineglass and looked over its brim at the girl's proud,
+solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour,
+bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other
+woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the
+wineglass down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden
+tone. "I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it
+or not. I knew you'd like it. You see, you get very evasive if you've
+ever been in a position like mine. You have to make servants like you so
+that they won't give notice when they hear the village gossip, because
+you must have a well-run house for your child. You have to make people
+like you so that they will let the children play with yours. So one gets
+into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without
+particularly worrying whether it's sincere. But this I find I really
+mean."</p>
+
+<p>As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who
+had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to
+something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well,
+I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant,"
+she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as
+likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to
+say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one
+another."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as
+queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the
+girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give
+Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty
+which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his
+unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether
+Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And
+for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a
+courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a
+present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their
+distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for
+her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced
+voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."</p>
+
+<p>"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about
+herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me
+when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was
+afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that
+I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint
+of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her
+son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at:
+that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."</p>
+
+<p>"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the
+table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think
+you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've
+been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been
+hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on
+Richard and you."</p>
+
+<p>The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!"
+she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that
+when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest
+directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my
+nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and
+stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to
+attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving
+badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us
+cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're
+surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that
+he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to
+fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid
+women."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion
+that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her,
+and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other
+women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.
+"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"</p>
+
+<p>There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of
+archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves
+me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect,
+the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women
+who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he
+can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went
+to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who
+were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds
+with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the
+soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that
+their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I
+will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd
+infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was
+not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he
+takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But
+I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much
+against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the
+world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but
+they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there
+cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are
+hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and
+fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like
+a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any
+character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.
+Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she
+had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free
+speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in
+late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none
+of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason....
+I'll tell you some time...."</p>
+
+<p>The girl was hurt. Marion bit her lip while she watched her crossly pick
+up her spoon and eat her ice pudding as if it was a duty. "This is like
+old times," she essayed feebly. "I've so often watched Richard eat it.
+He went through various stages with this pudding. When he was quite
+small he used to leave the crystallised cherries to the very last,
+because they were nicest, arranged in a row along the rim of his plate,
+openly and shamelessly. When he went to school he began to be afraid
+that people would think that babyish if they noticed it, and he used to
+leave them among the ice, though somehow they always did get left to
+the last. Then later on he began to side with public opinion himself,
+and think that perhaps there was something soft and unmanly about caring
+so much for anything to eat, so he used to gobble them first of all,
+trying not to taste them very much. Then there came an awful holiday
+when he wouldn't have any at all. That was just before he insisted on
+going to sea. But then he came back&mdash;and ever since he's had it every
+time we come here, and now he always leaves the cherries to the last."
+She was now immersed in the story she told; she was seeing again the
+slow magical increase of the small thing she had brought into the world,
+and the variations through which it passed in the different seasons of
+its youth, changing from brown candid gracefulness to a time of sulky
+clumsiness and perpetually abraded knees, and back again to gracefulness
+and willingness to share all laughter, yet ever remaining the small
+thing she had brought into the world. With eyes cast down, trying to
+dissemble her pride, lest the gods should envy, she added harshly, "He
+was quite interesting ... but I suppose all boys go through these
+phases.... I've had no other experiences...."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen was longing to hear what Richard was like when he was a boy, but
+she had been stung by that insolent, smiling murmur, and she could do
+nothing with any statement made by this woman but snarl at her. "No
+other experience?" she questioned peevishly. "I thought Richard said he
+had a half-brother."</p>
+
+<p>There was no longer any pride in Marion's eyes to dissemble. She stared
+at Ellen, and said heavily, as one who speaks concerning the violation
+of a secret, "Did Richard tell you that?" Before the girl had time to
+answer cruelly, "Yes, he tells me everything," she had remembered
+certain things which made her stiffen in her chair and keep her chin up
+and use her eyes as if there still flashed in them the pride which had
+utterly vanished. "Oh, yes," she asserted, in that forced voice, but
+very loudly and deliberately. "I have another son. He's a good boy. His
+name is Roger Peacey. You must meet him one day. I hope you will like
+him." She paused and recollected why they were speaking of this other
+son, and continued, "But, you see, I had nothing to do with him when he
+was a boy."</p>
+
+<p>This struck Ellen as very strange. She went on eating her ice pudding,
+but she cogitated on this matter. Why had this second son been brought
+up away from his mother? Surely that hardly ever happened except when
+there had been a divorce, and a husband whose wife had run away with
+another man was awarded by the courts "the custody of the child." Had
+she not talked of this son in the over-bluff tone in which people talk
+of those to whom they have done a wrong? She was possessed of the fierce
+monogamous passion which accompanies first and unachieved love, that
+loathing of all who are not content with the single sacramental draught
+which is the blood of God, but go heating the body with unblessed
+fermented wines; and she glared sharply under her brows at this woman,
+who after losing Richard's father married another man and then, as it
+appeared, had loved yet another man, as she might at someone whom she
+suspected of being drunk. It was true that Richard adored her, but then
+no doubt this kind of woman knew well how to deceive men. Softly she
+made to herself the Scottish manifestation of incredulity, "Mhm...." And
+Marion, for thirty years vigilant for sounds of scorn, heard and
+perfectly understood.</p>
+
+<p>She remained, however, massively and unattractively immobile. There came
+to her neither word nor expression to remove the girl's dubiety. Since
+she had heard such sounds of scorn over so lengthy a period they no
+longer came to her as trumpet calls to action, but rather as imperatives
+to silence, for above all things she desired that evil things should
+come to an end, and she had learned that an ugly speech ricochetting
+from the hard wall of a just answer may fly further and do worse. She
+knew it was necessary that she should dispel Ellen's suspicion, because
+they must work together to make a serene home for Richard, and she
+desired to do so for her son's sake, because she herself was possessed
+by the far fiercer monogamous passion of achieved and final love, which
+is disillusioned concerning mystical draughts, but knows that to take
+the bread of the beloved and cast it to the dogs is sin. She had
+acquired that knowledge, which is the only valuable kind of chastity
+worth having, that night when she had been forced to commit that
+profanation. Shading her eyes while there rushed over her the
+recollection of a pallid face looking yellow as it bent over the lamp,
+she reflected that even if she conquered this life-long indisposition to
+reply, the story was too monstrous to be told. It would not be believed.
+This girl would look at her under her brows and make that Scotch noise
+again and think her a liar as well as loose. So she sat silent, letting
+Ellen dislike her.</p>
+
+<p>She said at length, "Let's go and have coffee in the lounge."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure we don't need it," murmured Ellen, as a tribute to the
+magnificence of the meal.</p>
+
+<p>Crossing the room was a terrible business. She hoped people were not
+staring at her because she was with a woman whom they could perhaps see
+had once been bad. No doubt there were signs by which experienced people
+could tell. Richard's presence seemed all at once to have set behind the
+rim of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked
+down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people,
+none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their
+fray with appetite. They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like
+Richard. She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that
+there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze
+of Richard's eyes, set in Richard's mother's face. Doubt left her. Here
+was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance. Here was the
+quality of life she loved. She found herself saying eagerly, that she
+might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such
+strong words as he used: "Yes, Marion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen, when will you marry Richard?"</p>
+
+<p>"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We
+think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being
+kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an
+altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I
+feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied,
+one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing
+at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which
+sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale
+clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a
+lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will
+not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon,
+so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her
+white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had
+stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across
+the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she
+could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like
+doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his
+towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely,
+"No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.
+Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves
+that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by
+the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but
+her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to
+desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she
+exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would
+not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my
+life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you
+willed with. Let me have mine."</p>
+
+<p>But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy
+people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay
+hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she
+said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced
+herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her
+that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering
+vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to
+be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.
+I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I
+die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of
+me&mdash;quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I
+still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.
+You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you
+what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to
+shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my
+throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years
+that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But
+the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He
+lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I
+want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will
+give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for
+him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you
+see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the
+restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast
+mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these
+appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips,
+to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her
+reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and
+stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent
+and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are
+for their sons."</p>
+
+<p>She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that
+Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand
+across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so
+evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl
+was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.
+"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much
+more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I
+knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so
+very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take
+him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew
+he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us
+both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So
+I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's
+twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see
+to it that now he is here he is happy."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared
+into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some
+practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered
+about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does
+having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when
+Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading,
+for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it
+always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre
+and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the
+Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life,
+since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever
+beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that
+she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now
+she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now
+she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman
+who had given her Richard.</p>
+
+<p>Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her
+mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under
+the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with
+sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd
+of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving
+by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had
+relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have
+rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of
+Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death
+she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering
+suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by
+anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for
+the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest
+recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had
+occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her
+sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.
+It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving
+her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and
+gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her
+till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with
+his long first kiss.</p>
+
+<p>She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and
+Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar,
+instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look
+at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and
+give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you
+mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at
+Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,"
+and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was
+never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember
+that Hendry escaped the family misfortune&mdash;mind you, I know it's no a
+fault&mdash;of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the
+dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane
+where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of
+lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the
+pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding
+of a theory.</p>
+
+<p>But those were the fair-weather uses of love. It was in the foul weather
+she would have missed him most. If this woman had not given her Richard
+she would have walked home from the hospital alone and wept by the
+unmade bed whose pillow was still dented by mother's head; she would
+have had to go to the cemetery with only Mr. Mactavish James and Uncle
+John Watson from Glasgow, who would have said "Hush!" when she waved her
+hand at the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and cried,
+"Good-bye, my wee lamb!" Life was so terrible it would not be
+supportable without love. She laid her hand on Marion's where it lay on
+the table, and stuttered, "Oh, it was brave of you!"</p>
+
+<p>The intimate contact was faintly disgusting to the other. She answered
+impatiently, "Not brave at all; I loved him so much that I would have
+done anything rather than lose him."</p>
+
+<p>"You loved him&mdash;even then?"</p>
+
+<p>"In a sense they are as much to one then as they ever are."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah...." Ellen continued to pat the other woman's hand and looked up
+wonderingly into her eyes, and was dismayed to see there that this
+fondling meant nothing to her. She was not ungrateful, but for such
+things her austerity had no use. All that she wanted was that assurance
+for which she had already asked. Ellen was proud, and she was a little
+hurt that the way in which she had proposed to pay the debt of gratitude
+was not acceptable, so she held up her hand and said coolly, "I'll marry
+your son when you like, Mrs. Yaverland."</p>
+
+<p>The other said nothing more than "Thank you." Realising that she had
+said it even more than usually indifferently, she put out her hand
+towards Ellen in imitation of the girl's own movement, but did it with
+so marked a lack of spontaneity that it must, as she instantly
+perceived, give an impression of insincerity. "How I fail!" she thought,
+but not too sadly, for at any rate she had got her son what he wanted. A
+man came and stood a little way behind her, looking here and there for
+someone whom he expected to find in the assembly, and she turned sharply
+to see if it were Richard; for always when he was away, if the shadows
+fell across her path or there came a knock at the door, she hoped that
+it was him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am stupid about him," she admitted, settling down in her chair, "but
+if he had come it would have been lovely. What would he think if he came
+now and found us two whom he loves most sitting here silent, almost
+sulky, because we have fixed the time of his marriage? He would not
+understand, of course. When a man is in love marriage loses all
+importance. He thinks that he could wait for ever. He never realises, as
+women do, that it is not love that matters but what we do with it. Why
+do I say as women do? Only women like me who have through making all
+possible mistakes found out the truth by the process of elimination.
+This girl is as unprovident as Richard is. So unprovident that I am
+afraid she is angry with me for insisting that she should put her
+capital of passion to good uses." And indeed Ellen was sitting there
+very stiffly, turning her hands together and looking down on them as if
+she despised them for their cantrips. She wished her marriage had not
+been decided quite like this. Of course she wanted to be married,
+because, whatever the marriage-laws were like, there was no other way by
+which she and Richard could tell everybody what they were to each other.
+But she had wanted the ceremony as secret as possible, as little
+overlooked by any other human being, and she fancifully desired it to
+take place in some high mountain chapel where there was no congregation
+but casqued marble men and the faith professed was so mystical that the
+priest was as inhuman as a prayer. Thus their vows would, though
+recorded, have had the sweet quality of unwritten melodies that are sung
+only for the beloved who has inspired them. But now this marriage was to
+be performed with the extremest publicity before a crowd of issues, if
+not of persons. It was to be a subordinate episode in a pageant the plot
+of which she did not know.</p>
+
+<p>Marion, watching her face, saw the faint twitches of resentment playing
+about her mouth and felt some remorse. "She would be so happy just being
+Richard's sweetheart, if I did not interfere," she thought. "Ah, how the
+old tyrannise over the young...." And there came on her a sudden chill
+as she remembered of what character that tyranny could be. She
+remembered one day, when she was nineteen, waking from sleep to find old
+people round her. She had been having such a lovely dream. On her
+lover's arm, she had been walking across the fields in innocent sunshiny
+weather, and he had been laughing and full of a far greater joy in
+impersonal things than she had ever known him. When he saw gorse in life
+he would repeat the country catch, "When the gorse is out of bloom then
+kissing's out of fashion," but in her dream he laughed to see fire and
+water meet where the gorse grew on the sheep-pond's broken lip. He had
+liked the white cloths bleaching on the grass, and the song the lark in
+the sky twirled like a lad throwing and catching a coin, and the spinney
+on the field's slope's heights, where the tide of spring broke in a
+green surf of budding undergrowth at the feet of black bare trees.</p>
+
+<p>During all the months her child was moving in her body she was visited
+by dreams of spring. This was the best of dreams: it was real. The
+lark's song and Harry's happy laughter were loud in her ears; and she
+rolled over in her bed and opened her eyes on Grandmother and Aunt
+Alphonsine. She looked away from them, but saw only things that reminded
+her how ill she was; the tumbler of milk she had not been able to drink,
+set in a circle of its own wetness on a plate among fingers of
+bread-and-butter left from the morning; they had been told to tempt her
+appetite, but they were betraying that they felt she had had more than
+enough temptation lately; the bottles of medicine ranged along the
+mantelpiece, high-shouldered like the facades of chapels and pasted with
+labels that one desired to read as little as chapel notice-boards, and
+with contents just as ineffectual at their business of establishing the
+right; the jug filled with a bunch of flowers left by some kindly
+neighbour who did not know what was the matter with her.</p>
+
+<p>That raised difficult issues. She turned her eyes back to the old
+people. They looked terrible: Grandmother sitting among her spreading
+skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands
+clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was
+not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering
+her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and
+rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and
+fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were
+an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign.
+Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget
+that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she
+had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons,
+the velvet homes of elfs&mdash;reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in
+sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that
+colours have commonly only in twilight.</p>
+
+<p>But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power
+over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry
+her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared,
+and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his
+own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow,
+"Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And
+Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core
+of her soul a <i>dame de compagnie</i>; and Grandmother had said, with that
+use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of
+truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come
+back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."</p>
+
+<p>That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true
+that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his
+career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous
+compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to
+have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still
+that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the
+linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her
+agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and
+shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that
+such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been
+sacred to her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that
+it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people
+would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years,
+inexplicable. Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of
+Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she
+had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild
+she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed
+the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing
+prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink
+apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider. It is not in the nature
+of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and
+since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years
+with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good
+purpose which that tedious companionship had served. The theory of the
+sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by
+merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and
+necessary to the existence of society. But she had so often been
+assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life
+had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those
+doubts. To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been
+to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have
+been better if she had not been born. "Lord have mercy on us all!"
+thought Marion, and forgave her.</p>
+
+<p>It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as
+sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead
+of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which
+the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally. She was the most responsible
+for the defeat of Marion's life. And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not
+malignant of intent. The worst of illicit relationships is the
+provocation they give to the minds that hear of them. When it is said of
+a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public
+ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the
+sober external results of marriage; but when it is said of a man and
+woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact
+of their love. The thought of her niece night after night shut up with
+love in the white belvedere all the long time the moon required to rise
+from the open sea, fill all the creeks with silver, and drain them dry
+again as she sunk westwards, must have been torment to one whose left
+cheek, from the long pale ear to the inhibited mouth, was one scar. That
+scar was an epitome of all that was pathetic and mischievous about the
+poor faint woman, this being formed to be a nun who had not been blessed
+with any religion and so had to dedicate herself to the ridiculous god
+of decorum. "Your aunt," Marion's mother had said to her, "burned her
+face cleaning a pair of white shoes with benzine for me to wear at my
+first Communion. It was a pity she did it. And a pity for me too, since
+I have had to obey her ever since in everything, though I wanted
+neither the white shoes nor the Communion." In that speech were all the
+elements of Alphonsine's tragedy, and therefore most of the causes of
+Marion's. The French thrift that had made her clean the shoes at home,
+and thereby maim herself into something that desired to assassinate love
+whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the possibility that
+the family might have to support a fatherless baby. The affection for
+her sister Pamela which had made her perform these services had enabled
+her to bring up that lovely child through all the dangers of a
+poverty-stricken childhood in Paris, in spite of a certain wildness in
+her beauty which might, if unchecked, have been a summons to disorder;
+and her triumph in that respect had made it the most heartbreaking
+disappointment when the temptations she thought she had baulked for ever
+in Paris twenty years before returned and claimed so easily Pamela's
+child, whom she thought quite safe, since to her French eyes Marion's
+dark brows, perpetually knit in preoccupation with the movements of her
+nature, were not likely to be attractive to men.</p>
+
+<p>That must have added to her bitterness. It must have seemed very cruel
+to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed
+perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its
+hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all
+grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this
+black untidy girl. That would account for the passion with which she
+forced Marion to do the thing she did not want to; and any suspicion
+that she was actuated by a desire to punish the girl for her happiness
+she would be able to dismiss by recollecting that certainly she had
+served her little sister's welfare by crossing her will. Oh, there was
+much to be said for Alphonsine. But all the same, it was a pity that the
+old people had interfered. She had loved Richard so much that it would
+not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from
+the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far
+more than other children receive from both parents. They might have been
+so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.</p>
+
+<p>"But this is different," she said to herself. "They compelled me to
+unhappiness. I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen. It is quite
+different."</p>
+
+<p>But she looked anxiously at the girl. They smiled at each other with
+their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity. But their lips smiled
+guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2II" id="CHAPTER_2II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+
+<p>The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be
+almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a
+creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted
+with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white
+under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched
+illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey
+houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round
+steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did
+not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only
+as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky,
+stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the
+marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of
+the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue
+of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its
+humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and
+on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.</p>
+
+<p>This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the
+Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow
+or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the
+curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised
+clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at
+their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had
+exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this
+plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and
+effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be
+visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon;
+and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling
+on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything
+happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation
+of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed
+people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the
+present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she
+was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred
+to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she
+smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This
+is Kerith Island."</p>
+
+<p>"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat."
+And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I
+must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's
+fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should
+everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where
+Richard's going to work, though."</p>
+
+<p>"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works
+from our windows."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I
+couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the
+works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished
+in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the
+house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about
+him. I suppose I will soon get over it."</p>
+
+<p>"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."</p>
+
+<p>The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now
+across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to
+the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little
+hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse
+turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse
+gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green
+escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose
+again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the
+purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a
+brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform
+of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill
+grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by
+four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the
+fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink
+corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was
+built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a
+footing.</p>
+
+<p>Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an
+elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with
+a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white
+like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and
+receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken
+hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of
+the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there
+fell an orchard.</p>
+
+<p>"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and
+look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could
+see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the
+sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion
+indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the
+things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I
+can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from
+here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of
+coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always
+where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which
+fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller
+boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled
+island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a
+farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.</p>
+
+<p>Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been
+driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for
+to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of
+cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked
+bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine
+rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a
+fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with
+their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped
+behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened
+cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares
+set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its
+furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky
+that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which
+dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look
+brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be
+imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to
+lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to
+suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie
+at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud
+galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company
+beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen
+saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as
+Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there
+was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed
+scepticism concerning the value of all activities.</p>
+
+<p>To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from
+delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had
+up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday
+evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able
+to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of,
+and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with
+pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even
+when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they
+stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from
+her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an
+argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly,
+as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly.
+She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There
+had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down
+platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back,
+facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its
+landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high
+ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding,
+where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath
+esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.</p>
+
+<p>It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet
+the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of
+nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that
+was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the
+great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged
+in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the
+light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its
+brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own
+strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between
+deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the
+stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to
+the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark
+line of the Kentish hills.</p>
+
+<p>It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some
+large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like
+flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now
+flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but
+bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were
+back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it
+were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the
+wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion
+surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed
+out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and,
+walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud,
+followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and
+fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the
+quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a
+solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze
+from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make
+this a memorable star.</p>
+
+<p>Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been
+that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and
+breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy
+impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she
+partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain
+and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as
+uncompromising as mud.</p>
+
+<p>She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea,
+saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I
+could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard
+could still."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the
+sky?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings
+living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of
+extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism,
+an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked
+appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her
+impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill
+luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike
+for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the
+station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on
+which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was
+saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard
+was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of
+him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to
+conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than
+the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than
+a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not
+offended.</p>
+
+<p>She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which
+Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level
+crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the
+fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the
+barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant
+posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up
+the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken
+prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the
+direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But
+surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in
+Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was
+written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the
+jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too
+slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the
+housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines,
+there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with
+white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because
+of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want
+to recognise its beauty.</p>
+
+<p>When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest
+of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that
+this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of
+white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the
+other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's
+proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap
+in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of
+those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far
+older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to
+Canfleet&mdash;that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland&mdash;but it's all
+gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a
+disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between
+low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen
+a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be
+measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges
+gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which
+grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively
+deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the
+air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the
+broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places
+of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its
+windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that
+one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by
+pressing their faces close against the glass.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her.
+"I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But
+it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the
+house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time,
+so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways
+at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you
+know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did
+them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of
+life, you become most carefully conservative!"</p>
+
+<p>But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch,
+and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said
+hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this
+Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to
+please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion
+greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning,
+Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to
+this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things
+just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to
+replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they
+stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark
+room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak
+settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and
+samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this
+English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The
+Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and
+they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any
+particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it
+was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's
+ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look!
+It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and
+they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide
+windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your
+room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it.
+It's a room I'm fond of...."</p>
+
+<p>They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched
+door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on
+cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted
+green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she
+said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when
+I was a girl; but all the things are new&mdash;I got them down from London;
+and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the
+chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window
+that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a
+farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a
+story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was
+as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle
+life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.
+He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very
+capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him
+that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without
+losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie
+in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see
+who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on
+you."</p>
+
+<p>She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched
+the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little
+white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate
+grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and
+looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had
+pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because
+to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been
+sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out
+into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring
+cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the
+yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its
+further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the
+billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained,
+bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of
+purple twigs at each end.</p>
+
+<p>But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when
+it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at
+all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of
+tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the
+Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to
+have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken
+bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the
+puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish
+affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near
+with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?&mdash;and them not born at four
+o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and
+yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the
+roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as
+usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran
+forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among
+the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow,
+but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the
+sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow,
+turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that
+the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his
+long upper lip was twitching from side to side.</p>
+
+<p>She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus!
+Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen
+and Grandmother was reading the <i>Prittlebay Gazette</i> in the parlour, and
+she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing.
+Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon
+her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs,
+and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the
+farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing
+the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to
+him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent
+collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not
+point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was
+immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he
+wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with
+the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to
+point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate
+into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his
+face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What
+could it be that he wanted?</p>
+
+<p>She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it,
+pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass.
+Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness
+as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he
+said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when
+she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his
+eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom
+turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It
+was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent
+head followed by his forgotten dogs.</p>
+
+<p>Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited
+by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege
+upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that
+prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she
+liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a
+moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and
+sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey
+flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them
+treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then
+she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a
+bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen
+boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs,
+the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that
+night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come
+home.</p>
+
+<p>It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like
+this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it
+was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid
+that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone
+had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who
+was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite
+extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment.
+The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power
+than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him.
+She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the
+same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice
+everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions
+when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white
+room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each
+with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep,
+bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the
+long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with
+their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in
+sherry.</p>
+
+<p>The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she
+could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white
+cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little
+dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their
+images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very
+cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was
+being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that
+if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke
+disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by
+throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation
+would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm"
+to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement
+exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon."
+Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice
+for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her
+dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his
+notice.</p>
+
+<p>She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary,
+letting our whole lives revolve round a man."</p>
+
+<p>"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint
+that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have
+her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for
+some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who
+was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I
+don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that
+any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the
+Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said
+stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent
+things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal
+relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And
+then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the
+world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women
+don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we
+love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful
+with."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had
+failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by
+Richard just as much as she loved him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the
+end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up
+petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big
+sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would
+not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak
+about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for
+a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as
+all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.
+She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned
+the meaning of life as one lived it.</p>
+
+<p>So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked
+discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with
+drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great
+armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but
+was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of
+that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression
+was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial,
+though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails
+and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was
+wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles
+of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled
+her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the
+windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly
+happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing
+to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch,
+and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining
+all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all
+this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in
+the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland,
+is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired
+with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in
+John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can
+look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer
+and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your
+first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the
+ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'"
+"Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she
+objected.</p>
+
+<p>But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found
+it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because
+she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in
+the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately
+answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.
+Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too
+poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.
+All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no
+cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and
+unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge
+of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be
+enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns
+or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She
+did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been
+able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories
+of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies
+had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up
+people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to
+till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed
+quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where
+feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing
+seas.</p>
+
+<p>Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised
+that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For
+indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat
+within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth
+spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows
+trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were
+almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning
+below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so
+that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their
+shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried
+to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at
+the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine
+in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see
+him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the
+garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too
+the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified
+green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of
+clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate
+curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills
+beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the
+right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the
+marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple
+statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the
+west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if
+the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.</p>
+
+<p>She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and
+yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite
+intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the
+immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man
+dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with
+a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh
+became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill
+of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one
+wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of
+the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the
+inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the
+public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with
+concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the
+margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of
+the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries
+made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot
+of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more
+necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue
+her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the
+small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it
+was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own
+ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world
+presented by this woman's face.</p>
+
+<p>Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic
+point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his
+own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what
+extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble
+atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind
+associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she
+would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be
+trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able
+to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to
+the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if
+they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem
+heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight
+lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who
+had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more
+agonising than a common tear.</p>
+
+<p>"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic
+tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was
+appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish
+about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in
+an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist
+of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say
+and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her
+repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman
+should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that
+her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible
+in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother
+died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire
+would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent
+and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would
+then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical
+patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins,
+she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as
+inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and
+would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and
+complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of
+excessive living.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order
+characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly
+that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the
+aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"You look tired," said Marion timidly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just
+tiredness."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better go and lie down."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."</p>
+
+<p>"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at
+the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily.
+Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all
+was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains
+do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in
+the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting
+on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like
+that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in
+front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her
+looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her,
+and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself
+out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back
+for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser
+of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with
+peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror.
+The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail
+of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing
+Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to
+the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see
+why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of
+her own life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2III" id="CHAPTER_2III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+
+<p>They went out of the house by the French window of the dining-room, and
+crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in
+which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out
+to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild
+orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an
+orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This
+is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is
+let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was
+always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following
+was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not
+answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not
+spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was
+so keen on science?"</p>
+
+<p>But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were
+patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need
+adventure...."</p>
+
+<p>"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved
+half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire
+to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard,
+and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that
+Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be
+miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the
+leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the
+leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel
+there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been
+any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she
+paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She
+knew quite well.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet
+at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea,
+which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was
+lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened
+pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of
+the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough
+darkness without quality. Yet as they walked down the field-path to the
+floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands,
+was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a
+country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more
+intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt
+as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than
+it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had
+come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though
+he does no more than tell children tales of storms.</p>
+
+<p>And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the
+wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave
+cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious
+food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when
+they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate
+to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the
+sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and
+watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and
+time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound
+of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the
+running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved
+culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and
+the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.
+Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous
+disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.</p>
+
+<p>Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over
+the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.
+Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she
+made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable
+later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the
+marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge,
+buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the
+lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it
+was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.
+Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live
+there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to
+travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.</p>
+
+<p>"Who lives in that little house on the island?" she called out to
+Marion.</p>
+
+<p>"The one on the Saltings? No one. It has been empty for forty years. But
+when I was a child George Luck still lived there. George Luck, the last
+great wizard in England."</p>
+
+<p>"A wizard forty years ago! Well, I suppose parts of England are very
+backward. You've got such a miserable system of education. What sort of
+magic did he do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors' wives used to come
+to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look
+in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the
+men were doing at the time." She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen.
+"You see, other women before us have been reactionary."</p>
+
+<p>"Reactionary?" repeated Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"They have let their lives revolve round men," said Marion teasingly,
+and Ellen returned her laughter. They were both in high spirits because
+of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing
+bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and
+air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in
+love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current
+participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that
+makes man the most ridiculous of animals.</p>
+
+<p>They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line,
+again in the great green platter of the marshes. The sea-wall, which ran
+in wide crimps a field's width away on the other side of the line, might
+have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts
+showing above it. The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the
+sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they
+moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which
+it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually
+that leisurely, wet cry.</p>
+
+<p>"What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing.</p>
+
+<p>"Those are the redshanks. They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he
+will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little
+streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet
+there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks
+queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes
+here now except the men to see to the cattle. Even though the railway
+runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and
+shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New
+Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the
+morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired
+to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
+During the week the children are all at school or too young to go
+further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these
+people here, and they never come."</p>
+
+<p>She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between
+these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically
+night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever
+visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should
+continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like
+lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the
+Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you
+really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to
+be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life
+of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had
+erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless
+for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone
+waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery
+army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and
+white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters
+from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in
+his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.</p>
+
+<p>But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that
+nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as
+unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks
+would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a
+knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in
+which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees
+lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would
+have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as
+possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to
+hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and
+excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys'
+doffing of their caps. There was something at once absurd and menacing
+about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's
+greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to
+have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich
+expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.</p>
+
+<p>To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that
+church up there?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."</p>
+
+<p>"But what's that white thing beside it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of
+Richard's father."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined
+not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in
+the neighbourhood."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" asked Marion.</p>
+
+<p>"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it
+not?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public
+subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung
+back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard
+had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that
+white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much
+to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who
+seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been
+able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its
+architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement
+and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality
+should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That
+secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from
+remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she
+had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time
+when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for
+the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell
+on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror
+that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than
+hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than
+to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and
+smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not
+to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the
+hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had
+been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and
+found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the
+situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion
+asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the
+unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks
+it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh."
+There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she
+tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable
+with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a
+bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out!
+They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or
+don't they grow up North?..."</p>
+
+<p>They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the
+neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely
+inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a
+geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and
+even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like
+orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard.
+Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours
+which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an
+osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange
+hair of the young plants.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult
+to them."</p>
+
+<p>Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a
+look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of
+letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should
+go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah
+Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and
+made it squalid with tin huts.</p>
+
+<p>"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to
+laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and
+had things thrown at them.</p>
+
+<p>It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own
+Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to
+it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the
+Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable
+people...."</p>
+
+<p>"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."</p>
+
+<p>But to that Marion replied, grumblingly and indistinctly, that style was
+the only test of value, and that the fools who put up that notice could
+never do any good to anybody, and then her eyes roved to the path that
+ran down the green shoulder of the escarpment on the other side of the
+valley's neck. "Ah, here's Mrs. Winter. Ellen, you are going to come in
+contact with the social life of Roothing. This is the vicar's wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Is she our sort of pairson?" asked Ellen doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"For the purpose of social intercourse we pretend that she is," answered
+Marion without enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>They met her on the plank bridge that crossed the stream by which the
+osier beds were nourished, and Ellen liked her before they had come
+within hailing distance because she was such a little nosegay of an old
+lady. Though her colours were those of age they were bright as flowers.
+Her hair was white, but it shone like travellers' joy, and her peering
+old eyes were blue as speedwell, and her shrivelled cheeks were pink as
+apple-blossom. She bobbed when she walked like a ripe apple on its stem,
+and her voice when she called out to them was such a happy fluting as
+might come from some bird with a safe nest. "Why, it's Mrs. Yaverland. I
+heard that you'd gone up to town."</p>
+
+<p>"I came back this morning. This is Miss Melville, whom I went to meet.
+She is going to marry Richard very soon." Marion did not, Ellen noticed
+with exasperation, make any adequate response to this generous little
+trill of greeting. The best she seemed able to do was to speak slowly,
+as if to disclaim any desire to hurry on.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how do you do? I am pleased I met you on the very first day." The
+old lady smiled into Ellen's eyes and shook her hand as if she meant to
+lay at her disposal all this amiability that had been reared by tranquil
+years on the leeward side of life. "This will be a surprise for
+Roothing. We all thought Mr. Yaverland would never look at any woman but
+his mother. Such a son he is!" Ellen was annoyed that Marion smiled only
+vaguely in answer to this mention of her astonishing good fortune in
+being Richard's mother. "I hope Mr. Winter will have the pleasure of
+marrying you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid not," said Ellen with concern. "I'm Presbyterian, and
+Episcopalianism does not attract me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear! Oh dear! That's a pity," said the old lady, with a pretty
+flight of hilarity. "Still, I hope you'll ask us to the wedding. I've
+known Richard since he was a week old. Haven't I, Mrs. Yaverland? He
+was the loveliest baby I've ever seen, and later on I think the
+handsomest boy. Nobody ever looked at my Billy or George when Richard
+was about. And now&mdash;well, I needn't tell you, young lady, what he's like
+now. I'm glad I've met you. I've just been up at Mrs. More's."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Mrs. More?" asked Marion heavily.</p>
+
+<p>"The new people who have the small-holding at Coltsfoot the Brights had
+before. I think he used to be a clerk, and came into a little money and
+bought the holding, and now they're finding it very difficult to get
+along."</p>
+
+<p>"This small-holding business ought to be stopped."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" asked Ellen peevishly. Marion seemed to reject everything, and
+she was sure that she had seen small-holdings recommended in Labour
+Party literature. "I thought it was sound."</p>
+
+<p>"Not here. Speculators buy up big farms and cut them into small-holdings
+and sell them to townspeople, who starve on them or sell them at a loss.
+The land's wasted for good, and all because it can't be farmed again
+once it's been cut up. To all intents and purposes it's wiped off the
+map. It's a scandal."</p>
+
+<p>"It is a shame," agreed the old lady. "I often say that something ought
+to be done. Well, the poor woman's lost her baby."</p>
+
+<p>"Bad business," said Marion.</p>
+
+<p>"Such a pretty little girl. Six months. I've been up seeing them putting
+her in the coffin. The mother was so upset. I was with her all day
+yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen the place," said Marion. "As ugly as one of the Hallelujah
+Army shanties. What this bit of country's coming to! And Coltsfoot was a
+good farm when I was a girl."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't very nice now certainly. You see, now that the other people
+have failed and gone away, it's difficult for them to get loads taken
+down as there isn't a proper road. Before, they did it co-operatively
+among themselves. But this winter they say they've been without coal
+quite often, and the baby's been ill all the time. I think Mrs. More's
+been terribly lonely. Poor little woman, she's got no friends here. All
+her people live in the Midlands, she tells me. I don't think they can
+afford a holiday, so the next few months will be hard for her, I'm
+afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the
+garden. Annoying to think that that used to be good wheat-land."</p>
+
+<p>"They've never liked the place. They were terrified of losing the child
+because of the damp from the moment it came. She's quite broken by it
+all, poor thing."</p>
+
+<p>Marion began to draw on the ground with the point of her stick.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well, you'll be wanting to get on," said the old lady. "Now, do
+bring your future daughter-in-law to tea with us some day. I've got a
+daughter-in-law staying with me now. I should like you to meet Rose. She
+plays the violin very nicely. And we have a garden we're rather proud
+of, though of course this is the wrong time of the year to see it. Yet
+I'm sure things are looking very nice just now. Just look at it! Could
+anything," she asked, looking round with happy eyes, "be prettier than
+this? Look at the sunlight travelling over that hill!" She cast a shy
+glance at Marion, who was continuing to watch the point of her stick,
+and bravery came into her soft gay glance. "It's passing over the
+earth," she said tremulously but distinctly, "like the kindness of God."</p>
+
+<p>A silence fell. "The wee thing has courage," thought Ellen to herself.
+"It's plain to see what's happened. Marion's often sneered at her
+religion, and she's just letting her see that she doesn't mind. I like
+people who believe in something. Of course it might Le something more
+useful than Christianity, but if she believes it...."</p>
+
+<p>Marion lifted her head, stared at the hillside, and said, "Yes. And
+look. It is followed by the shadow, like His indifference."</p>
+
+<p>Tears came into the old lady's eyes. "Good-bye. We must settle on an
+afternoon for tea. I'll send somebody round with a note. Good-bye." She
+pushed past them, a grieved and ruffled little figure, a peony-spot of
+shock on each cheek, and then she looked back at Ellen. "We'll all look
+forward to seeing you, my dear," she called kindly; but feared, Ellen
+saw, to meet the hard eyes of this terrible woman, who was staring
+after her with a look of hostility that, directed on this little
+affirmation of love and amiability, was as barbarous as some ponderous
+snare laid for a small, precious bird.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's get on," said Marion.</p>
+
+<p>They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of
+the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice.
+To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing. It
+should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds,
+and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher
+level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green
+pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a
+crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle. But the
+quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in
+fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick
+dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an
+angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.</p>
+
+<p>They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran
+askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes,
+rusted and prohibitive and futile.</p>
+
+<p>"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of
+fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of
+raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence
+to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End
+trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go
+straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and
+lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as
+Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the
+day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the
+enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter,
+Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the
+thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land
+going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings
+and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I
+wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead
+leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the
+manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she
+pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said
+apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the
+two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose
+bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the
+others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had
+not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair
+exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there
+between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I
+won't come. I'm tired...."</p>
+
+<p>She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself,
+"She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half
+because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by
+losing my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly
+blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking
+of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had
+parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought,
+be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there
+could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having
+to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in
+a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike
+any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be
+tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A
+woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that
+work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and
+so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened
+and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really
+dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this
+Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it
+would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now
+this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a
+living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman
+who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a
+baby's coffin.</p>
+
+<p>And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and
+undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for
+an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy
+wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained
+timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last
+fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long
+succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire
+system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was
+never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the
+gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was
+always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day
+there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything
+but weak-eyed, plain people.</p>
+
+<p>The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it
+had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which
+is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the
+tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window
+at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls
+and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would
+not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.
+Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are
+bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the
+end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.
+The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had
+frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement,
+would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of
+pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's
+lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there
+would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"
+She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before
+she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to
+remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she
+wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean
+living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out,
+leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass
+bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation,
+while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth
+grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a
+meal.</p>
+
+<p>Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor
+souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that
+all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by
+passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was
+feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud
+at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an
+errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting
+strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the
+woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming
+up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to
+speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and
+they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded
+without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore
+having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed
+with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She
+could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom
+she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for
+Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to
+be happy.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.
+Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not
+be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with
+Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had
+seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed
+in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there had always been
+something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a
+sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by
+sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as
+dignified as befitted one who came as an ambassador from life itself,
+and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair
+outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of
+courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarrassment. She
+was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck
+through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be
+his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and
+Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.</p>
+
+<p>There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by
+the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had
+left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees
+that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge
+that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone
+far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had
+felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly
+and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she
+had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to
+the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a
+queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of
+the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said,
+"Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an
+inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she
+followed him down the hillside that nobody since the world began had
+ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner,
+and she became scarlet with shame.</p>
+
+<p>When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared
+nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like
+air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen
+it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had
+pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to
+up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to
+him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he
+answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk
+to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could
+come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that
+seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how
+the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I
+suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who
+does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on
+in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now.
+Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."</p>
+
+<p>At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in
+which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away,
+wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about
+to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its
+cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over
+her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked
+at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting
+along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an
+inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a
+disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year
+later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he
+had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He
+murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had
+looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey
+eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It
+was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of
+passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.</p>
+
+<p>With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a
+courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days
+with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed
+it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of
+seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair
+dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time
+that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action.
+She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion
+would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had
+looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they
+would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But
+they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good
+with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow
+the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would
+pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all
+his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black....
+She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all
+other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt
+about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that
+there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him
+that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite
+well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more
+beautifully than she had ever been.</p>
+
+<p>She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if
+Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself
+to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she
+could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.
+Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base
+passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational
+hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It
+would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and
+besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as
+little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now
+nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping
+broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"</p>
+
+<p>She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the
+flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower
+towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the
+hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl
+was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the
+tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had
+formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations
+by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion
+had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first
+moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the
+bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down
+on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of
+the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among
+such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it
+was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that
+she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird,
+and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's
+spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind
+became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh
+and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had
+been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary
+importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible
+presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it
+could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself
+loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had
+fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she
+must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act
+of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that
+made her cry out with joy.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was
+intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should
+intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with
+being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The
+girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower
+as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under
+faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about
+the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added
+to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for
+the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course
+the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of
+Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer
+mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She
+took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was
+sinister.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2IV" id="CHAPTER_2IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The
+white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains
+of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at
+each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue
+which the night assumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the
+gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses
+in a bowl had the air of brooding and passionate captives. Different
+from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of
+the wood fire danced again in the glass doors of one of the bookcases:
+and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep,
+stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at
+odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker.
+She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that
+there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent
+schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which
+seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author
+whose work she studied. In the swinging glass door beside her there was
+a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she
+herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in
+the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by
+night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and,
+orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard
+would find such an interior on his return.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you found a book you like?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. There's lots of lovely ones. But none I just fancy. I'm inclined to
+be disagreeable and far too particular this evening. Are these your
+books or Richard's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nearly all mine."</p>
+
+<p>"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could
+have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point
+if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at
+all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a
+bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.
+I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you
+awake."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all
+right as soon as Richard comes."</p>
+
+<p>Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till
+then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted
+intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift
+dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching
+with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate
+matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its
+midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.
+Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through
+the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on
+the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of
+irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high
+polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived
+that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation
+into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the
+most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.
+It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the
+evening in making Ellen like her.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."</p>
+
+<p>But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She passed into the room of bright
+new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction
+in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for
+I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me brush your hair."</p>
+
+<p>As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because
+Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she
+brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been
+gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in
+whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to
+be understood and conciliated. Her wish that it were so reminded her how
+much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl's
+shoulder at her reflection in the glass. "It is a face that believes
+there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out," she
+thought. "Well, that is probably true for her. I, with my foes who are a
+part of myself, am unusually cursed. If these young people have ordinary
+luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy
+standing by and watching them. Oh, I must make friends with her. We have
+many things in common. I will talk to her about the Suffragettes. What
+shall I say about them? I do honestly think that they are splendid
+women. I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out
+into the streets knowing they will be stoned...." A memory overcame her.
+"Ah!" she cried out, and laid down the brush.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" exclaimed Ellen, standing up. There was a certain
+desperation in her tone, as if she thought the tragic life of a
+household ought to have a definite closing-time every night, after which
+people could go to bed in peace.</p>
+
+<p>"I forgot&mdash;I forgot to take some medicine. I must go and take it now.
+And I don't think I'd better come back. I'm sure you'll brush your hair
+better yourself. I'm sure I tugged. You're so tired, you ought to go to
+bed at once. Good-night. Good-night." By the slow shutting of the door
+she tried to correct the queer impression of her sudden flight, but knew
+as she did so that it sounded merely furtive.</p>
+
+<p>In her own room she undressed with frantic haste so that she could turn
+out the light and retreat into the darkness as into a burrow. But
+everywhere in the blackness, even on the inside of the sheet she drew
+over her face as she lay in bed, were pictures of the aspects of evil
+the world had turned to her that day: thirty years before, when she was
+stoned down the High Street of Roothing. She was in the grip of one of
+her recurrent madnesses of memory. There was no Richard to sit by her
+side and comfort her, not by what he said, for she had kept so much from
+him that he could say nothing that was really relevant, but by his
+beauty and his dearness, which convinced her that all was well since she
+had given birth to him; so her agony must go on until the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>She must get used to that, because when he was married to Ellen she
+would no longer be able to sit up in her bed and call "Richard,
+Richard!" and strike the bell that rang in his room&mdash;that rang, as it
+seemed, in his mind, since no other sound but it ever wakened him in the
+night. Not again would he stand at the door, his dark hair damp and
+rumpled, his eyes blinking at the strong light, while his voice spoke
+hoarsely out of undispersed sleep. "Mother, darling mother, are you
+having bad dreams?" Not again would she answer moaningly, "Oh, Richard,
+yes!" and tremble with delight in the midst of her agony to see how,
+when this big man was dazed and half awake, he held his arms upwards to
+her as if he were still a little boy and she a tall overshadowing
+presence. In the future he must be left undisturbed to sleep in Ellen's
+arms. That thought caused her inexplicable desolation. Rather than think
+it she gave up the struggle and allowed herself to be possessed by
+memory, and to smart again under the humiliation of that afternoon when
+life had made a fool of her. For what had hurt her most was that she had
+gone out into the world, the afternoon it stoned her, in a mood of the
+tenderest love towards it.</p>
+
+<p>She had risen late, she remembered, that day. All night long she had
+been ill, and had not slept until the first wrangling of the birds. Then
+suddenly she had opened her eyes, and after remembering, as she always
+did when she woke, that she was going to have a child, she had looked
+out of her wide window into the mature and undoubtful sunshine of a fine
+afternoon. She had felt wonderfully well and terribly hungry, and had
+hastened at her washing and dressing so that she could run downstairs
+and get something to eat. When she went into the kitchen she saw that
+dinner was over, for the plates were drying in the rack and Peggy, the
+maid, was not there. It was incredible that she had not known why Peggy
+had gone out, that she should fatuously have told herself that the girl
+was probably working in the dairy; but in those days her mind was often
+half asleep with love for the unborn.</p>
+
+<p>She rejoiced that she had missed the family meal, for it was not easy to
+sit at the table with Grandmother and Cousin Tom and Aunt Alphonsine,
+unspoken comments on her position hanging from each face like
+stalactites. In the larder she found the cold roast beef, magnificently
+marbled with veins of fat, and the cherry pie, with its globes of
+imperial purple and its dark juice streaked on the surface with richness
+exuded from the broken vault-of the pastry, and she ate largely, with
+the solemn greed of pregnancy. Afterwards she washed the dishes, in that
+state of bland, featureless contentment that comes to one whose being
+knows that it is perfectly fulfilling its function and that it is
+earning its keep in the universe without having to attempt any
+performance on that vexing instrument, the mind.</p>
+
+<p>When she had finished, she wandered out of the kitchen aimlessly,
+benevolently wishing that her baby was born so that she could spend the
+afternoon playing with it.</p>
+
+<p>The parlour door was ajar, and she peeped in and saw Grandmother sitting
+asleep in the high-backed chair, a shaft of sunlight blessing her bent
+head to silver and stretching a corridor for dancing motes to the bowl
+of mignonette. She saw the scene with the eye of an oleographer. In
+defiance of experience she considered her grandmother as a dear old
+lady, and the hum of a bee circling about the mignonette sounded like
+the peace that was in the room becoming articulate and praising God.
+Enjoyable tears stood in her eyes. Drying them and looking round the
+dear scene, so that she might remember it, she saw that the grandfather
+clock marked it as half-past two. Now was the time that she must go for
+her walk. The children would be back at school, the men would be at
+work, and the women still busy cleaning up after their midday meal. She
+was afraid now to walk on the Yaverland lands for fear of finding
+Goodtart, the cattleman, standing quite still in some shadowed place
+where she would not see him till it was too late to avoid touching him
+as she passed, and turning on her those dung-brown eyes in which
+thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a canal; and
+though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with
+Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had
+stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the
+belvedere. The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go
+so far. But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran
+from the glebe land opposite Yaverland's End and stretched towards the
+village High Street. No one ever went there at this time of day.</p>
+
+<p>Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and
+she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though
+she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown. Stealing out
+very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down
+the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She
+had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish
+cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and
+reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The
+Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson
+Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine
+it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married,
+and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not
+receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to
+the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant
+oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by
+some wise, far-sighted person.</p>
+
+<p>It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had
+slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon,
+to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will
+to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that
+it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before
+the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his
+pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone
+would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of
+her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come
+to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was
+twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the
+spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a
+woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With
+aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that
+showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had
+happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and
+seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy
+figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances
+these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive
+greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being
+without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that,
+and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in
+love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she
+knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing
+his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that
+must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the
+exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then
+perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to
+have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive
+eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held
+to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day
+in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel
+in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him
+like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their
+beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of
+acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that,
+for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.</p>
+
+<p>At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a
+tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down
+her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again
+and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and
+daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly,
+swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the
+trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch
+scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of
+the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For
+the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the
+most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously
+for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the
+unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their
+mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home
+litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they
+could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds,
+and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared
+excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts
+in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her
+and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young
+doctor who had been <i>locum tenens</i> here in February, and that they had
+seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the
+Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in
+order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family,
+and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill
+these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.
+She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little
+wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as
+happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to
+venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when
+men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.</p>
+
+<p>The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of
+an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to
+earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked
+leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it
+dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit
+half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up
+a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly,
+the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of
+crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of
+Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by
+going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into
+the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be
+Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the
+village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and
+would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the
+unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from
+all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their
+ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite
+close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under
+the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.</p>
+
+<p>Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed
+at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the
+society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of
+thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that
+his great horny fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was
+drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so
+disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of
+another expulsion. "Oh, ter dash with the thing!" he exclaimed
+mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue
+sky above and snuffled. Marion's heart dissolved. She could not let this
+poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving
+only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.
+"George!" she called softly, staying among the branches. He gaped about
+him. "George!" she called a little louder. "The ball's in the pit, among
+the leaves." But he was transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice
+and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to
+gape. She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after
+only half a moment's reluctance she stepped forward. She did not really
+mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention
+that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby. For there was
+now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been
+before and her body was like a vase. It was only when they had awful
+thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not
+have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn. So she went
+over to him, pointing to the pit. "I saw it roll down there, George.
+Look! There it is."</p>
+
+<p>But he did not pick up the ball. He appeared to be petrified by the
+sight of her. "Make haste," she said, "they'll be waiting for you." At
+that he dropped his lids, and his lips thickened, and his face grew red.
+Then he raised his head again and looked at her with eyes that were not
+dull, as she had always seen them before, but hot and bright, and he
+began to shift his weight slowly backwards and forwards from one foot to
+the other. Her heart grew sick, because all the world was like this, and
+she turned again to the path home. But through the tree-trunks in that
+direction there came two other boys in search of the ball&mdash;Ned Turk, who
+to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes;
+and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had
+done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd
+faces. A horror came on her. It was as if they had assumed masks to warn
+her that they had some secret and sinister business with her. Then one
+pointed his hand at her and made an animal noise, and the other laughed
+with his mouth wide open. Neither said anything. Their minds were
+evidently engaged in processes beneath those which find expression in
+language. She stiffened herself to face them, though she felt frightened
+that these two boys, whom she had known all her life, with whom she had
+ridden on the hay-wains in summer and caught stickle-backs in the marsh
+dykes, should change to these speechless beings with red leering masks
+who meant her ill.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time she felt herself too young for her destiny. "I am
+only nineteen," she cried silently. Tears might have disgraced her but
+that the child moved in her as if it had looked out at the frightening
+figures through her eyes, and she suddenly hated Harry for leaving her
+and his son unprotected from such brutes as people seemed to be, and was
+vivified by the hatred. She made to walk past the boys back towards
+Yaverland's End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to
+their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately
+answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads
+whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being
+consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that
+would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing
+for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and
+walk down Roothing High Street and go back to Yaverland's End by the
+lane. Her mood of forgiving love for the village, which the cricket-ball
+had interrupted, had been so real that she felt as if a pact had been
+established between it and her, and she was quite sure that she would be
+safe from the boys there. If they were tiresome and followed her, no
+doubt somebody like Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general stores, would take
+her in and let her rest till it was dark, and then see her home. She
+turned round and walked out of the wood, and because she could not, in
+her heavy-footed state, trample through the undergrowth, she had to
+follow the path that led her to within a yard or two of George Postgate.
+She could see from the workings of his large face that he was forming
+some plan of action. And sure enough, when she passed him, he cried out
+"Dirty Marion!" and twitched the sun-bonnet from her head. The sudden
+movement made her start violently, for though she had not known what
+fear was until she conceived, she now knew a panic-terror at anything
+that threatened her body. That made the boys shout with laughter and
+call to their friends to hurry up and see the fun.</p>
+
+<p>The sunshine that beat down on the unshaded field was hot on her bare
+head. It would be awkward too, going into the village hatless and with
+ruffled hair. But she must not be angry with George Postgate, for indeed
+the incident had been to him only a means of gaining that popularity
+with the fellows that his poor stupid soul so longed for and had so
+often been refused, and he could not know that the fright would make her
+feel so ill. Since the first agonising months of her pregnancy, when
+nausea and faintness had pervaded her days, she had never felt as ill as
+this. A sweat had broken out on her face and her hands; she had to
+pant for breath and her limbs staggered under her. But she would be all
+right if she could sit down for one moment. There was a hawthorn stump a
+little way off, and to this she made her way, but as she sunk down on it
+a clod of earth struck her in the shoulder. She spun round, and another
+broke on her face. Grit filled her mouth, which was open with amazement.
+She had been deaf with physical distress, so she had not heard that the
+boys had gathered together on the wood's edge and were now marching
+after her in a shouting crowd. Something in her attitude when she turned
+on them made them fall dumb and stock-still for a moment. But as a gust
+of wind ruffled her hair and blew her skirts about her body a roar of
+laughter went up from them, and earth and dry dung flew through the air
+at her.</p>
+
+<p>As she set her face towards the High Street again, which still seemed
+very far away, she sobbed with relief to see that old Mr. Goode, the
+carrier, had come down to the end of his garden to see what the noise
+meant, and that he had almost at once gone back into his house. Of
+course he would come out and save her. In the meantime she pushed on
+towards the houses, that because of her sickness and her fear rocked and
+wavered towards her flimsily like a breaking wave. A heavy clod struck
+her in the back, and she shrieked silently with terror. If they hurt her
+she might give birth to her baby and it would not live. She had not had
+it quite seven months yet, so it would not live. At that thought anguish
+pierced her like a jagged steel and she began to try to run, muttering
+little loving names to her adored and threatened child. She looked
+towards the road to see if old Mr. Goode was coming, and was surprised
+to see that he was standing at the gate of the field with two other men
+and a boy. And though they were all looking towards her, they made no
+movement to come to her help. Perhaps they did not see what was
+happening to her. It did not matter. She would be there in a few
+moments. One of the boys had found a tin can and was beating on it, and
+the sounds made her head feel bad. She staggered on, looking on the
+ground because of the sun's strong glare.</p>
+
+<p>When she found that her feet had reached the patch of rutted ground that
+was around the gate, she sobbed with thankfulness. She threw out her
+hands to the multitude of people who had suddenly gathered there, and
+cried out imploringly, for if someone would only take her to a place
+where she could lie down she would be all right and she would keep her
+child. But none of them came to her, and her deafened ears caught a
+sound of roaring. She could not see who they were and what they were
+doing, for all things looked as if she saw them through flowing water.
+But she knew the tall figure by the gatepost must be Mr. Goode, so she
+stumbled to him and raised her head and tried to find his kind face.
+But, like the boys, he wore a mask. Veins that she had never noticed
+before stood out red on his forehead and his beard twitched, and the
+funny lines that darted about his eyes, which had become small and
+winking, made his face a palimpsest in which an affected disgust
+overlaid some deep enjoyment. He did not seem to be looking at her;
+indeed, he averted his eyes from her, but thoughts about her made him
+laugh and send out a jeering cry&mdash;wordless like the call of the boys.
+She realised that he and these people whom she could not see, but who
+must be people who had known her all her life, had come out not to save
+but to see her ill-treated and to rejoice. She stood stock-still and
+groaned. Her head felt wet, and she put up her hand and found that a
+stone had drawn blood behind her ear. The boys pressed close about her
+and beat the tin can in her ears, and one stretched out a stick and
+touched her, which made Mr. Goode and the unseen enemies laugh. But at
+that she shrieked. She shrieked with such terrible anger at those who
+insulted the mother of her child, that all their jaws fell and they
+shrank back and let her pass.</p>
+
+<p>But when she had gone a few paces up the road someone shouted something
+after her, and there was a noise of laughter and then of the shuffling
+of many feet behind her, and jeers and cat-calls and the beating of the
+tin can. She went on, looking to the right and the left for some old
+friend to come out and take her to shelter, but now she knew that there
+would be none. These people would drive her on and on. And when she got
+home to Yaverland's End, if they would let her go there, and did not
+trample her down on the roadside first, she would lose her child. The
+core of her body and soul would be torn out from her, and all promise
+of pleasure and all occasion of pride. For there was no pleasure in the
+world save that to which she had looked forward these seven months, of
+seeing that perfect little body that she knew so well and kissing its
+smooth skin and waiting for it to open those eyes&mdash;those black eyes; and
+there could be no greater degradation than to bring forth death, when
+for months the sole sustenance against the world's contempt had been
+that she was going to give birth to a king of life. There danced before
+her eyes all the sons of whom she was to be bereft in the person of this
+son. The staggering child, the lean, rough-headed boy of ten with his
+bat, the glorious man.</p>
+
+<p>Now her loss was certain. All the people were running out into the
+gardens of the little houses on the right and throwing up the windows
+over the shuttered shops on the left, and all wore the flushed and
+amused masks that meant they were determined that she should lose her
+child. Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general store, the kind old woman whom
+she had thought would take her in, and Mrs. Welch, the village drunkard,
+were leaning over adjacent garden walls, holding back the tall, divine
+sunflowers that they might hobnob over this delight, and their faces
+were indistinguishable because of those masks. Even Lily Barnes,
+standing on the doorstep of the nice new Lily Villa her husband, Job
+Barnes the builder, had built for their marriage, with her six months
+old baby in her arms, was thus disguised, and seeming, like Mr. Goode,
+to look through her old friend at some obscene and delicious fact, sent
+up that hooting wordless cry.</p>
+
+<p>Marion was so appalled that a woman carrying her baby should connive at
+the death of another's that she stood quite still and stared at her,
+until the boys behind her thrust her with sticks. When she passed the
+alley between the post-office and the carrier's she saw the cattle-man,
+Goodtart, looking out at her from its shadows; he did not move, but his
+dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger
+stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his
+neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with
+earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with
+nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every
+time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated
+it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it
+up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished
+that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his
+child to this.</p>
+
+<p>Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and
+the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with
+his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back
+into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she
+had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no
+solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself
+like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this
+thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.
+But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her
+and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was
+approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light
+feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face
+obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some
+invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality
+which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried
+to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some
+remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that
+she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and
+pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and
+behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt
+and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying
+standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively,
+Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it
+said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of
+butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her. He was asking
+the village people what would happen when the squire came home and
+heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire's
+tenants. A silence fell on her pursuers. From the rear old Mr. Goode's
+kind voice said something about "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey"; Ned
+Turk piped, "We don't mean no 'arm," and the crowd dispersed. It
+shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated
+and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin
+cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect
+by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of
+their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.</p>
+
+<p>She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey. She
+realised that she was safe. If she could rest now she would keep her
+child. She knew relief but not exultation. It was as if life had been
+handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed
+with the cup. There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon:
+the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she
+had been rescued. When Peacey's voice had boomed out above her it had
+expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it
+had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful
+than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and
+he begged them to have similar prudence. He had risked nothing of his
+reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her. To this loathsome
+world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her
+divine child. She looked up at Peacey and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness. "You'd best
+come into Cliffe's cottage," he said, and went before her. It struck
+her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street
+it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or
+without his knowledge. Well, she must lie down, and this was the only
+door that was open to her. She must follow him.</p>
+
+<p>Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and
+through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur: "Poor little
+girl!" Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in
+his heart spoken to itself? Was he really a kind man? She looked at him
+searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes,
+which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing. In any case
+she must take his arm, or she would fall. She even found herself
+shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she
+was afraid the people inside might not welcome her. She did not know the
+Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five
+years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make
+friends with a young married woman. But its trim garden, where on golden
+summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his
+clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while
+his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own
+loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion
+wishing that Harry and she were properly married. Because she had
+received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for
+of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy. But the
+shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was
+as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into
+some vacated house given over to decay. There was dust everywhere, and
+the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the vase on the
+table had died yesterday; and the woman who stood in the middle of the
+room, looking down at her hands and turning her wedding ring on her
+finger, was not pretty or joyous. Her face was a smudge of sullenness
+under hair that was elaborately dressed yet was dull for lack of
+brushing, and her body drooped within the stiff tower of her
+thickly-boned Sunday-best dress. She looked at Marion without curiosity
+from an immense distance of preoccupation. There came from a room at the
+back of the house the strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee," played on
+the harmonium, and at that she made a weak, abstracted gesture of
+irritation.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and get a basin of water and a bit o' rag. The girl's head's
+bleeding," said Peacey, and she went out of the room obediently. He
+collected all the cushions in the room and piled them on the horsehair
+sofa, and helped her to lie comfortably down on them. Then he walked to
+the window, and stood there looking out until Mrs. Cliffe came back into
+the room. He took the basin without thanks, and set it down on a chair
+and began to bathe Marion's head, while Mrs. Cliffe stood by watching
+incuriously.</p>
+
+<p>"Now then, Trixy," he said, not unpleasantly, "you'd best go into the
+back parlour and listen to your beloved husband playing hymns so
+trustfully."</p>
+
+<p>She went away, still without speaking, and Marion, no longer feeling
+defensive before a stranger, closed her eyes. Really his fat hands were
+very gentle, very clever and quick. After a few moments he had finished,
+and she was able to turn her face to the wall and talk to her baby that
+had been saved to her, and to exult that after all she would see those
+eyes. She shivered to think how nearly she had lost him, and was
+transfixed by her hatred of Harry. She turned hastily and faced the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>Peacey was watching her with his quiet eyes. He said in a silken voice,
+"This sort of thing wouldn't happen to you if you were married to me."</p>
+
+<p>She lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. She knew that what he said
+was true.</p>
+
+<p>"You've looked at me as if I were a pickpocket, you have," he went on,
+"just because I want to marry you. I don't hold it against you. You're
+young. That young, that it's a shame this has happened to you. But after
+to-day perhaps you'll judge me a bit fairer. You see, I'm older than
+you, and I've seen a bit of the world, and I know how things are. And I
+knew you'd have a nasty jar like you had to-day before you were through
+with it. And I don't doubt you'll have a few more before you're done. It
+ain't too good for the little one, if you'll excuse me mentioning it.
+You can't expect a man of any feelings to look on without trying to do
+what he can."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up to scan his face for some sign of sincerity, and found
+herself for the first time wishing that she might find it and have
+reason to distrust her own dislike of him. But he was sitting sideways,
+with his head turned away from her, and she could see nothing of him but
+his hot black clothes and his fat hand slowly stroking the thigh of his
+crossed leg in its tight trouser. A sigh shook the dark bulk of his
+back.</p>
+
+<p>"Me of all men," he said softly, "who had such a mother."</p>
+
+<p>There was a long pause. She grew curious.</p>
+
+<p>"Is she dead?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Died when I was ten. Not a soul's ever cared for me since then. I'm not
+sorry. It's made me remember her all the better. And she was one of
+God's saints."</p>
+
+<p>His voice was husky. She muttered, "I am sorry," and was annoyed to find
+that she really was.</p>
+
+<p>"Why need you be?" he asked. "There's those that haven't that much to
+look back on. All I want from you, Miss Marion, is to let me help you.
+Or at least not to think ill of me for wanting to help you."</p>
+
+<p>He sat still for a moment and continued to stroke his thigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Marion," he began abruptly, and then paused as if to brace himself.
+"Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you
+to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never wouldn't bother you for
+that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise
+with some chance of keeping it. And besides, there's more than that to
+it. How," he asked, lifting his head and speaking mincingly, "should I
+presume to go where Sir Harry's been? I would never ask you to be a wife
+to me. Just to accept the protection of my name, that's all I ask of
+you."</p>
+
+<p>They sat for a while in the embrowned sunshine of the dusty room.</p>
+
+<p>He rose and stood over her, drooping his sleek head benevolently. "Ah,
+well," he said, "I'd best leave you alone. God knows I never meant to
+intrude on you. Perhaps you would take a little doze now, and after tea
+I'll take you home." He looked on her moistly, tenderly. "Think kindly
+of me if you dream." Some emotion coagulated his voice to a thick, slow
+flow. "You'll be the only woman who ever has thought of me in her dreams
+if you do. I've never had anything to do with women all my life. You
+see, I know I've got an ugly mug. I wouldn't dare to make love to any
+woman in case I saw&mdash;what I've seen in your face&mdash;what I saw in your
+face that night I came out on you from the belvedere. Oh, I don't blame
+you, Miss Marion. You're young&mdash;you're beautiful. You've had a real
+gentleman for your sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you.
+Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands
+together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her
+matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate
+that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her.
+"Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled
+about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body
+neckless and sloping like a seal's, and said softly, "And don't think it
+was me who put Lady Teresa up to coming down to Yaverland's End
+to-morrow morning. It is her ladyship's own idea. I said to her, 'Leave
+the poor girl alone.' I have always said to her, 'Leave the poor girl
+alone.'" His voice faded. He moved vaporously out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>One is too harsh to one's dead self. One regards it as the executor and
+residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate
+regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty
+years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the
+closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her
+life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was
+conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present
+should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting
+up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The
+tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost
+as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black
+fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all
+the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he
+has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the
+end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my
+Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely
+Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him
+unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There
+are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She
+groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like
+cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot
+thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this
+dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it
+was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had
+remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear
+it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage
+to live.</p>
+
+<p>Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about
+what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should
+sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or
+Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on
+that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to
+abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her
+consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was
+within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn
+baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she
+had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of
+her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves
+had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had
+been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly
+nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo
+knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical
+adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment
+dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to
+live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and
+have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill
+and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the
+shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it
+and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next
+day it would forsake her.</p>
+
+<p>She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer
+from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose
+at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was
+necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look
+up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the
+expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been,
+it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she
+dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that
+Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the
+church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl
+who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope
+that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy
+head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of
+paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of
+Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not
+really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and
+tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.</p>
+
+<p>Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking
+personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm
+black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of
+Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a
+profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that
+Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its
+bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or
+of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no
+reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at
+Torque House. By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry. The child
+would doubt again.... Since these things would have happened she could
+not do other than she did. Her surrender was the price she had to pay
+for Richard's life.</p>
+
+<p>How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to
+pay any real price! She looked back through the past at Peacey's conduct
+of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at
+some perfect and obscene work of art. He had laid his hand so
+wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so
+that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the
+renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he
+turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to
+one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme
+mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante
+love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and,
+knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as
+their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship,
+she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his
+melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had
+failed utterly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cliffe had come in with a cup of tea and some cake on a tray.
+"You'll feel better for this," she said, and while Marion had ate and
+drunk she had stood by the window and looked at her. It seemed to Marion
+that she had greatly changed of late. Before, she had belonged very
+definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from
+the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even
+after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any
+cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw
+and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative
+of a change from her pristine gentility.</p>
+
+<p>"Funny I never heard of you being like this," she said at last.</p>
+
+<p>"It is. I thought everyone was talking about it."</p>
+
+<p>"They may be. But there's times when one doesn't listen to what people
+are saying." For a time she was silent. "Ah, well," she meditated
+bitterly, "it doesn't pay to do wrong, does it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't done wrong," said Marion.</p>
+
+<p>"So you say now," Mrs. Cliffe told her, "but there'll come a day when
+you see you have." She drew in her breath with a little gasp as Peacey
+put his head in at the door.</p>
+
+<p>He looked sharply from one to the other, and then advanced to Marion's
+couch, rubbing his hands genially. "Now then, Trixy," he said teasingly,
+"you don't want me to talk too long to your beloved husband, do you? I
+might go telling him things about you, mightn't I? You run along and
+look after him." Mrs. Cliffe retired quite taciturnly, nothing in her
+face responding to this rallying, and he bent quickly over Marion. "I
+hope she hasn't been worrying you?" he asked. Concern for her?&mdash;it
+sounded just like concern for her&mdash;made his voice tremble. "That's why I
+hurried back. Women are so narrow-minded to their poor sisters who
+haven't been so fortunate. I thought she might have been making you feel
+a bit uncomfortable."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," said Marion.</p>
+
+<p>The mask of his poor ugly face, which had been grotesque with pitying
+lines, became smooth. He sighed with relief, and sat down by her side,
+very humbly.</p>
+
+<p>"But she was beginning to talk rather strangely," the poor fool Marion
+had continued. "I think she's altered very much lately."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, I was thinking so myself," Peacey had answered
+reflectively. "I wonder if she's got anything on her mind. I wish I
+could find out. One doesn't like a 'ome of friends not to share its
+worries with you, without giving you a fair chance to 'elp. I must see
+whether I can get it out of 'er."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, he was a kind man. He was certainly very kind. She put down her cup
+and braced her body and her soul, and said, "Mr. Peacey...."</p>
+
+<p>The world had deceived her utterly that day; and yet there was one in
+that cottage who had suffered more than she, for by her suffering she
+had bought no Richard. Poor Mrs. Cliffe! She was a woman of sixty now,
+white-haired, and fine-featured with the anxious fineness of one who has
+for long lived out of favour with herself and has laboured hard for
+re-establishment; but the fear still dwelt in her. Most times that
+Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting
+knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here
+and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly. But
+every now and then, perhaps once a year, she would put down her knitting
+so soon as Marion came in sight and come into the road to meet her and
+would give her nervous, absent-minded greetings. Then she would draw her
+into the furthest edge of the pavement, because the blind have such
+sharp hearing, and she would whisper:</p>
+
+<p>"Have you heard from <i>him</i> lately?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"He's still at Dawlish?"</p>
+
+<p>"They say so."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think he will ever come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He will never come back."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah." She would stand looking past Marion with her face cat's-pawed by
+memory and her fingers teasing the fringe of her shawl, till from the
+garden the blind old man would cry lovingly and querulously, "Trixy,
+where are you?" and she would answer, "Coming, dearie." As she turned
+away she would murmur: "I shouldn't like him to come back...."</p>
+
+<p>Poor Trixy Cliffe! She should have known only the sorrow of pure
+femalehood, such sorrow as makes the eyes of heifers soft. Women like
+her should be harvested like corn in their time of ripening, stored in
+good homes as in sound barns, and ground in the mill of wifehood and
+motherhood into the flour that makes the bread by which the people live.
+But there must have been some beauty working in her soul, for Peacey
+went only where he saw some opportunity to cancel some movement towards
+the divine, being a missionary spirit. So she had been delivered over to
+that terror which survived for ever. Even in the exorcised blue
+territory of a good old woman's eyes. "Oh, poor Trixy, poor Trixy!"
+moaned Marion, weeping. But it struck her that she was enjoying herself,
+and she sat up rigidly and searched her soul for the smuggled
+insincerity. "I must be lying," she said aloud with loathing. "I really
+cannot be pitying Trixy Cliffe because in my heart of hearts I care for
+no one but Richard. I would knead the flesh of anyone on earth and bake
+it in the oven if that were the only food I could give him. What am I
+doing this for? Ah, I see. I am hanging about this fictitious emotion
+simply because I do not wish to go on and remember Roger." She held out
+her hands into the blackness and cried out, "Oh, Roger, forgive me for
+shutting you out of my memory as I have shut you out of everything else.
+I will remember everything, I will!" She lay down and let all pictures
+reappear before her eyes, but her mouth was drawn down at the corners.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2V" id="CHAPTER_2V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was no use wondering now whether or not Peacey had really murmured
+"Good day, ma'am," as they parted at the door of the church after their
+furtive marriage. She had certainly thought she had heard this ironic
+respectfulness, and she had stared after him with a sudden dread that
+under the cream of benignity there might after all be a ferment of
+malign intention. But that gait, which was so light and brisk for such a
+heavy man, had already taken him some distance from her, and he was now
+entering the yew alley that was the private way from Torque Hall to the
+churchyard. The sunlight falling through the interstices of the dark
+mossy trees cast liver-coloured patches on his black coat. She had
+turned and looked down, as she always did when human complexities made
+her seek reassurance as to the worth of this world, on the shiny
+mud-flats, blue-veined with the running tides, and green marshes where
+the redshanks choired. Her misgiving had weakened at that beauty, for
+with the logic of the young she thought that if the universe was
+infinitely good it could not also be infinitely evil, and it had been
+utterly dispelled by his considerate conduct during the following weeks.</p>
+
+<p>He did not try to see her at all until a day or two before the birth of
+her child was expected. Then he came at twilight. He would not let
+Grandmother put a match to the lamp in the parlour, and Marion knew from
+his quiet urgency that he was doing this so that she might continue to
+wear the dusk as a cloak. He sat down by the window, his shoulders black
+against the sunset, and his fat hands, with their appealing air of shame
+at their own fatness, laid on the little table beside him an old; carved
+coral rattle and a baby's dress precious with embroideries. These he had
+bought, he said, up in London, where he had had to go for a day to do
+business with the wine merchants. He had not seemed to listen to her
+thanks. But his hunched shape against the primrose light and the
+gleaming of his thick white fingers playing nervously with the fragile
+gifts spoke of a passionate concern for her. No doubt that concern was
+sincere. They told her after her confinement that during the day and
+night through which her child was slowly torn from her he had not left
+the house, and at her cries a sweat had run down his face. That was not
+unnatural. An incomplete villainy would vex its designer as any
+unfinished work of art vexes the artist. But she interpreted it in the
+sense that he, knowing what delusions youth has regarding the human
+capacity for love, had foreseen that she would.</p>
+
+<p>She let him see her before anyone else, and he had made the most of that
+ideal occasion when her being was so sensitive that it responded to
+everything, and so well pleased at having safely borne her son that she
+saw everything as evidence of creation's virtue. He had added stroke to
+stroke with the modest confused smile with which he entered the room, as
+if he felt his vast bulk ridiculous in this room of small rosebud
+patterns; the uneasy laughter with which he disguised his embarrassment
+when they could find no chair big enough for him; the shy wonder with
+which he put out his hand and hooded the tiny black head with it, and
+uncurled the little hand with his obese forefinger; the reticence with
+which he checked his remark that he had always wanted to have a child of
+his own. And he perfected the picture that he desired her to see by the
+assurance he gave murmurously from the darkness of the open door. "Get
+well soon.... You needn't be afraid of me. We made a bargain. I mean to
+stick to it." He had caught the very tune that dogged sincerity plays on
+the voice's chords. She lay happy after he had gone because she and her
+child had so true a friend.</p>
+
+<p>It was, of course, from no malice against her that he set out to deceive
+her, but from the natural desire to protect his being from alterations
+hostile to its quality. Long after, sitting with Richard in a caf&eacute; in
+Rio de Janeiro, she had looked at the men who were taking the lovely
+painted women to themselves, and she detected behind the gross mask that
+the prospect of physical enjoyment set on the faces an expression of
+harsh spiritual defensiveness; and thenceforward she had understood why
+Peacey had practised this fraud on her. He had known, as all men know,
+that there is a beneficent magic in the relationship between men and
+women; the evil man, at war with all but himself, cannot but admit that
+for his supremest pleasure he depends on one other than himself, and by
+his gratitude to her is tainted with altruism and is no longer
+single-minded in his war on others. Such men uphold prostitution because
+it exorcises sex of that magic. It is not a device to save sensuality,
+for love with a stranger is like gulping new spirit, and love with a
+friend is drinking old wine. Its purpose is indeed this very
+imperfection of the embraces that it offers, for they leave the soul as
+it was.</p>
+
+<p>Peacey, she understood in the light of this discovery, had desired her
+with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and
+a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would
+have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to
+create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her
+and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.
+She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler's
+pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as
+old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of
+craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as
+unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked
+down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top
+shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver: thinking his
+solution out to its perfect issue.</p>
+
+<p>It had been quite perfect. By that visit, and by his abstention from any
+later visit, he had induced in her just that mood of serenity and
+confidence which would be most shocked by the irruption of his passion.
+The evening when it all happened she had been so utterly given up to
+happiness. She had taken the most preposterously long time to put
+Richard to bed. He had had a restless day, and had been so drowsy when
+she went to feed him in the evening that she had put him back in his
+cradle in his day clothes, but about half-past eight he had awakened and
+called her, and she found him very lively and roguish. She had stripped
+him and then could not bear to put his night-clothes on, he looked so
+lovely lying naked in her lap. He was not one of those babies who are
+pieces of flesh that slowly acquire animation by feeding and sleeping;
+from his birth he had seemed to be charged with the whole vitality of a
+man. He was minute as a baby of three months is, he was helpless, he had
+not yet made the amazing discovery that his hand belonged to him, but
+she knew that when she held him she held a strong man. This babyhood was
+the playful disguise in which he came into the world in order that they
+might get on easy terms with one another and be perfect companions.
+Never would he be able to feel tyrannous because of his greater
+strength, for he would remember the time when she had lifted him in her
+weak arms, and that same memory would prevent her from ever being
+depressed into a sense of inferiority, so that they would ever move in
+the happy climate of a sense of equality. And every moment of this
+journey towards that perfect relationship was going to be a delight.</p>
+
+<p>She bent over him, enravished by the brilliant bloom of his creamy skin
+and the black blaze of his eyes, which had been black from birth, as
+hardly any children's are; turned him over and kissed the delicate crook
+of his knees and the straight column of his spine and the little square
+wings of his shoulder-blades, and then she turned him back again and
+jeered at him because he wore the phlegmatic, pasha-like smile of an
+adored baby. She became vexed with love for him, and longed to clasp
+him, to crush him as she knew she must not. She put on his
+night-clothes, kissing him extravagantly and unsatedly, and when she
+finished he wailed and nuzzled to her breast. "Oh, no, you greedy little
+thing," she cried, for it was a quarter of an hour before he should have
+been fed again, but a wave of love passed through her and she took him
+to her. They were fused, they were utterly content with one another. He
+finished, smacking his lips like an old epicure. "Oh, my darling love!"
+she cried, and put him back into the cot and ran downstairs. If she
+stayed longer she would keep him awake with her kisses and play. She was
+brightened and full of silent laughter, like a girl who escapes from her
+sweetheart.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother sat very quietly at her sewing and soon went upstairs.
+Grandmother was getting very old. When she said "Good-night" she seemed
+to be speaking out of the cavern of some preoccupation, and when she
+went upstairs her shawl fell from her shoulders and trailed its corner
+on the ground. Marion hoped that the old lady had not worn herself out
+by worrying about her, and she pulled out the sewing that had been shut
+up in the work-basket and meditated finishing it, but she was too tired.
+Nowadays she knew a fatigue which she could yield to frankly, as it was
+honourable to her organism, and meant that her strength was going into
+her milk and not into her blood. She folded her arms on the table and
+laid her head on them and thought of Richard. It was his monthly
+birthday to-day. He was three months old. She grieved to think that she
+could feed him for only six months more. How could she endure to be
+quite separate from him? Sometimes even now she regretted that the time
+had gone when he was within her, so that each of her heartbeats was a
+caress to him, to which his little heart replied, and she would feel
+utterly desolate and hungry when she could no longer join him to her
+bosom. But she would always be able to kiss him. She imagined herself a
+few years ahead, calling him back when he was running off to play,
+holding his resistant sturdiness in her arms while he gave her hasty,
+smudged kisses and hugged his ball for more loving. But she reflected
+that, while the character of those kisses would amuse her, they would
+not satisfy her craving for contact so close that it was unity with his
+warm young body, and she must set herself to be the most alluring mother
+that ever lived, so that he would not struggle in her arms but would
+give her back kiss for kiss. She flung her head back, sighing
+triumphantly because she knew she could do it, but as her eyes met her
+image in the mirror over the mantelpiece she was horrified to see how
+little like a mother she was looking. Lips pursed with these long
+imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child's mouth; she had lost
+utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a
+child may sleep: on a child's path her emanations were beginning to cast
+not light but lightning.</p>
+
+<p>She called out to herself: "You fool! If you really love Richard you
+will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow
+strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him
+an orange and not a kiss!" But it seemed to her that this would be a
+sacrifice until, staring into the glass, she noticed that she was now
+more beautiful than she had ever been, and then she saw the way by which
+she could be satisfied. Harry must come back; she knew he was coming
+back, for they had intercepted his letter to her, and they would not
+have done that if it had been unloving. After she had weaned Richard she
+must conceive again and let another child lift from him the excessive
+burden of her love: then her mind and soul could go on in his company
+without vexing him with these demands that only the unborn or the
+nursling could satisfy. Then this second child would become separate
+from her, and she must conceive again and again until this intense life
+of the body failed in her and her flesh ceased to be a powerful artist
+exulting in the creation of masterpieces. It must be so. For Richard's
+sake it must be so. Her love would be too heavy a cloak for one child,
+for it was meant to be a tent under which many should dwell. Again as in
+the wood she laid her hand on her body and felt it as an inexhaustible
+treasure. Again she was instantly mocked.</p>
+
+<p>There had come, then, a knock at the door. She had felt a little
+frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt
+fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is
+endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not
+be bitten by a frothing mouth. But it was not late, and it was as likely
+as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian
+calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.</p>
+
+<p>Peacey stood there. He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his
+body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll. There
+was an appearance of ceremony about him. His skin shone with the white
+lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly
+in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which
+she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like
+varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.</p>
+
+<p>He did not speak. He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he
+should enter. She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that
+clung about him been so definitely that of soap. From the garden behind
+him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds
+disturbed. His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids,
+with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or
+twice. When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish
+and he stepped within. He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to
+strip off his gloves. His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction,
+terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out: "Why have
+you come?"</p>
+
+<p>But he answered nothing. Speech is human, and words might have fomented
+some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should
+know each other only as animals and enemies. He continued to take off
+his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him
+hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the
+lamp. She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and
+moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood. Then in the blackness his
+weight threshed down on her. Even his form was a deceit, for his vast
+bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength. All consciousness soon left
+her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.
+Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her. She saw it as a lovely
+naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side,
+where it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body,
+sitting by with its haunches in a spring. She cried out to herself: "You
+can rise above this! This is only a physical thing," but her own answer
+came: "Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing. Yet it was a
+sacrament and gave you life. There is white magic and black magic. This
+is a black sacrament, and it will give you death." Her soul fainted into
+utter nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself
+up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.
+But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and
+made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over
+her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish
+early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow
+of the lamp the night before. It was evident that Peacey had set it in
+order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing
+she had left crumpled on the table. At this manifestation of his
+peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son's
+room. But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was
+ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first
+to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty
+had through all previous agonies reassured her. But the eastern sky was
+inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before,
+and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the
+barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch
+wounds. Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had
+happened to her one of earth's ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking
+on could make good. But turning to her child to still his crying, she
+saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on
+the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty
+and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and
+she ran to him. She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the
+criminal face of the morning.</p>
+
+<p>From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest
+isolation. She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing
+what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but
+she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now
+why Grandmother had been so preoccupied that she let the tail of her
+shawl trail on the ground as she went upstairs that night, and why
+Cousin Tom Stallybrass had not come in to tell how the calf had gone at
+Prittlebay market. When one afternoon she came to the head of the stairs
+and saw Aunt Alphonsine gesticulating in her tight <i>dame de compagnie</i>
+black in the parlour below, stretching out her long lean neck like the
+spout of a coffee-pot to Grandmothers' ear, she stood quite still,
+staring at the two women and hating them till they saw her and fell
+silent. She did not take her gaze from them until Aunt Alphonsine put up
+her hand to cover her scar. Then she knew that this wretched woman was
+at last afraid of her and would let her alone, and she turned
+contentedly to the room where Richard was.</p>
+
+<p>But later on a misgiving seized her lest her aunt might have come as
+envoy from Peacey, and since she perceived that, her rage against the
+world was so visibly written on her that she inspired fear; she thought
+it best to give her boy into the charge of Peggy and to go over to
+Torque Hall herself. She waited in the courtyard outside the servants'
+quarters while they fetched him, and stood with her head high, so that
+the faces peering at her from the windows should see nothing of her
+torment, at the corner of the gardens that was visible through the
+gracious Tudor archway. There was nothing showing save a few pale mauve
+clots of Michaelmas daisies standing flank-high in the slanting dusty
+shafts of evening sunshine, and the marble Triton, glowing gold in
+answer to the sunset, with gold autumn leaves scattered on his pedestal.
+But she knew very well how fair it all must be beyond, where she could
+not see&mdash;the broad grass walk stretching between the wide, formal
+flowerbeds, well tended but disordered with the lateness of the year, to
+the sundial and the chestnut grove. How could Harry, who had loved her,
+possess all this and not want to share it with her? She could have
+sobbed like a child whose playmate is not kind, had not Peacey stood at
+her elbow. "I want to give you warning that if ever you come near me
+again I will kill you," she said. He looked sharply at her and she saw
+that he was convinced and discomfited. But suddenly he smiled. She went
+home, wondering uneasily why he should have smiled, but came to the
+conclusion that this was simply one of his mystifications and that he
+had simply been trying to cover his defeat. It was an extraordinary fact
+that there never once occurred to her that possibility, the thought of
+which, she afterwards realised, had made Peacey smile. The truth was
+that she never thought directly of that night's horror, but, perhaps
+because of that fantasy about the wounded youth which had vexed her
+delirium, she always disguised it in her mind as an encounter with a
+wild beast, and the expectation of human issue no more troubled her than
+it would a woman who had been gored by a boar.</p>
+
+<p>It was partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous
+peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some
+months that she was going to have Peacey's child. It was indeed a rainy
+December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was
+little Jack Harken, because he was whistling "Good King Wenceslas," as
+he always did, and would not go to answer him, although she knew
+Grandmother and Peggy were both in the dairy, because she was distraught
+with her own degradation. Her encounter with Peacey had been like being
+shown some picture from a foul book and being obliged to stare at it
+till it was branded on her mind, so that whenever she looked at it she
+saw it also, stamped on the real image like the superscription on a
+palimpsest. But now she felt as if she herself had become a picture in a
+foul book. And she was quite insane with a sense of guilt towards
+Richard. This discovery had, of necessity, meant that she must wean him,
+and her obsession interpreted their conflict between them that had
+naturally followed as a wrangle between them as to her responsibility
+for this evil. Now he was lying in his cot screaming with rage, his
+clean frock and the sheets running with the rivulets of milk that he had
+spat out and struck from the teat of the bottle she was forcing on him,
+and she was sobbing, for this sort of thing had been going on for days,
+"I can't help it, darling, I can't help it."</p>
+
+<p>Then Jackie began to thump rhythmically on the door below, and she ran
+down, maddened with so much noise, and snatched the letter he held out
+to her. At the writing on the envelope her heart stood still. She
+recanted all she had lately thought of Harry. Hatred and resentment fell
+from her. The promise of her lover's near presence came on her like a
+south wind blowing over flowers. At his message that he was waiting for
+her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is&mdash;a
+shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its
+mate's hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that
+changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable
+gold. In her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her
+shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly
+so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the
+thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell,
+because her lover's arms would so soon be round her.</p>
+
+<p>She was amazed, for she had not yet had leisure or the heart to look out
+of the window, that beneath her the marshes crackled white with sunlit
+snow, and a blue sea stretched to the rosy horizon that girdles bright
+frosty days. Even as this beauty had lain unseen under her windows, so
+had her happiness waited unsuspected. She did not see him till she was
+close upon him, for he was striding up and down between the last two
+trees of the elm hedge. Her heart ached when she saw him standing,
+brilliantly lovely as the glistening snow-laden branches above him, for
+it was plain from the confident set of his shoulders and the loose grip
+of his hand on his stick that he was unaware that any situation existed
+which was not easily negotiable. They had evidently told him nothing at
+Torque Hall to destroy the impression she must have created by her last
+letter to him in which she had described her acceptance of Peacey's
+offer of a formal marriage. They had not dared, for they knew how
+terrible he would be when he moved to avenge her. But he lifted his eyes
+and ran to her and took her in his arms, and did not cease to kiss her
+till she sobbed out what they had done to her. Then it was as if a wind
+had blown and the snow had fallen from the branches, leaving them but
+dark, gnarled wood.</p>
+
+<p>"But why did you marry him?"</p>
+
+<p>"The people stoned me in the street and I could get no peace at home."</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't you have tried to stand it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid for the boy."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why couldn't you have gone away?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could I when I was so ill? Why did not you come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could I leave the prince and princess?"</p>
+
+<p>She was aghast to find them quarrelling, and while he drew a shuddering
+breath between his teeth, she interrupted: "Oh, Richard is so lovely!
+You must see him soon. Oh, such a boy!"</p>
+
+<p>But he had paid no heed and shakingly poured out words since it was so
+like the harmless spite of a child that beats young to old, her blood
+from that of a loved girl to a hating woman. He found the situation, she
+had thought at the time, and still thought after thirty years, far less
+negotiable than a high love would have done. It did not occur to him
+that he might take her away. He took it for granted that thereafter
+they must be lost to each other. But save for his desire to blame her
+for these mischances, which did not offend her, since it was so like the
+harmless spite of a child that beats his racquet because it has sent his
+ball into the next garden, he seemed not to be thinking of her part in
+that loss at all. It was his extreme sense of his own loss that was
+making him choke with tears. It appeared that love was not always a
+shelter, a wing, a witty clemency, a tender alchemy. She stood half
+asleep with shock until a sentence, said passionately in his delightful
+voice which made one see green water running swiftly, and at first
+refused admission to her mind by her incredulous love, confirmed itself
+by reiteration. "Damn it all," he was saying, "you were unique!" At that
+she cried out, "Oh, you are Peacey too! I will go back to Richard," and
+turned and stumbled up the wet hillside.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that Harry's desertion nearly killed her&mdash;that there was a
+moment, as she breasted the hill-top and found herself facing the
+malevolent red house where they had always told her that he did not
+really love her, when she thought she was about to fall dead from excess
+of experience and would have chosen to die so, if Richard had not waited
+for her. Yet it was also true that for long she hardly ever thought of
+Harry. Such fierce and unimagined passions and perplexities now filled
+her, that the simple and normal emotions she felt for him became
+imperceptible, like tapers in strong sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry
+frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in
+the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had
+left Torque Hall that morning. She had shaken her head and given a
+dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had
+had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because
+the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she
+was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to
+speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her
+or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey. Nor, when a few weeks later
+it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had
+been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next
+twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must
+be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved. She thought of it,
+indeed, but negligently. She could imagine well how he had walked with
+his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a
+tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very
+virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped
+and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest
+in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the
+shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, "I must get out of
+this." No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to
+the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies. It was not like her
+agony. Nothing was simple there. Destiny had struck her being a blow
+that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was
+confusion, and the best things were bad.</p>
+
+<p>Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
+beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
+his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
+would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
+and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
+so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
+forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
+constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
+a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
+that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
+her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
+that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
+with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
+knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
+to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
+was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
+matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
+her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
+with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
+was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
+dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
+motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
+to judge her and bring this matter to an end.</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
+that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
+he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
+he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
+money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
+thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
+yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
+that day of which she had told nobody.</p>
+
+<p>But she had cheered herself in all those nights that she would make up
+for her body's defection by loving the child very much when it was born.
+She knew she would have no passion for it as she had for Richard, but
+she foresaw herself being consciously and slantingly tender over it,
+like a primitive Madonna over the Holy Child. There was, of course, no
+such solution of the problem. It became plain that there was not going
+to be in that hour when she knew the unnatural horror of a painless
+parturition. She had not been at all shocked by the violence she had
+endured at Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with
+the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a
+persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating
+herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like
+looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that
+here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which
+have no meaning and realising that here is madness.</p>
+
+<p>She was going through a process that should have produced life: but
+because of the lack of some essence which works through pain, but
+nevertheless is to the breeding womb what sight is to the eye or sanity
+to the brain, it was producing something that was as much at variance
+with life as death. The old women at her bedside chuckled and rubbed
+their hands because she was having such an easy time, but that was
+because they were old and had forgotten. If a young woman had been
+there she would have stood at the other side of the room between the
+windows, as far away from the bed as she could, and her lips would have
+pursed, as if she felt the presence of uncleanness. So were her own,
+when they showed her the pale child. She had indeed done an unclean and
+unnatural thing when she had brought forth a child that lived yet was
+unloved; who was born of a mother that survived and looked at it, and
+who yet had no mother, since she felt no motion towards it, but a deep
+shiver of her blood away from it; who aroused no interest in the whole
+universe save her own abhorrence; who was, as was inevitable in one so
+begotten and so born, intrinsically disgusting in substance.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have Richard to help me bear this," she said to herself, but
+her heart reminded her that though she had Richard, this child had no
+one. Pitifully she put out her arms and drew it to her breast, but
+detected for herself the fundamentally insincere kindness that a
+stranger will show to a child, confident that before long it will be
+claimed by its own kin.</p>
+
+<p>She always remembered how good the little thing had been as it lay in
+her arms, and how distasteful. Those were always to remain its silent
+characteristics. It was so good. "As good," the nurses used to say, "as
+if he were a little girl." It hardly ever cried, and when it did it
+curiously showed its difference from Richard. He hated being a baby and
+subject to other people's wills, and would lie in a cot and roar with
+resentment; but this child, when it felt a need that was not satisfied,
+did not rebel, but turned its face to the pillow and whined softly. That
+was a strange and disquieting thing to watch. She would stand in the
+shadow looking at the back of its little head, so repellently covered
+with hair that was like fluff off the floor, and listening to the cry
+that trailed from its lips like a dirty piece of string; and she would
+wonder why it did this, partly because she really wanted to know, and
+partly because it fended off the moment when she had to take it in her
+arms. Perhaps, she reflected, it muted its rage because it knew that it
+was unlovable and must curry favour by not troubling people. Indeed, it
+was as unlovable as a child could be. It was not pleasant naked, for its
+bones looked at once fragile and coarse, and its flesh was lax, and in
+its clothes it was squalid, for it was always being sick or dribbling.
+Then her heart reproached her, and she admitted that it cried softly
+because it had a gentle spirit, and she would move forward quickly and
+do what it desired, using, by an effort of will, those loving words that
+fluttered to her lips when she was tending Richard. Time went on, but
+her attitude to it never developed beyond this alternate recognition of
+its hatefulness and its goodness.</p>
+
+<p>She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to
+bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed
+infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant
+in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out
+of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when
+her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly
+to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for
+knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty
+knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food
+round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a
+railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would
+speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered
+him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does
+when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But
+Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk
+perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that
+passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got
+tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked
+playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with
+trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of
+foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine
+and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a
+pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over
+again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and
+Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!"
+When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both
+his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so
+that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly
+noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would
+take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not
+share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the
+best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to
+a servant. He was of the substance of his mother, and he knew all that
+she knew, and he knew that this child was an intruder.</p>
+
+<p>They clenched themselves against him. They were kind to him, but they
+would silently scheme to be alone together. If they were all three in
+the garden, she sitting with her needlework, Richard playing with his
+engine and Roger making daisy-chains, there would come a time when she
+would arise and go into the house. She would not look at Richard before
+she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When
+she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious
+operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale,
+or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to
+look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him,
+knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door and stand for a
+moment, twiddling the handle round and round, as if he had not really
+been so very keen to come to her, and she would go on indifferently with
+her occupation. But presently she would feel that she must steal a
+glance at the face that she knew would be looking so adorable now,
+peering obliquely round the edge of the door, the lips bright with
+vitality as with wet paint and the eyes roguish as if he felt she were
+teasing life by enjoying it so, and the dear square head, browny-gold
+like the top of a bun, and the little bronze body standing so fresh and
+straight in the linen suit. So her glance would slide and slide, and
+their eyes would meet and he would run to her. If he had anything on his
+conscience he would choose this moment for confession. "Mother, I told a
+lie yesterday. But it wasn't about anything really important, so we
+won't talk about it, will we?"</p>
+
+<p>Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk,
+until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so
+boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love
+for him as in long meadow-grass. Even as she imagined that night before
+Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss.
+They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other
+child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle,
+surveying them with wild eyes. There would be a moment of dislocation.
+Then she would cry, "Come along, Roger!" and Richard would slip from her
+knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms
+round her neck and kiss her. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as
+if it needed reassurance.</p>
+
+<p>But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very
+difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of
+him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never
+felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving
+nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in
+order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage
+which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was
+eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel
+either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in
+different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the
+immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the
+other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when
+she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great
+distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she
+marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for
+love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would
+never mature.</p>
+
+<p>The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another
+eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque
+Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed
+between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she
+was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but
+she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so
+after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past
+each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift
+her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she
+would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful,
+and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was
+as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a
+band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were
+contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be
+pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's
+breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the
+other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it
+would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its
+features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any
+expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the
+mud. They would pass on&mdash;their hearts sunk deeper into dingy
+acquiescence in their separation.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as
+externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.
+Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house
+into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers
+to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though
+his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of
+naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when
+Roger ailed&mdash;which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a
+weak digestion&mdash;she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse
+him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary
+intensity on the minuti&aelig; of his treatment and diet as if she were
+attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on
+presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter
+evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often
+to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start
+one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent,
+concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal
+existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the
+park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames
+mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave
+any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him
+as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing
+did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare
+that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman
+living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the
+other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes
+at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers
+rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into
+it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and
+she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger,
+but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there had
+arrived&mdash;as there did every six months&mdash;parcels of toys, addressed to
+him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of
+paper scrawled "With love from father."</p>
+
+<p>She would be troubled by such moments when they came, for she was
+growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this
+pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and
+struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had
+smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love
+itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and
+breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent
+that it did not detect that nobody had really given it anything, and
+went on rejoicing, thus redeeming her from guilt. He would come and
+stand at the door of any room in which she was sitting, and she would
+pretend not to know he was there, so that she need caress him or say the
+forced loving word; but when at length, irritated by his repeated
+sniffs, she turned towards him, she would find the grey marbles of his
+eyes bright with happiness, and he would cry out in his dreadful
+whistling voice, "Ah, you didn't know I was watching you!" and run
+across undoubtingly to her arms. There would be real gratitude in the
+embrace she gave him. His trust in her had so changed the moment that
+she need not feel remorse for it.</p>
+
+<p>It had seemed quite possible that they could go on like this for ever,
+until the very instant that all was betrayed. She had had a terrible
+time with Richard, who was now seven years old. After their midday meal
+he had asked permission to go and spend the afternoon playing with some
+other boys on the marshes, and she had given it to him with a kiss,
+under which she had thought he seemed a little sullen. When Roger and
+she had nearly finished their tea he had appeared at the door, had stood
+there for a minute, and then, throwing up his head, had said doggedly:
+"I've had a lovely time at the circus." She had left the bread-knife
+sticking in midloaf and sat looking at him in silence. This was real
+drama, for she had refused to take them to the circus and forbidden him
+to go by himself because there was a measles epidemic in the
+neighbourhood. It flashed across her that by asking for permission to
+play with the boys on the marshes when he meant to go to the circus he
+had told her a lie. The foolish primitive maternal part of her was
+convulsed with horror at his fault. Because he was more important than
+anybody else, it seemed the most tremendous fault that anybody had ever
+committed, and because he was her son it seemed quite unlike any other
+fault and far more excusable. Her detached wisdom warned her that she
+must check all such tendencies in him, since what would in other
+children be judged a shortcoming natural to their age, would in him be
+ascribed to the evil blood of his lawless begetting, and he would start
+life under the powerful suggestion of a bad reputation. She resolved to
+punish him. The core of her that was nothing but love for Richard, that
+would have loved him utterly if they had not been mother and son, but
+man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, cried out with
+anguish that she should have to hurt him to guard against the destiny
+which she herself had thrust upon him.</p>
+
+<p>She said in a strained voice: "How dare you tell a lie to me and pretend
+that you were going to the marshes?" He answered, his eyebrows meeting
+and lying in straight, sullen bars: "I had to do that so's you wouldn't
+worry about me not coming home. And I paid for myself with the sixpence
+that was over from the five shillings Cousin Tom gave me at Christmas.
+And you know it doesn't really matter about the measles, because I'm
+strong and don't always go catching things like Roger does."</p>
+
+<p>He made as if he were going to sit down at the table, but she said: "No,
+you mustn't have any tea. Go to your room and undress. You've lied and
+you've disobeyed. I'll have to whip you." Her heart was thumping so that
+she thought she was going to faint. He lifted his chin a little higher
+and said: "Very well, the circus was very good. It was quite worf this."
+He marched out of the room and left her sick and quivering at her duty.
+After she had heard him bang his door, she realised that Roger was
+asking her again and again if he might have some more cherry jam, and
+she answered, sighing deeply, "No, dear, it's too rich. If you have any
+more you'll be ill," and she rose from the table and took the jar into
+the larder. She decided to clear away tea first, but that only meant
+carrying the tray backwards and forwards twice, and after a few moments
+she found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, shaking with
+terror, while the other child whined about her skirts and stretched up
+its abhorrent little arms. She pushed it aside, qualifying the harsh
+movement with some insincere endearment, and went to Richard's room and
+walked in blindly, saying: "I must whip you&mdash;you've broken the law, and
+if you do that you must be punished." Out of the darkness before her
+came the voice of the tiny desperado: "Very well. It was quite worf
+this. Mother, I'm ready. Come on and whip me." She pulled down the
+blinds and set herself to the horrid task, and kept at it hardly,
+unsparingly, until she felt she had really hurt him. Then she said, with
+what seemed to be the last breath in her heart-shattered body: "There,
+you see, whenever you break the law people will hurt you like this. So
+take notice." She moved about the room, leaving it as it should be left
+for the night, opening the windows and folding up the counterpane, while
+he lay face downwards on his pillow. Just as she was closing the door he
+called softly:</p>
+
+<p>"Mummie!"</p>
+
+<p>She continued to close it, and he cried:</p>
+
+<p>"Mummie!"</p>
+
+<p>But she remained quite quiet so that he thought she had gone. After a
+minute she heard him throw himself over in the bed and kick the clothes
+and sob fiercely, "Gah! Why can't she come when I call her?"</p>
+
+<p>She was back by his bedside in a second, and his arms were round her
+neck and he was sobbing:</p>
+
+<p>"Mummie, mummie, I know I've been naughty!" And as he felt the wetness
+of her face he cried out, "Oh, mummie, have I made you cry? I will be
+good! I will be good! I'll never make you cry again! I know I was a
+beast to go 'cos you really were frightened of us getting measles, but
+oh, mummie, I did so want to see a tiger!"</p>
+
+<p>They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that
+were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost
+melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.</p>
+
+<p>"You were quite right to whip me," he told her. "I wouldn't have
+believed you were really cross if you hadn't hurt me." Presently, when
+he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he
+sighed, "Oh, darling, the circus was lovely! There were such clever
+people. There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the
+ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful
+lady in pink satin. Mummie, you'd look lovely in pink satin!&mdash;and she'd
+bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.
+That was lovely, but I liked the animals best. Oh, darling, the lions!"</p>
+
+<p>She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that
+ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he
+protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
+surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
+up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
+of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
+could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
+do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
+parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
+They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
+suddenly as children do.</p>
+
+<p>She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
+nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
+little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
+than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
+waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
+rose and left him.</p>
+
+<p>Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily
+through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart
+wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew
+that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had
+been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going
+to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that
+she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve
+this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the
+open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by
+some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all
+poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate
+for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.</p>
+
+<p>She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and
+humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of
+nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the
+woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way
+touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her
+eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went
+round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop
+on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was
+pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark doors and
+windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their
+thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they
+were consciously preserving their occupants from the night's magic. As
+she walked to the garden's edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass
+and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks. The
+round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were
+hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and
+changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within
+the house was Richard. All was beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother? She stood
+there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew
+cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went
+back to the house.</p>
+
+<p>She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door
+was open and giving out a faint ray of light. She pulled it open and saw
+the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the
+jar into his mouth. A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it,
+threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull.
+It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that
+gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair,
+the floor. She lifted the child down and struck it. It gave her the most
+extraordinary pleasure to strike it. She struck it three times, and each
+time it was as good as drinking wine. Then she fell forward on her knees
+and covered her face with her hands. The child ceased to howl and put
+its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only
+reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it. Still, she submitted
+to its embrace, and muttered in abasement: "Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn't
+have done that!"</p>
+
+<p>The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam,
+and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that
+anybody had behaved badly to it. There was nothing to do but to give it
+a kiss and take it off to bed. When she saw its horrid little body
+stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered
+again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether
+very much force would be needed to kill it. All the time it knelt at her
+knee saying its prayers she was wondering whether, when he was a little
+older, he would not get caught by the tide out on the flats. "You vile
+woman!" she exclaimed in amazement. "You murderess!" But that was merely
+conversation which did not alter the established fact that her
+profounder self still hated the child it had brought forth, as it had
+done before he was born, and now, as then, was plotting to kill it, and
+that some check which her consciousness had always exerted on that
+hatred had for some reason been damaged, and that he was in active
+danger from her.</p>
+
+<p>All night she lay awake, and in the morning she went up to the bailiff's
+office at Torque Hall and asked them to send for Harry. She waited in an
+inner room, her heart quite calm with misery, and when Harry appeared in
+the doorway she did not care one way or another that he was white and
+shaken. Without delaying to greet him, she told him that she loathed
+Peacey's child so much that it must be taken away from her, at least for
+some time, and that she had wondered if she ought to give him a chance
+of finding affection with his father, who had, after all, never stopped
+sending him presents.</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence, and she turned her eyes on him and found him
+looking disapproving. Plainly he thought it very unnatural of her to
+dislike her own child, and was daring to doubt if his own son was safe
+with her. He&mdash;he of all men&mdash;who by his disloyalty had brought on her
+this monstrous birth that had deformed her fate! She clenched her fists
+and drew in a sharp breath and her eyes blazed. He moved forward
+suddenly in his chair, and she saw that this display of her quality had
+drawn him to her, as always the moon of her being had drawn the fluid
+tides of his, and that he wanted to touch her. Nearly he desired her.
+That also was insolence. Her acute hating glance recorded that whereas
+desire had used to make his face hard and splendid like a diamond, like
+a flashing sword, it now made it lax, and she realised with agony,
+though, of course, without surprise, that he had been unfaithful to
+their love times without number. But she looked into his eyes and found
+them bereaved as her heart was. She turned aside and sobbed once, drily.
+After that, they spoke softly, as if one they had both loved lay dead
+somewhere close at hand. He told her that Peacey had set up for himself
+in an inn, and that a widowed sister of his, named Susan Rodney, who
+also had been in the Torques' service, was keeping house for him. She
+was a really good sort, he declared, although she was Peacey's sister,
+and very motherly; indeed, she had been terribly upset by the loss of
+her only child, a little boy of nine, so she would doubtless welcome the
+charge of Roger. At any rate, there would be no harm in letting the
+child go to her for a three months' visit.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll settle the whole thing," he said. "You'd better not write; he may
+want to meet you."</p>
+
+<p>With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything
+useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she
+abruptly rose to go. But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity
+that had vexed her for years.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," she asked. "How did you get rid of Peacey? Was it money?"</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders. "Not altogether. You see, I found out
+something about him...."</p>
+
+<p>She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had
+perpetuated.</p>
+
+<p>So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation.
+She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her
+brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper
+lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow
+floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And
+because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was
+sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at
+Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance
+at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she
+found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been
+in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which
+was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as
+to how he was getting on at Dawlish.</p>
+
+<p>"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would
+begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer,
+and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious
+man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that
+which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated
+her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.</p>
+
+<p>Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by
+explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had
+suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she
+could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to
+win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and
+be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly
+in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely
+she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had
+gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the
+other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been
+subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read
+book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to
+this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not
+bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood
+had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows
+brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her
+bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the
+Ten Commandments.</p>
+
+<p>Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the
+eyeballs were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose
+and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much,
+and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms
+round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly
+difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her,
+and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her.
+But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that
+because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more
+impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the
+child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in
+this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her
+heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she
+had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being
+slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was
+necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment
+Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his
+poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other
+love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them
+off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly,
+and with an air of refusing to participate in the spoils of vice,
+declined to let Marion buy her a firstclass ticket, so the parting had
+to take place in a crowded thirdclass compartment. Roger shrieked and
+kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion
+said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now
+she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the
+eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And
+there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."</p>
+
+<p>All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this
+plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who
+stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters
+wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he
+never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream
+out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been
+sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother
+hates him!"</p>
+
+<p>She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with
+grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus
+about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child
+might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She
+watched the diminishing train with a criminally light heart. Richard
+began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely&mdash;just us two!"</p>
+
+<p>It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran
+into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep,
+into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did
+not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the
+head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he
+went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the
+garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a
+foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not
+been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he
+returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter,
+for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick
+suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him
+out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have
+stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not
+struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed
+her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a
+picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put
+them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted
+candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her
+pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which
+these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and
+Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and
+sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost
+nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better
+than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he
+would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her
+about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would
+settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would
+tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together,
+and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found
+the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine.
+They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried
+horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see
+Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it
+were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there
+met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings,
+and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the
+sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels
+thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled
+and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its
+flames.</p>
+
+<p>Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness
+and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and
+lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it
+was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his
+body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and
+unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings
+as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride
+ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his
+behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable
+conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his
+spirit were poured out into his passion for her. She had always known
+these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the
+knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For
+now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man
+to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she
+was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud
+by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother
+of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according
+to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be
+enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses
+in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so
+much less splendid than his son.</p>
+
+<p>She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour
+on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with
+the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew
+that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to
+keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite
+safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to
+speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to
+say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard
+would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she
+would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to
+speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she
+tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might
+try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be
+nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger
+will always be nice to me&mdash;you needn't worry about that."</p>
+
+<p>As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural
+slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village
+school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact,
+disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered
+judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of
+his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which
+his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure,
+whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute
+illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically
+than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or
+need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so
+were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly,
+or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or
+workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely
+than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together
+men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to
+rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged
+to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure,
+their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be
+adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.</p>
+
+<p>Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
+passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest
+after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind
+like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and
+even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
+goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would
+disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose
+begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him
+take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her
+the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that
+stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith
+Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought
+beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any
+man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to
+everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long
+would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she
+cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard
+looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The
+surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical
+kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very
+well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute,
+with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to
+burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest
+of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity,
+and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way,
+"You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll
+be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.
+If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger,
+she would succeed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2VI" id="CHAPTER_2VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking
+and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay
+in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone
+from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by
+nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and
+love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning
+for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later
+years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the
+afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever
+rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as
+one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own
+thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that
+the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle
+of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it
+specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two,
+and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last
+Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds
+about the dark edges of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.
+She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began
+to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning
+their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.
+"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys
+say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because
+always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down
+and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to
+infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.
+But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile,
+as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly,
+"Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his
+brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as
+children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some
+important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant
+resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow,
+acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has
+to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.
+But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an
+off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the
+best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"
+She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had
+been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about;
+it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups
+were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....</p>
+
+<p>As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and
+rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment
+so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the
+benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that
+her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no
+longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she
+wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week
+before Christmas.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on
+the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it
+threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the
+pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.
+There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to
+remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her
+brainpan.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he
+would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.
+It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so
+many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she
+took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six
+months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by
+reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to
+be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was
+declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that
+love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy
+than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not
+have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the
+house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then
+penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant
+presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat
+with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she
+could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor
+little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that
+Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in
+subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his
+cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they
+would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished
+she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and
+not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from
+looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey
+and he knew it.</p>
+
+<p>Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to
+heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She
+picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and
+struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients
+would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was
+being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter
+to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not
+know, and then, because the grandfather clock twanged out three and she
+knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the
+windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High
+Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found
+Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped.
+The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously,
+and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all
+the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation
+of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at
+once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days
+after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey,
+the village people would go through her story all over again to try to
+find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a
+tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which
+the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer
+distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming,
+<i>please</i>, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the
+favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much
+imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say
+afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the
+extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy
+with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed.
+For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was
+nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the
+game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote
+her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back
+within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an
+infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back,
+pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be
+taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger,
+she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped
+them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame
+died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and
+cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"</p>
+
+<p>What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels
+with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than
+a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can
+hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.
+She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the
+blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air
+with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him
+suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and
+abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her
+no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every
+hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in
+some way that would hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when
+she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up
+and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had
+forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able
+to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to
+write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not
+coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She
+took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown
+getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard
+and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away
+she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and
+wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of
+blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or
+of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper;
+and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said
+wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into
+February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and
+the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.</p>
+
+<p>That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn
+she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men
+looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her
+hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.
+Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.
+Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In
+the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to
+herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God
+I may never spend another like it."</p>
+
+<p>But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul
+walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously,
+struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was
+no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not
+long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture
+so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in
+an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get
+something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a
+bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few
+hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now
+undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They
+were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that
+there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put
+into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and
+at games.</p>
+
+<p>Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance
+which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead
+from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a
+school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a
+player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure
+was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know
+as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail
+of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were
+both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his
+superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader
+might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.
+When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this
+suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth
+limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he
+pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it
+was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this
+sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.
+She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that
+she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down
+Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown sunshine of the
+dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his
+dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of
+the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the
+other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep,
+for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of
+memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given
+her with its first prick, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that
+those things would go on and on, until in the end a little figure in a
+nightshirt beat the dark with its fists.</p>
+
+<p>For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating
+her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her
+that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart
+which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little
+more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she
+coveted more than any pleasure. But that process, if it ever had begun,
+was stopped when Richard was fifteen.</p>
+
+<p>It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays,
+that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that
+she had started up, crying out, "Harry! Harry!" She heard the latch of
+the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.
+Half asleep, she mumbled, "Harry, it can't be you?..." A voice answered
+haltingly, "No," and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and
+lit the candle by her bedside. She could not see him, for the light was
+too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her
+dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, "Go to
+bed, I'm all right, all right." But he sat down on her bed and took her
+hand in his, and said sullenly, "You've been calling out for my father.
+Why are you doing that?" She whimpered, "Nothing. I was only dreaming."
+But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep. "I know all
+about it, mother. The other boys told me about it. And Goodtart said
+something once." His hand tightened on hers. "You used to meet him up at
+that temple." For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and
+then persisted, "What is it? Why do you cry almost every night? I've
+heard you ever so often. You've got to tell me what's the matter."</p>
+
+<p>She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid
+for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that
+the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but
+because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin
+cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she
+desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her
+long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the
+shore by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him
+so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips
+dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the
+boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"</p>
+
+<p>"What boy did that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."</p>
+
+<p>She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually
+became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair
+across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she
+wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had
+happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight
+of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself,
+"Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"</p>
+
+<p>But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face
+against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and
+sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at
+him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking,
+"Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I
+love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for
+one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears,
+slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with
+kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with
+relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back
+to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He
+did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped
+softly into dreamless sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced
+by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of
+guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes
+against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it
+is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by
+calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest
+dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and
+she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was
+binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his
+childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from
+a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand
+what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these
+nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her
+destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she
+could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly
+concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a
+profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She
+did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory
+quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little
+figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt
+nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As
+much as ever Roger was an orphan.</p>
+
+<p>But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this
+matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed
+it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How
+proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to
+sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to
+that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from
+boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen
+so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when
+he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids
+and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent
+clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her
+until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She
+had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul
+when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship,
+he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"
+She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather
+roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting,
+did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned
+away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had
+distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would
+imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for
+going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was
+not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that
+travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his
+magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had
+found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and
+the farm-men, for she had grown very sly about her fellow-men, and knew
+that it was best to hide happiness lest someone jealous should put out
+their hand to destroy it. So she had gone down to the orchard and sat in
+the crook of a tree, looking out at an opal estuary where a frail
+rainstorm spun like a top in the sunshine before the variable April
+gusts. She wondered how his dear brown face would look now he had
+outfaced danger and had been burned by strange suns. She had heard
+suddenly the sound of steps coming down the path, and she had turned in
+ecstasy; but there was nobody there but a pale young man who looked like
+one of the East-End trippers who all through the summer months
+persistently trespassed on the farm lands. As he saw her he stopped, and
+she was about to order him to leave the orchard by the nearest gate when
+he flapped his very large hands and cried out, "Mummie! Mummie!" There
+was a whistling quality in the cry that instantly convinced her. She
+drew herself taut and prepared to deal with him as a spirited woman
+deals with a blackmailer, but as he ran towards her, piping exultantly,
+"Now I'm sixteen I can say who I want to live with&mdash;the vicar says so,"
+she remembered that he was her son, and suffered herself to be folded in
+his arms, which embraced her closely but without suggestion of strength.</p>
+
+<p>That day, at least, she had played her part according to her duty: she
+had corrected so far as possible the sin of her inner being. It had not
+been so very difficult, for Roger had shown himself just as
+goldenhearted as he had been as a child. He would not speak of the years
+of ill-treatment from which he had emerged, save to say tediously, over
+and over again, with a revolting, grateful whine in his voice, how hard
+Aunt Susan had worked to keep the peace when father had one of his bad
+turns. It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice
+in a draper's shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and
+overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained
+of was that the "talk was bad." Tears came into his light eyes when he
+said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save
+sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for
+her. There would never be any end to that. All through the midday meal
+he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and
+would say whistlingly: "Ooh, mummie, d'you know, I used to think it must
+be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think
+I've ever seen such another head of hair."</p>
+
+<p>But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they
+walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of
+which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when
+I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said
+that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you
+didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."</p>
+
+<p>Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a
+kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try
+his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and
+that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you
+knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past
+eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she
+had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they
+ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into
+the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly
+excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here,
+Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who
+defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not
+like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But
+Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened
+with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It
+evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a
+third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself
+felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other
+people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have
+come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see
+it's Roger!"</p>
+
+<p>Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for
+him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure,
+she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome
+having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But
+her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it
+was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of
+a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his
+coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he
+had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one
+chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell
+the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer
+and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and
+immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of
+waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are
+you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her
+chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when
+suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's
+shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to
+run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to
+carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not
+look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice,
+"Hello, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not
+bear to look at his warty hands any longer, and then asked: "Roger,
+dear, is there anything the matter?" She spoke to him always without any
+character in her phrases, like a mother in books. He mumbled, "Nothing,
+mummie," but would not lift his head; and after a gulping minute
+whimpered: "I want to go back to the shop." "Back to the shop, dear? But
+I thought you hated it. Darling, what is the matter?" He remained
+silent, so she took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
+Perhaps that had not been a very wise thing to do.</p>
+
+<p>Marion had dropped her hands and gone back to Richard, and said with
+simulated fierceness: "You haven't done anything to Roger that would
+make him think that we don't like having him here?" He glanced sharply
+at her and recognised that their destiny was turning ugly in their
+hands, and he answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to a chap
+who's been through such a rotten time." She thought, with shame, that if
+his face had become cruel at her question, and he had answered that he
+thought it was time the other went, she would have bowed to his
+decision, because he was her king, and she realised that it was no
+wonder that Roger had found out. That moment of which she was so proud
+because she had said heartily, "Richard, don't you see it's Roger?"
+without showing by any wild yearning of the eye that she would have
+given anything to be alone with him, had been instantly followed by a
+betrayal. For when he had lifted his lips from her cheek and had turned
+to greet Roger with courtesy that was at once kind and insincere, he had
+left one hand resting on her shoulder as it had been when they embraced,
+and his thumb stretched out to press on the pulse that beat at the base
+of her throat. If she had been completely loyal she would have moved;
+but she had stood quite still, letting him mark how she was not calm and
+rejoicing at all, but shaken as by a storm with her disgust at this
+loathsome presence. His hand had relaxed and he had passed it
+caressingly up her neck. She had let herself sigh deeply; she might as
+well have said, "I am so glad you understand I hate him." That was the
+first of a thousand such betrayals. The words said between souls are not
+heard by the eavesdropping ear, but the soul also can eavesdrop, and
+tells in its time. That morning there must have come a moment to the
+poor pale boy, as he worked at his silly present in the little shed,
+when it was plain to him that the mother and the brother whom he had
+thought so kind were vulpine with love of each other, vulpine with hate
+of him.</p>
+
+<p>There was no disputing his discovery, since it was true. The only thing
+to do was to try to arrange some way of life for him in which he would
+have a chance to become an independent person who could form new and
+unspoiled relationships. It was, of course, out of the question to send
+him back to the shop, but the problem of disposing of him was one that
+raised innumerable difficulties which Marion was the less able to face
+because her bad dreams had begun again. He had so little schooling that
+it was impossible to send him in for any profession. He, himself, who
+was touchingly grateful because they were not sending him back to the
+shop, chose to be trained as a veterinary surgeon, and he was
+apprenticed to old Mr. Taylor at Canewdon. But it turned out that though
+he had a passionate love for animals he had no power over them. After he
+had been chased round a field three times and severely bitten by a
+stallion with whom he had sat up for two nights, Mr. Taylor pronounced
+that it was hopeless and sent him home. They tried him as a chemist's
+assistant next, and he did well for ten months, until there was that
+awful trouble about the prescription. There had been nothing to do after
+that save to put him to work as a clerk and give him an allowance that
+with his wages would enable him to live in comfort and try to seem glad
+when he came home for his holidays.</p>
+
+<p>For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not
+love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made
+him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and
+half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not
+take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for
+his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at
+his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were
+so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank
+Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get
+there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep
+things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less
+misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window
+than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was
+concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end
+of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes
+following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her
+heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was
+responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to
+ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as
+everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which
+confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving
+from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city,
+because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.</p>
+
+<p>From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she
+was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he
+would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say
+bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And
+she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as
+you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be
+sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling
+and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the
+inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it
+would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.
+And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there
+flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing
+would happen. But what thing? She would put her hand to her head, but
+she was never able to remember.</p>
+
+<p>And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen;
+though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing. She herself had
+never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it,
+but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had
+always done its duty by Roger. It told, of course, the most moving story
+of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he
+should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been
+walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a
+flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller's in Watford
+and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his
+allowance, he could not possibly pay.</p>
+
+<p>The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at
+first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger. It had been
+unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had
+been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation
+of the note of love. It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in
+the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense
+rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur,
+"Oh, but he was speaking the truth. I'm quite comfortably off. I've come
+to pay the jeweller," and watch the look of amazement on the hot,
+high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated
+into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man,
+and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no
+longer. Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger. Marion
+felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to
+feel.</p>
+
+<p>She liked, too, going into the jeweller's shop and sitting there under
+the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely
+voice that she had learned from her lover: "Yes, but I don't want you to
+take them back. I want to pay for them. There seems to have been some
+misunderstanding. There is no difficulty about the money at all. My son
+only wanted you to wait till his quarter's allowance came. I have the
+money here in notes. If you would count it...." She was playing a
+mother's part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller's eyes were
+examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she
+had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because
+it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from
+within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly
+because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served
+Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried
+back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him
+as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have
+done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious
+woman...."</p>
+
+<p>But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up
+suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with
+pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took
+it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into
+a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the
+oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.
+She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay
+two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other
+hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her
+train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you,
+mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of
+his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll
+of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For
+since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not
+love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space,
+there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had
+always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....</p>
+
+<p>But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had
+written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his
+allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must
+try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a
+situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they
+heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his
+holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an
+increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at
+first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then
+in Rio de Janeiro. There she was happy. She was one of those Northerners
+to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its
+natives. For over those the sun has had power since their birth,
+consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became
+pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the
+Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth. But
+with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of
+the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons. She could walk
+across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the
+heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent
+pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the
+thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she
+was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had
+always impotently desired to do.</p>
+
+<p>And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched
+his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had
+established it over her being from the moment of his conception. There
+was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in
+hesitancy, but in simultaneous snatchings at life by both of the warring
+forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation. He loved
+riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he
+did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him
+in his pleasure. But he gave the core of his passion to his work and
+disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he
+was always cool and remote like a priest. It gave him pleasure to be
+insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of
+fineness and humility. He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality
+of his work that he rejected half the world's offers to him. And always
+he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if
+they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country
+that had banished them and were earning great honours. She wished this
+life could go on for ever.</p>
+
+<p>But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the
+flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap. She did not
+open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.
+His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an
+Indian's in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and
+satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.
+That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think
+of Richard's actions as being good or bad, but only as being different
+in colour and lustre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are
+pearls, and there are emeralds. But it made her feel lonely, and she
+turned soberly to opening her letter. It was from Roger. He was in
+trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were
+gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help. At
+first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising
+that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly:
+"Richard, how can I cable money to Roger? He wants it quickly. And,
+Richard, I think I should go home and look after him." Richard had set
+his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment's quivering
+silence, had broken into curses. "Oh, don't speak of poor Roger like
+that!" she had cried out, and he had answered terribly: "I'm not
+speaking of him; I'm speaking of my father, who let you in for all
+this." She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his
+face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace
+with his father before he died. Not even for Harry's sake would she
+imperil the love between her and her son.</p>
+
+<p>She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been
+useless. Roger would never come back to live with her. All she could do
+was to sit at Yaverland's End, ready to receive him when he turned up,
+as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was
+going to do in the future. Usually on these occasions he brought her a
+present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the
+humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a glass jar of
+preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking
+magnificent when he saw it in the grocer's shop. She would kiss him
+gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the
+grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in
+cities.</p>
+
+<p>A regular routine followed these visits. First he wrote happy letters
+home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was
+silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job
+and owed money to the landlady. Then she would seek him out, wherever he
+was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards
+Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the
+house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an
+irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home
+with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.
+At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.
+For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become
+so if he went back and lived with her. As things were, he could
+interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.
+Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible
+quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so
+sorry for his landladies. To admit that he could not earn a bare living
+when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would
+have broken his spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her,
+but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend
+together on these occasions. There fell increasingly moments of silence
+when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good
+little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his
+unpleasantness. For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.
+As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning
+to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was
+something else about his appearance, something tarnished and
+disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at
+Leicester said to her: "I do think it's such a pity that a nice young
+man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don't take more care of himself like he
+ought to." Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world,
+because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her
+son a murderer than a drunkard. She had wondered if the truth need ever
+reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind's eye a newspaper
+paragraph: "Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings
+for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course
+of their duty...." She had asked quickly, "What is he like? Does he get
+violent?" The woman had answered: "Oh no, mum; just silly-like," and had
+laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.</p>
+
+<p>Oh God, oh God! When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to
+something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear,
+but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had
+always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was
+conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was
+somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention
+to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for
+daring to be Richard&mdash;an intention that was vindictive against beauty
+and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not
+strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit
+for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's
+drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would
+side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.
+They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness
+would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped
+out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that
+lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness
+that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.
+Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and
+excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she
+cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been
+so different...."</p>
+
+<p>If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great
+house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there
+slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry
+would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of
+her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born
+child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have
+gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a
+boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of
+immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his
+face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she
+longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have
+turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men
+and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them
+threatened, not one of them doomed....</p>
+
+<p>Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.
+The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming
+tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her
+house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would
+not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.
+Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it
+had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her
+eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...."</p>
+
+<p>There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric
+bell.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the clock by her bedside. It was three o'clock. She said
+to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange
+things have happened assume when they fear that yet another is
+approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation,
+"It's late for anyone to call."</p>
+
+<p>But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.</p>
+
+<p>She cried out, "Ah, yes!" She knew who it was. It was Roger, come in
+rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and
+squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself. She hurried over to her
+wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into
+slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, "Roger, Roger,
+Roger! ... Why, it's you, Roger!... Come in. Come in, my boy.... What is
+it, my poor lad?..."</p>
+
+<p>She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle
+of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and
+smoothed from it certain lines of loathing. Bowing her head, she
+murmured a remonstrance to some power.</p>
+
+<p>But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2VII" id="CHAPTER_2VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the
+door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare,
+lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,"
+so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared
+to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more
+hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard
+line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the
+threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and
+hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor
+darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight
+coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it
+seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the
+white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous
+stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but
+their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.</p>
+
+<p>She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed
+nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor
+she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had
+looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked
+like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern
+countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where
+she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles
+away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat
+outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their
+relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without
+warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.</p>
+
+<p>She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the
+shed?" she asked indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>"No. It's outside the gate."</p>
+
+<p>"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."</p>
+
+<p>He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of
+dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.</p>
+
+<p>She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the
+illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the
+phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange
+night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were
+co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears
+she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge
+electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous
+son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he
+passed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It
+was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores
+lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit
+to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and
+kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.</p>
+
+<p>She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search
+of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of
+light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been
+anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have
+gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from
+him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her,
+that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."</p>
+
+<p>Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance
+of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had
+not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his
+cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The
+queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet
+somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity
+for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....</p>
+
+<p>He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and
+murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her
+that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in
+an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely
+name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way
+it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly
+as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.
+It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his
+favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to
+school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow
+of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the
+flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."</p>
+
+<p>She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but
+she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm
+plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption.
+These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that
+the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's
+hot!" she said, holding out the plate.</p>
+
+<p>He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in
+Scotland."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"</p>
+
+<p>"As well as well can be."</p>
+
+<p>"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I've had none, none at all."</p>
+
+<p>"That means not too many. Does it?"</p>
+
+<p>They kissed, and he said tenderly yet harshly: "Roger hasn't been
+bothering you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the poor thing, don't speak of him like that," she said. "No, but
+I've not heard from him for six weeks. Not even at Christmas. I'm a
+little anxious. But it may be all right. You remember last Christmas
+there was a time when he didn't write. I expect it'll be all right." But
+with her eyes she abandoned herself to fear, so that he should soothe
+her and stroke her hands with his, which were trembling in spite of
+their strength because he was so glad to see her.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, darling, I have hated leaving you alone. But it was necessary.
+I've done good work this winter." He made with one hand a stiff and
+sweeping movement that expressed his peculiar kind of arrogance, which
+stated that his was the victory, now and for ever, and yet took
+therefrom no pride for himself. "I've pulled it off," he said jeeringly,
+and smiled at her derisively but with tight lips, as if they must take
+this thing lightly or some danger would spring. "Where I get my brains
+from I don't know," he muttered teasingly, and put out his hand and
+traced the interweaving strands in one of her plaits. "What hair you've
+got!" he said. "I've never seen a woman with ..." He started violently
+and was silent.</p>
+
+<p>She cried out, "What is it?" But he answered, speaking clippedly, "Oh,
+nothing, nothing...."</p>
+
+<p>So evidently was he overcoming a moment of utter confusion that she
+turned away and busied herself with the coffee.</p>
+
+<p>Behind her his voice spoke falsely, uplifted in a feint of the surprised
+recollection which at its first coming had struck him dumb the previous
+moment. "And Ellen! I'm a nice sort of lover to be five minutes in the
+house without asking for my Ellen! How is she? How have you been getting
+on together?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, your dear Ellen!" she cried fervently. But her heart went cold
+within her. He was right. It was against nature that he should have
+forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was
+sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman
+he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of
+destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make
+time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he
+had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head,
+thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable
+look of a man who is truly in love. Well, if that were so, why could it
+not be pure and easy joy for them both, as it was for other sons and
+mothers when there were happy marriage afoot? Why must their life, even
+in such parts of it as escaped the shadow of Peacey or Roger, be so
+queer in climate? This time it was Richard's fault. She had been
+willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people. Her
+spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, "Go and eat your
+eggs before they're cold." As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and
+trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of
+his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and,
+cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?" she
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>He answered mildly, "Didn't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, you didn't," she told him curtly. "You said you thought her pretty.
+Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch
+little face!..."</p>
+
+<p>She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the
+uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the
+smile on his lips. Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air
+as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to
+follow their diverse musics? But she could not quarrel with him for
+long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was
+given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame
+her heart like the advance of an army. His flesh and hair seemed to
+reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with
+water. Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into
+some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his
+mouth vigilant. Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver.
+Utterly melted, she cried out, "I am so glad you have come home."</p>
+
+<p>He started, and came smiling out of his dream. "I am so glad to be
+here," he said. They laughed across the table; the strong light showed
+them the dear lines they knew on one another's faces. "That's why," he
+cried brilliantly, "I've come at this ungodly hour. I had to be here. I
+got into London at nine o'clock and I went and had some dinner at the
+Station Hotel. But I felt wretched. Mother, I'm getting," he announced
+with a na&iuml;ve triumph, "awfully domestic. I got the hump the minute Ellen
+left Edinburgh. I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and
+got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here
+by midnight if I hadn't had a smash at Upminster. No, I wasn't hurt. Not
+a scrap. It was at the beginning of that garden suburb. God, it must be
+beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe. I'm
+glad we live in this old place. Well, a chap who'd bought some timber at
+an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a
+log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half
+a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a
+garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up.
+The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown
+and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down
+because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his
+business, I ask you?' he kept on saying. Mustn't it be queer to have
+womenfolk with whom one doesn't feel identical?" They exchanged a
+boastful look of happiness, the intensity of which, however, seemed the
+last effort he found possible. For his lids drooped, and he supported
+his head on his hand and took a deep drink, and said drowsily, "I'm glad
+to be here."</p>
+
+<p>She went and stood beside him and stroked his hair. "I should have come
+to you at Aberfay," she grieved. "But I knew I couldn't stand the
+winter, and I would only have been a nuisance to you if I had been ill
+all the time. Did the woman feed you properly, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>He said, without looking up, "I wouldn't have let you come. It was a
+God-forsaken hole. I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for"&mdash;he
+gave it out with an odd hesitancy, almost as if he were boyishly
+shy&mdash;"Ellen. And I had to stand it, so that I could pull this thing
+off."</p>
+
+<p>She asked, "What thing, my dear?" though she was not so very greatly
+interested. By daylight her ambition for him was fanatic and without
+limit. But in this stolen hour, when no one knew that they were
+together, she let herself feel something like levity about his doings.
+It seemed enough, considering how glorious he was, that he should merely
+be.</p>
+
+<p>He began to eat again and told the story tersely between mouthfuls. "You
+know the reason that I stayed up in Edinburgh after I'd sent off Ellen
+was that I thought I had to show the directors what I'd been doing at
+Aberfay next Thursday. They were to come on to me after they'd paid
+their visit to the Clyde works. Well, they came yesterday instead. Sir
+Vincent has to go to America sooner than he expected, so he wanted to
+get it over. When they saw what I'd been trying for during the last six
+months they got excited. As a matter of fact it is pretty good. I wish I
+could tell you about it, but you know I can't. Also I had told McDermott
+that Dynevors, the Birmingham people, had heard my contract was up in
+March, and wanted to buy me. So they got frightened, and offered me a
+new contract that they thought would keep me." He had finished his meal,
+and he pushed away his plate and stretched himself, looking up at her
+and smiling sleepily.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you taken it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rather. It couldn't have been better."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."</p>
+
+<p>"How?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm
+too woolly-headed to tell you now."</p>
+
+<p>"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a
+rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are
+you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared
+nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest
+he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.</p>
+
+<p>He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to
+reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm
+glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been
+working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my
+footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest
+director. I've got"&mdash;again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of
+arrogance that was not vanity&mdash;"the best brain of them all. In ten years
+I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly
+everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the
+next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being
+fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind,
+who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any
+class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I
+meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific
+man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."</p>
+
+<p>"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where
+it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you.
+You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the
+example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself.
+Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady
+enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be
+done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to
+impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes&mdash;there's a
+kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work,
+when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what
+one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have
+kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have
+pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into
+British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking
+so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one
+go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's
+important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world.
+It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only
+look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study
+matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that
+when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's
+not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool
+that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself
+with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will
+die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything
+on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself,
+such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.</p>
+
+<p>"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification
+for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose
+that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was
+to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as
+little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it,
+considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were
+beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so
+easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just
+kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women
+that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here
+and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the
+reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is
+that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your
+life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me,
+and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember
+licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself
+teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married
+woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by
+your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of
+her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been
+magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such
+thing as justice in heaven or earth&mdash;I tell you, mother, it's kept me
+going to think of the sacrifice you made for me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case
+against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of
+him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being
+cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband&mdash;for some man to
+adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all
+been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist
+more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything
+about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this
+while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done
+for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful
+you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"</p>
+
+<p>Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with
+grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I
+never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I
+mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance
+music...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you poor darling!&mdash;and you would have danced so beautifully!" he
+cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself
+free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she
+might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were
+only moods. I never really wanted anything except to be with you!" But
+her bliss in him had been too tightly strung by his sudden coming and by
+his open speech of that concerning which they spoke as seldom as the
+passionately religious speak of God, so for a little time she had to
+weep. But presently she stretched out her hand and pressed back his
+seeking mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" she said with a grave wildness. "We must not talk like this."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted his face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found
+her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly
+he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on
+his hand and staring at a blank wall.</p>
+
+<p>She saw that she had hurt him. She drew close to him again, and murmured
+lovingly, though still with defensive majesty: "Why should we talk of
+it, my boy? It's all over now, and you're a made man. This contract
+really does mean that, doesn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered, patting her hand to show that he submitted to her in
+everything, "Oh, in the end it means illimitable power."</p>
+
+<p>To give him pleasure she exchanged with him a brilliant and triumphant
+glance, though at this moment she felt that her love for him concerned
+itself less with ambition than she had ever supposed. Incredulously she
+whispered to her harsh, sceptical mind that it almost seemed as if its
+sphere were not among temporal things. But it gave her a real rapture to
+perceive in his eyes the elder brother of the expression that had always
+dwelt there in his childish days when he announced to her his
+cricket-scores and his prizes; even so, she had thought then, the
+adjutant of a banished leader might hand him down arrows to shoot on the
+city that had exiled him. And indeed the success of their conspiracy had
+been marvellous. In old times they had looked out of this house under
+lowered and defiant brows, knowing there was none without who knew of
+them who did not despise them. But now they could smile tenderly and
+derisively out into this hushed moonlight that received the uncountable
+and fatuously peaceful breaths of the sleepers who had been their
+enemies and were to be their slaves. It was strange that at this of all
+instants she should for the space of a heartbeat lose her sense of the
+uniqueness of her fate and be confounded by amazement at the common lot
+in which they two and the vanquished sleepers alike partook. Was it
+possible that this could be? That this plethora of beings that coated
+the careless turning earth like grains of dust on a sleeping top were
+born&mdash;mysterious act!&mdash;and mated&mdash;act so much more mysterious than it
+seemed!&mdash;and died&mdash;act which was the essence of mystery! She was dizzied
+with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught
+hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to
+her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less
+broad body. She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking
+about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as
+unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest. Penitently she dropped a kiss
+on his forehead and muttered, "Richard, you're a good son. You've made
+up for everything I've been through many times over...."</p>
+
+<p>"Then stay up with me a little," he said. "Don't let's go to bed yet."
+He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the
+hearth till it faced the grate. "Sit down, dear, and I'll make you a
+fire. Dear, do sit down. This is the last night we shall have
+together." She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew
+to be in him a mask of intense desire. He busied himself with the fire
+and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he
+had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her
+lap and seemed to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not. Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep
+of his eyelashes. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered; and discovered
+happily, "Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen." She waited serenely,
+while the clock ticked.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being
+here...."</p>
+
+<p>She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough
+that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.</p>
+
+<p>But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to
+my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm
+mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case&mdash;because they've got the works
+on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I
+shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a
+place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll
+be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to
+our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising
+his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him,
+though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before.
+"It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what
+it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar
+thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go,
+hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I
+were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place
+where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that,
+mother?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened
+here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a
+reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling.
+"Yes, I love it."</p>
+
+<p>They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He
+grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if
+he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like
+the house?"</p>
+
+<p>She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.</p>
+
+<p>"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.</p>
+
+<p>For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward
+and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked
+unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six
+hours with her without seeing that I must? She&mdash;she's a lamp with a
+double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little
+soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the
+same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from
+hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned
+again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty
+faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at
+him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he
+repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making
+for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live."
+And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his
+lips would not&mdash;that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen,
+there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made
+him leaden and uneager.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured,
+and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than
+your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying
+to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to
+find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune
+in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."</p>
+
+<p>He made no response. The words were strangled in her throat, and she
+fell to tapping her foot rhythmically against the fender. Her eyes were
+moist; this was so different from the talk she had expected.</p>
+
+<p>Presently his shoulders twitched. "Don't do that, mother dear," he said
+impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry, darling," she answered wearily. She threw herself back in
+her chair and clenched her fists. Desperation fevered her, and she began
+to speak vindictively. "Of course it was a great relief to me when I saw
+the kind of girl Ellen is, considering how up till now you've sidled
+past women of any sort of character as if you'd heard that men got sent
+to prison for loving any but fools."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she went on; "you always seemed to be looking carefully for
+anything you could find that was as insipid as a water-melon. You can't,
+you know, possibly count your love-affairs as amongst your successes."
+She jerked her head back, her lips retracted in a kind of grin.
+"Mariquita de Rojas!" she jeered.</p>
+
+<p>He started, though not much. "I never knew you knew about that," he said
+mildly.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I did." She quivered with exaggerated humiliation. "To see my
+son spending himself on something so nearly nothing. And then the way
+you moped and raged at her when she threw you over. Seeing the poor
+woman was a fool, how else could you expect her to behave but like a
+fool? It was undignified of you to put the burden of being the woman you
+loved on a poor thing like her&mdash;like overworking a servant girl." She
+perceived that she was hot and shaking, and that she was within an ace
+of betraying the secret that there sometimes rose in her heart a thirst
+to beat and hurt every woman that he had ever loved. Words would pour
+out that would expose her disgusting desire to strike and scratch if she
+did not substitute others. So she found herself crying in a voice that
+was thinner than hers: "And a married woman! To see you doing wrong!"</p>
+
+<p>The moment she said it she was ashamed and drew an expunging hand across
+her lips. And as she had feared, he threw over his shoulder a glance
+that humorously recognised the truths which she had insincerely
+suppressed: that while she desired to hurt the woman whom he had loved,
+she would gladly have murdered any woman who had refused to love him,
+whether married or single; and that she had never cared what he had done
+so long as he did not lose his physical and moral fastidiousness, and
+did not lust after flesh that, having rotted its nerves with delight
+unsanctioned by the spirit, knew corruption before death, and so long as
+he had not pretended to any woman that he wanted her soul when he wanted
+her body.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing the tears in her eyes, he said kindly: "Well, I never thought
+Mariquita's marriage counted for much. Do you remember how you took her
+in one night when old de Rojas hid in a cloisonne vase on the verandah
+for cover and potted at the stars with his gun?" But in his voice she
+read wonder that for the first time in his life he should have found his
+honest mother forging a moral attitude.</p>
+
+<p>It was dreadful that, on this of all nights, and so soon after a special
+illumination of their relationship, she should have set him making
+allowances for her to cover up her insincerity. She stammered miserably:
+"Well, Ellen's a dear, dear girl," and twisted her fingers in her lap,
+and cried out in a fresh access of fever: "It's strange: this is a cold
+night, and yet I feel hot and heavy and sticky as I did in Italy when
+the sirocco blew."</p>
+
+<p>He slid his hand into hers again and altered his position so that he
+could smile up into her face. "Yes, she's a dear girl," he agreed
+comfortingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Then marry her soon!" she begged. "You're thirty. It's time you had a
+life of your own. You must make the ties that will last when I am dead.
+Marry her soon."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said. "I will marry her soon."</p>
+
+<p>"At once!" she urged. "You can be married in three weeks, you know, if
+you set things going immediately. You'll see about it to-morrow, won't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing, but stroked her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"You will do that?" she almost shrieked.</p>
+
+<p>He moistened his dry lips. "I hadn't thought ... quite so soon...."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is so very young," he mumbled, and turned away his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Richard, Richard!" she exclaimed softly. "God knows I'm not in
+love with old-fashioned ideas. I've only to put up my hand behind my ear
+to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down
+Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas
+are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this
+idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What
+you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old
+enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you
+miscall&mdash;that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed
+in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her
+inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of
+the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to
+each other, like other mothers and sons?</p>
+
+<p>He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right,
+mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false
+brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in
+town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything
+really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got
+lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with
+her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult
+to get."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, jewellery," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented,
+unconscious of her irony.</p>
+
+<p>Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen,
+that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and
+would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you,
+they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to
+give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for
+certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The
+heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are
+no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well
+with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was
+not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her
+son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise
+ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the
+house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling
+under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be
+lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still
+suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's
+misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but
+lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who
+sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So
+it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft
+as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself. It had seemed to
+Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the
+moon's faith in them. Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights
+were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion
+had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to
+hunger for something hardly to be attained by man. Perhaps his son, if
+he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had
+forgotten. She said eagerly: "Richard, before you go to bed, let us go
+out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island."</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap. She began to
+rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation.
+There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that
+there was no hope, things never went well on this earth. Then he
+exclaimed suddenly, "Marion."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of
+Ellen's magic which he loved and desired to share with her. But he
+muttered, "That box on the dresser. Up there on the top shelf."</p>
+
+<p>She followed his eyes in amazement. "The scarlet one in the corner? That
+belongs to cook. I think it's her workbox. What about it?"</p>
+
+<p>He stared at it with a drowsy smile. "You had a cloak that colour when I
+was a child," he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, so I had," she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, "How
+he loves me! He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good
+ale that he could drink. He speaks like a sweetheart...." And then
+caught her breath. "But that," she wept on, "is how he ought to speak of
+Ellen, not of me." A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into
+her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong,
+competent hands, and said to herself uneasily: "I wish life could be
+settled by doing things and not by thinking...." But the conviction had,
+by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind. She cried out to
+herself in anguish: "Of course! Of course! He cannot love Ellen because
+he loves me too much! He has nothing left to love her with!" A tide of
+exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement
+within her of the pride that leads to death. For if Richard went on
+loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never
+thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do. The girl
+would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its
+heart hurt as dear little Ellen. And there would be no future. She would
+have no grandchildren. When she died he would be so lonely.... And it
+was her own fault. All her life long she had let him see how she wanted
+love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry's failure; and so he
+had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his
+own needs. "What can I do to put this right?" she asked herself. "What
+can I do?"</p>
+
+<p>She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap. "Mother,
+what's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"The matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"You were looking at me like a judge who's passing sentence."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who
+sentences the children for the sins of the father."</p>
+
+<p>His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father.
+"Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."</p>
+
+<p>It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could
+free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any
+more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit
+groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.
+It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she
+were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.</p>
+
+<p>She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was
+strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at
+each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a
+hammer on her own delicate reluctances.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I
+ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before
+he died."</p>
+
+<p>He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent
+because of the beating of her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the
+afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of
+course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house,
+which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father
+standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was
+happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't
+got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which
+he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia
+and Catullus died. How funny&mdash;how funny to think I never knew their
+names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled
+from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them,
+so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.</p>
+
+<p>Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went
+on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in,
+if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite
+close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped
+himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got
+to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come
+and see you.'"</p>
+
+<p>Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The
+snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left
+you to for years."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I
+took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me
+all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a
+dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly
+frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him
+saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world,
+will it be as jolly as this?'"</p>
+
+<p>"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said
+that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise
+what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had
+been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."</p>
+
+<p>"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother&mdash;if I'd done that to a
+woman, what would you have said?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for
+one's husband. One expects much more."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his
+eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a
+house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we
+talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to
+him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been
+worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But
+men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a
+mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a
+son's a happier thing than a daughter&mdash;there's something a little sad
+about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do
+with this business of having children&mdash;and men like that do so love
+happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the
+lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the
+couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke
+up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four,
+and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you
+and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked
+if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you
+would."</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. It was Punch."</p>
+
+<p>She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had
+loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that
+he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up
+old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.</p>
+
+<p>She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know
+that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."</p>
+
+<p>"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque
+Hall."</p>
+
+<p>The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had,
+so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went
+on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.
+And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead."
+For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she
+raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that
+there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling
+it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't
+you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long
+before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a
+part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each
+other&mdash;and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't
+matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making
+something&mdash;something&mdash;" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for
+some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot,
+and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is
+so!" she cried defiantly.</p>
+
+<p>The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and
+envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to
+bed," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.
+Uneasily he stood and watched her.</p>
+
+<p>"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"The Registrar?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one
+does."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in
+the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there
+only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said. "Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the
+table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought
+grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to
+her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door. She
+flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there
+would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything.
+She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the
+passage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the
+memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive
+and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken
+of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve,
+and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad
+complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and
+crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were
+there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite
+with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it
+seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on
+her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had
+read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said
+that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant
+cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was
+somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause
+of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was
+no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked
+with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits
+that were all that was to be seen of the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen," she said.</p>
+
+<p>The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved
+her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should
+have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled
+like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I know. We've got the vote."</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."</p>
+
+<p>The girl sat up. "When did he come?"</p>
+
+<p>"Last night."</p>
+
+<p>"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."</p>
+
+
+<p>Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've
+nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said
+shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she
+noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet
+high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too
+modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my
+dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets
+lose their value when they are disclosed...."</p>
+
+<p>She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a
+glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.
+Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity,
+for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she
+felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but
+to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end
+of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a
+silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the
+floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining
+green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored
+the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees
+and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like
+the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the
+chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred
+smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls,
+in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured
+itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She
+nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen ran across the lawn to her, beetle-black in her mourning, but
+capering as foals do.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll not have my breakfast till he does," she announced. "Is there
+anything I can do for him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, my dear, I'm afraid. But look at the view. Isn't it lovely?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, it's bonny. And it's neat. It's redded
+itself up for Richard's coming."</p>
+
+<p>"'Redded itself up'? What does that mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you use the word here? English seems to be a terribly poor
+language. Redding up means making everything tidy and neat, so that
+you're ready for anything."</p>
+
+<p>That was what one must do: red oneself up. It was true that it was no
+use doing that for Richard any more, and that there was no one else in
+the world for whom she wished to be ready. But she must be schooled by
+the spectacle of the earth, for here it was shining fair, and yet it had
+nothing to expect; it was but the icing of a cake destined for some
+sun's swallowing.</p>
+
+<p>"Is Richard a good riser?" asked Ellen, adopting a severe,
+servant-engaging tone to disguise the truth that she was trembling with
+desire to see her lover.</p>
+
+<p>"Usually, but he may be late to-day since he went to bed such a short
+time ago. He evidently isn't up yet, for his blind's still down. That's
+his room on the left."</p>
+
+<p>But as they gazed the blind went up, and they saw him turning away from
+the window.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why didn't he look at us!" cried Ellen. "Why didn't he look at us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is thinking of nothing but how soon he can get down to
+breakfast and meet you," said Marion; but being aware of the quality of
+her blood, which was his, she knew that he had not seen his women and
+the glittering world because he had risen blind with sullenness.</p>
+
+<p>"Will he be long, do you think?" she pondered. "Not that I'd want him to
+miss his bath." She broke into a kind of Highland fling, looking down on
+the blue and silver estuary and chanting, "Lovely, lovely," but desisted
+suddenly and asked: "Mrs. Yaverland, do you think there's a future
+life?"</p>
+
+<p>Marion said lazily, "I shouldn't have thought you need to think out that
+problem yet awhile."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm not worrying for myself. But on a fine day like this I just
+hate to think my mother's not getting the benefit of it somewhere. And
+seeing your age, I thought you might have begun to give the matter
+consideration."</p>
+
+<p>Marion resolved to treasure that remark for repetition to Richard; and
+was dashed to remember that it was probable in future they would not
+share their jokes. "Well, I don't think there's any evidence for it at
+all," she said aloud; "but I don't think that proves that there isn't
+one. I don't think we would be allowed to know if there was one, for I'm
+sure that if most people knew for certain there was going to be another
+world they wouldn't make the best of this." But she saw, from the way
+that Ellen continued to stare down at her toes, that that abstract
+comfort had not been of any service, so she parted with yet another
+secret. "But I do know that when Richard's father died all the trees
+round the house seemed to know where he had gone."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen raised wet but happier eyes. "Why, I felt like that when they
+brought mother's coffin out of the Fever Hospital. Only then it was the
+hills in the distance that knew&mdash;the Pentland Hills. But do you really
+think that was true?"</p>
+
+<p>"I knew it was then," said Marion. "If I am less certain now it is only
+because I have forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>They nodded wisely. "After all, there must be something."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there must be something...."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen began to dance again. Marion turned aside and tried to lose the
+profound malaise that the reticent feel when they have given up a secret
+in thinking how well worth while it had been, since Ellen was such a
+dear, young, loving thing. She found consolation in this frost-polished
+morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her
+abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance
+over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of
+rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine
+jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world
+had neglected nothing in its redding up.</p>
+
+<p>At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go
+in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. From now onwards he's
+yours, not mine."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen ran in and Richard came to the window to meet her. As he drew her
+over the threshold by both hands he called down the garden, "Good
+morning, mother." But Marion had perceived that from the moment of
+seeing her his face had worn the dark colour of estrangement. She turned
+and walked blindly away, not noticing that Mabel had come out to bring
+her the morning post, and was following at her heels, till the girl
+coughed.</p>
+
+<p>There were four letters. She opened them with avidity, for they were
+certificates that there were other things in life as well as Richard
+with which she could occupy herself. Two were bills, the first from her
+dressmakers and the other from the dealer who had sold her some coloured
+glass a few weeks before; and there was a dividend warrant for her to
+sign and send to her bankers. Sweeping about the lawn as on a stage, she
+resolved to buy clothes that would make her look like other untormented
+women, and more hangings and pictures and vases to make her house look
+gay. Then she observed that the fourth envelope was addressed in the
+handwriting of the son whom she could not love.</p>
+
+<p>She looked towards the house and saw the son whom she loved, but he did
+not see her. Ellen's red head was close to his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>It was horrible handwriting outside and inside the envelope: a weak
+running of ink that sagged downwards in the second half of every line
+and added feeble flourishes to every capital that gave the whole an air
+of insincerity. It had the disgusting appearance of a begging letter,
+and indeed that was what it was. It begged for love, for condonation of
+the writer's loathsomeness. She held it far off as she read:</p>
+
+<p>"DEAR MOTHER,</p>
+
+<p>"You will be wondering why I had not written to you. You will know soon
+that something you would not have expected has happened to me. I am not
+sure how you will take it. But I will be with you in two days, and then
+you will see for yourself. I hope you will not harden your heart against
+me, dear mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Your loving son,</p>
+
+<p>"ROGER."</p>
+
+<p>There was no address, but the postmark was Chelmsford. No doubt he had
+written in the cells. For the letter could have no other meaning but
+that the disgrace she had foreseen had at last arrived.</p>
+
+<p>She could not bear to be out there alone on that wide lawn, in the
+bright light, in the intense cold. She ran to the window, and not daring
+to look in lest they should be very close together, she called,
+"Richard, Roger is coming."</p>
+
+<p>There was a noise of a chair being pushed back, and Richard stood over
+her, asking: "When? Has he written?"</p>
+
+<p>She held out the letter.</p>
+
+<p>There was the rustling of paper crushed in the hand, and she looked up
+into his burning and compassionate eyes. Her head dropped back on her
+throat; she grew weak with happiness. He was her own once more, if she
+would but disclose in what great fear and misery she stood. But in the
+room behind there sounded the chink of china. Little Ellen was bending
+over the table, putting the tea-cosy over Richard's egg.</p>
+
+<p>Marion said levelly: "Well, I shall be glad of Roger's company while
+you're occupied with Ellen." She added reprovingly, as if she were
+speaking to a child: "You mustn't be jealous of the poor thing. I saw
+last night that you can be jealous...."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes blazed at the indecency. He stepped back from the window.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2VIII" id="CHAPTER_2VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ellen was very glad that Marion was going out for the whole of the
+afternoon, for then she would be alone with Richard; and though they had
+been out together all the morning, there had been that in the atmosphere
+which made a third. The whole time it had been apparent that the coming
+of this Roger, who must be an awful man, was upsetting him terribly.
+When he had taken her out into the garden after breakfast he had looked
+up into the vault of the morning and had put his hand to his head,
+making a sound of envy, as if he felt a contrast between its crystal
+quality and his own state of mind. He had liked standing with her at the
+edge of the garden and setting names to the facets of the landscape,
+which he plainly loved as he had never told her that he did. He really
+cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be
+afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned
+out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not
+lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way
+among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the
+golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts
+and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black
+gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped.
+Something in the orchard below had waylaid his attention. Ellen looked
+down the steep bank to see what it was, and saw Marion sitting in the
+low crook of an apple-tree. She snatched at contemptuous notice of the
+way that the tail of the woman's gown, which anyway was far too good for
+any sensible person to wear just going about the house and garden in the
+morning, was lying in a patch of undispersed frost; but fear re-entered
+her heart. Marion was sitting quite still with her back to them, yet the
+distant view of her held the same terrifying quality of excess as her
+near presence.</p>
+
+<p>There could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the
+earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat,
+stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.</p>
+
+<p>Richard said: "No, she isn't crying. She isn't moving. I should feel a
+fool if I went down and she didn't want me." And because his voice was
+thin and husky like a nervous child's, and because he was answering a
+question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid. This woman was
+throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But these were only the things that one thought about life. As soon as
+one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be. The world was not
+really tragic. When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where
+they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure,
+and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even
+now, since the water looked so smooth. He answered that winter boating
+was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation
+that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but
+which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had
+had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white
+oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed
+the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin
+snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only
+warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the
+primrose moon on the right. She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to
+take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take
+her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in
+the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.</p>
+
+<p>Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he
+turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious
+abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world
+that he refused to hurry, "Go and put on your hat and we'll start at
+once." So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the
+harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she
+forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.
+There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically
+unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat
+dwellings that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and
+boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs
+of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being
+designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know
+of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and
+there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the
+place which struck the same note of innocence.</p>
+
+<p>The town council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the
+esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a
+bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with
+cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen
+thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too,
+when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed
+the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The
+houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep
+green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which no one sat,
+and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its
+base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take
+the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air
+had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish,
+spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were
+brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but
+breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the
+pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the
+simple people who lived in the other part of the town.</p>
+
+<p>She was amused by it all, and was sorry when they came to the
+Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked
+very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was
+polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant
+port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to
+land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains,
+spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled
+beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the
+boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before
+had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men
+who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on the
+tradition of brave life, and it made her want to cry to see how
+crowsfeet of pleasure came at the corners of their eyes when they looked
+at Richard, and how they liked to slap his strong back with their rough
+hands, which age was making delicate with filigree of veins and
+wrinkles. And she could see, too, that they liked her. They looked at
+her as if they thought she was pretty, and teased her about the
+Votes-for-Women button she was wearing, but quite nicely.</p>
+
+<p>When they were standing under the dark eaves of the boathouse, looking
+up at the gleaming tawny sides of the motor-launch, one of the old men
+pointed at the golden letters that spelt "Gwendolen" at the prow, and
+said, "Well, Yaverland, I suppose you'll have forgotten who she is these
+days." Another added: "He'd better, if he's going to marry a
+Suffragette." And all broke into clear, frosty laughter. She cried out
+in protest, and told them that Suffragettes were not really fierce at
+all, and that the newspapers just told a lot of lies about them, and
+that anyway it was only old-fashioned women who were jealous, and they
+listened with smiling, benevolent deference, which she enjoyed until her
+eyes lighted on Richard, and she saw that he was more absorbed in her
+effect on his friends than in herself.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment she felt as lonely as she had been before she knew him, and
+she looked towards the boat and stared at the reflection of the group in
+the polished side and wished that one of the dim, featureless shapes she
+saw there had been her mother, or anyone who had had a part in her old
+life in Edinburgh. She turned back to the men and brought the
+conversation to an end with a little laughing shake of the head, giving
+them the present of an aspect of her beauty to induce them to let her
+mind go free. Again she felt something that her commonsense forbade to
+be quite fear when he did not notice for a minute that she was wistfully
+asking him to take her away. It was all right, of, course.</p>
+
+<p>When they had said good-bye to the happy old men and were walking along
+the promenade, he asked: "What was the matter, darling? Didn't you like
+them? They're really very good old sorts"; and understood perfectly when
+she answered: "I know they are, but I don't want anybody but you." There
+was indeed vehemence in his reply: "Yes, dear, we don't want anybody but
+ourselves, do we?" Undoubtedly there was a change in the nature of the
+attention he was giving her. Instead of concentrating in that steady
+delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated
+between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete
+abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his
+stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of
+the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She
+hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend,
+whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished
+home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and
+disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and
+soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life
+explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the
+luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where
+Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness,
+overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the
+hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the
+squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything
+else in the glittering, brittle world around her.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under
+Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within
+herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were
+always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their
+absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white,
+view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the
+hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she
+turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have
+you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of
+her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more
+desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen
+had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house
+with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the
+midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast
+mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And
+Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had
+noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is
+he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very
+poor person, ma'am. His boots is right through, and his coat's half off
+his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.
+Shall I tell him to go away?"</p>
+
+<p>But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.
+She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a
+minute."</p>
+
+<p>Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each
+other queerly.</p>
+
+<p>She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook
+haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably
+haven't seen him since he was a boy."</p>
+
+<p>"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at
+the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and
+unsuspicious."</p>
+
+<p>Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face
+suffused with the bloom of kind, sad passion, and lifted towards her
+son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the
+rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if
+she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful,
+closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some
+hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated
+her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard
+of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had
+stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the
+kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard!" breathed Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>He went on eating.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does
+she want it to be Roger?"</p>
+
+<p>"God knows, God knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are
+lots of things about her that I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>Some moments passed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she
+said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."</p>
+
+<p>"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He
+stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly,
+coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out
+suddenly. "Who is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a
+ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's
+Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman
+but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away
+because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and
+now he's on the road. I must give him something, poor creature. Such a
+nice wife he had&mdash;he says she's in Chelmsford workhouse. I'll send him
+on to old Dawkins at Dane End; I'll get him to give the poor wretch a
+few days' work."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen disliked her as she left the room. She looked thick and ordinary,
+and was apparently absorbed in the mildly gross satisfaction of a
+well-to-do woman at being bountiful. Moreover, she had in some way hurt
+Richard, for his face was dark when he came back to the table.</p>
+
+<p>But an amazement struck Ellen as she thought over the scene. "Richard,"
+she exclaimed excitedly, "is it not just wonderful that this man should
+come to your mother for help after she'd put him to the door? I'm sure
+she'd make a body feel just dirt if she was putting them to the door. It
+would be a quiet affair, but awful uncomfortable. But she's such a good
+woman that, even seeing her like that, he knew she was the one to come
+to when he was really in trouble. Do you not think it's like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," he almost groaned. "Even when she's at her worst you know that
+she's still better than anyone else on this earth."</p>
+
+<p>When Marion came back she sat down at the table without noticing what
+seemed to Ellen his obvious dejection, and began to talk about this man
+Milford, telling of the power he had over his beasts and how a prize
+heifer that they then had, by the name of Susan Caraway, had fretted for
+three weeks after he had left. She said that he gained this power over
+animals not by any real love for them, for he was indifferent to them
+except when he was actually touching them, and would always scamp his
+work without regard for their comfort, but simply by some physical
+magnetism, and pointed out that there it resembled the power some men
+have over women. It surprised Ellen that she laughed as she said that,
+and seemed to find pleasure in the thought of such a power. When the
+meal was over she sat for a moment, gathering together the breadcrumbs
+by her plate, and said pensively: "Yes, it might quite easily have been
+Roger." Ellen wondered how it was that Richard had always spoken of his
+mother as if she needed his protection, when her voice was so nearly
+coarse with the sense of being able to outface all encounterable events,
+and she felt a flash of contempt for his judgment. She wished, too, that
+when Marion rose from, the table he had not followed her so closely
+upstairs and hovered round her as she took up her stand on the
+hearthrug, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her foot in the fender,
+and kept his eyes on her face as she settled down in an armchair. It was
+just making himself cheap, dangling after a woman who was perched up on
+herself like a weathercock.</p>
+
+<p>When she said, "I'm going to walk over to Friar's End. Old Butterworth
+wants me to do some repairs which I don't feel inclined to do, so I want
+to have a look at the place for myself," the announcement was so little
+tinged by any sense of the persons she was addressing that she might as
+well have held up a printed placard. Ellen thought he was a little
+abject to answer, "So far as I can remember, Butterworth's rather a
+rough specimen. Wouldn't you like us to come with you?" and almost
+deserved that she did not hear. Such deafness argued complete
+abstraction; and indeed, as she turned towards them and stood looking
+out towards the river, her face again wore that incomprehensible
+expression of secret and even furtive satisfaction. The sight of it
+fell like a whip on Richard. He lowered his head and sat staring at the
+floor. Ellen cried out to herself, "She's an aggravating woman if ever
+there was one. It's every bit as bad as not saying what you feel, this
+not saying what you look," and tried to pierce with her eyes the dreamy
+surface of this gloating. But she could make nothing of it, and looked
+back at Richard; and shuddered and drew her hands across her eyes when
+she saw that he had lifted his head and was turning towards her a face
+that had become the mirror of his mother's expression. He, too, was
+wrapped in some exquisite and contraband contentment. She raised her
+brows in enquiry, and mockingly he whispered back words which he knew
+she could not hear.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll go now," said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.
+Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly: "Why
+are you looking at me like that?" But he would not answer, and began to
+laugh quietly. "Tell me!" she begged, but still he kept silence, and
+seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but
+would not disclose. It struck her as another example of Marion's
+dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room
+after she had left it and that it should blot out the son's habitual
+splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly: "Oh, very well, be a
+Cheshire cat if you feel called to it," and went and pretended to look
+for a volume in the bookcase. It was annoying that he did not come after
+her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat
+until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front
+door.</p>
+
+<p>She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above
+the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was
+at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but
+because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling,
+she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the
+smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored
+world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to
+ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again
+in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little
+bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God
+could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right
+too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our
+time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the
+living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put
+about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the
+outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.
+She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly reassured.
+For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it
+borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved
+in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts
+commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the
+broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only
+frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve
+and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to
+find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed
+them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her
+wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body
+close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was
+astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and
+felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to
+him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her
+on to his knee and began to kiss her.</p>
+
+<p>But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain
+expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process
+which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had
+a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of
+course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over
+and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told
+herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind
+of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of
+love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest
+kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were
+impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she
+found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare,
+bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of
+tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had
+their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it
+was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that
+he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like
+trees.</p>
+
+<p>Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it
+was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first
+there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when
+one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a
+tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk,
+and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces
+where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the
+birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the
+grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches
+that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were
+their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together;
+the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when
+they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making
+anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves
+his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he
+sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad
+when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade
+necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good
+against your white, white skin."</p>
+
+<p>"That's verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by," she told
+him wisely, "for I couldn't go wearing a green necklace when I'm in
+mourning."</p>
+
+<p>"But you won't be in mourning much longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Six months in full mourning, six months half. That's as it should be
+for a mother."</p>
+
+<p>"But what nonsense!" he exclaimed irascibly. "When you're a young little
+thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes. It doesn't do your mother
+any good, your going about in black."</p>
+
+<p>"I know well it doesn't, but, remember, mother was old-fashioned Scotch,
+and she was most particular about having things just so. Specially on
+melancholy occasions. I remember she was most pernickety about her
+blacks after my father's death. And though she's entered into eternal
+life, we've no guarantee that that makes a body sensible all at once."
+She saw on his face an expression which reminded her that he had been
+careful never to acquiesce when she spoke of the possibility of a future
+life, and she cried out: "You needn't look so clever. I'm sure she's
+going on somewhere, and why you should grudge it to the poor woman I
+don't know. And your mother thinks there's something after death, too.
+She told me this morning in the garden that she was quite certain of it
+when your father died. She said that all the trees round the house
+seemed to know where he had gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she said that, did she?" His arms released her. He stared into her
+face. "She said that, did she?" he repeated in an absent, faintly
+malevolent murmur; and clasped her in his arms again and kissed her so
+cruelly that her lips began to bleed.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. "You're not loving me, you're just
+taking exercise on me!"</p>
+
+<p>He let her go, but not, she knew from the smile on his face, from any
+kindness, but rather that he might better observe her distress and gloat
+over it. She moved away from the heat of the fire and from that other
+heat which had so strangely been engendered by these contacts which
+always before engendered light, and went to the window and laid her
+forehead against the cold glass. The day had changed and lost its smile,
+for the sky was hidden by a dirty quilt of rain-charged clouds and the
+frost had seeped into the marshes and left them dark, acid winter green,
+yet she longed to walk out there in that unsunned and water-logged
+country, opening her coat to the cold wind brought by the grey, invading
+tides, making little cold pools where she dug her heels into the sodden
+ground, getting rid of her sense of inflammation, and being quite alone.
+That she should want not to be with Richard, and that she should not be
+perfectly pleased with what pleased him, seemed to her monstrous
+disloyalty, and she turned and smiled at him. But there was really
+something wrong with this room and this hour, for as she looked at him
+she felt frightened and ashamed, as if he were drunk, though she knew
+that he was sober; and indeed his face was flushed and his eyes wet and
+winking, as if smoke had blown in them. For some reason that she could
+not understand he reminded her of Mr. Philip.</p>
+
+<p>She cried out imploringly. "Take me down to the marshes, Richard!"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head and laughed at some private joke. She felt desolate,
+like a child at school whom other children shut out from their secrets,
+and drooped her head; and heard him say presently: "We are going out
+this afternoon, but not on the marshes."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?"</p>
+
+<p>He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would
+not answer. She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a
+game of it to cover her near approach to tears. Then he told her, not
+because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed
+to put him in a good humour. "We're going to the registrar, my dear, to
+fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks' time."</p>
+
+<p>The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing
+at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.
+He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more
+suitable to a smaller man. Oh, he was terribly different to-day! His
+eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were
+narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full. She screamed "Oh, no!
+Oh, no!" without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was
+crying out.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed and pulled her down on his knees. He was laughing more than
+she had ever known him laugh before. "Why, don't you want to, you little
+thing?"</p>
+
+<p>Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some
+reason. But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet,
+unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.
+She said feebly, as one who asks for water: "Please, please take me down
+to the sea-wall."</p>
+
+<p>His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness. "But why don't you
+want to come and see about our marriage? Are you frightened, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as
+he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and
+said: "Nellie, ma wee lassie, dis onything ail ye?" and yet left her
+with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of
+curiosity and not because he really cared for her. She was dizzied.
+Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard. She muttered: "Yes, a
+little."</p>
+
+<p>He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with
+a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine. "Frightened of me, my darling?"</p>
+
+<p>She pulled herself off his knee. "I don't know, I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Why?"</p>
+
+<p>She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the
+flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to
+Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The
+immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and
+twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly
+because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr.
+Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had
+hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects
+was not so great as she would have hoped. She could bear it no longer,
+and screamed out: "Oh! Oh! That's how Mr. Philip looked!"</p>
+
+<p>It took him a minute to remember who she meant. Then his face shadowed.
+"Don't remind me of him, for God's sake!" he said through his teeth. "Go
+and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar."</p>
+
+<p>She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her
+trembling. He was very like Mr. Philip. Softly she said: "You sounded
+awful, as if you were telling me."</p>
+
+<p>"I was."</p>
+
+<p>She began to want to cry. "I'll not do anything that I'm told."</p>
+
+<p>He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat. It struck her as a
+mark of debasement that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their
+minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made
+some wordless sound. He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard
+him before: "Go and put on your things."</p>
+
+<p>"Away yourself to the registrar," she cried more loudly still, "and tell
+him he'll never marry you to me."</p>
+
+<p>The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled
+something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.
+She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was;
+and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards
+a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden
+feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peacock it in heaven, had
+come to show his wings to earth. On the other side, turned to the colour
+of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that
+Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were
+remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many
+concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman. The
+woman was not young and wore a man's cloth cap and a full, long, filthy
+skirt. They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard
+apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures
+across the gap. At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces
+close together, and vomited coarse cries at one another; and she had
+looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at
+the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than
+terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some
+boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners. Then she
+had been sixteen. Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting
+across a space. Could it be that vileness was not a state which one
+could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human,
+one must pass? If that were so, life was too horrible. She cried out
+through his vehemence: "No, I'm not going to marry you."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be stupid. You're being exactly like all other women, silly and
+capricious. Go and put your things on."</p>
+
+<p>"I will not. I'm going away."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk nonsense! Where are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"Back to Edinburgh." She made a hard line of her trembling mouth. "My
+mind's made up."</p>
+
+<p>He made a sound that expressed pure exasperation untouched with
+tenderness, and his eyes darted about her face in avaricious
+appraisement of this property that was trying to detach itself from him
+with a display of free will that might not be tolerated in property. She
+could see him resolving to take it lightly, and thought to herself:
+"Maybe it's just as well that it's to be broken off, for I doubt I'm too
+clever for marriage. I would read him like a book and, considering
+what's in him"&mdash;a convulsion of rage shook her&mdash;"he'd be annoyed at
+that."</p>
+
+<p>He had been saying with deliberate flippancy: "Oh, you silly little
+Ellen," but at that convulsion a change came over him. Delight
+transfigured him. He jerked his head back as she had done, as if he
+would like to continue the violent rhythm of her movement through his
+own body, and blood and laughter rushed back to his face. Taking a step
+towards her, he called softly: "Oh, my Ellen, don't let us quarrel! Come
+here."</p>
+
+<p>But she remembered then how that scene at the base of the golden stone
+had ended. The pair had swung apart and had staggered their several
+ways, shrieking over their shoulders; and had suddenly pivoted round and
+stood looking at each other in silence. Then they had run together and
+joined in a rocking embrace, a rubbing of their bodies, and had put
+their mouths to each other's faces so munchingly that it had looked as
+if they must turn aside some time and spit out the cores of their
+kisses. She would have no such reconciliation. "I won't! I tell you I
+hate you!" she cried, and escaped his arm.</p>
+
+<p>Rage came into his face without displacing his intention to make love to
+her. That was against nature, unless nature was utterly perverse! She
+could not bear it. She struck him across the mouth and ran out of the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment of confusion on the landing when she could not tell
+which of the white doors on the right and left led into her bedroom. The
+first one she opened showed her a table piled with heavy books; a vast
+wardrobe with glass doors showing a line of dresses coloured like autumn
+and of fabrics so exquisite that they might be imagined sentient; under
+a shelf beneath it a long straight line, regular as the border plants in
+a parterre, of glossy wooden shoe-trees rising out of rather large shoes
+made from many kinds of leather and velvets and satins; and in the
+carpets and the hangings a profound and vibrant blue. Accusingly she
+exclaimed into the emptiness, "Marion!" and darted into her own room
+just as Richard burst out into the passage. She flung herself on the bed
+and lay quite still while he knocked on the door. Twice he called her
+name. Nothing in her desired to answer. That was both relief and the
+loss of all. Three times again he knocked, and there penetrated through
+the panels one of those wordless noises that had been disgusting her all
+the afternoon. After a moment's silence she heard him go downstairs. She
+leaped up and dragged her trunk from a corner into the middle of the
+room, but instead of beginning to pack she fell on her knees and wept on
+to the comfortingly cool and smooth black surface.</p>
+
+<p>"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I
+thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll
+just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and
+looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them
+terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my
+face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into
+her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and
+found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely
+guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be
+dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be
+dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a
+necessary and noble journey towards economic and spiritual independence
+it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh,
+which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her
+mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight.
+What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real
+way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be
+crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer
+pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it
+and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried
+about the town.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed
+and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained
+and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her
+life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man
+whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to
+disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in
+the glass which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate
+the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It
+struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from
+her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was
+overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened
+to her in it.</p>
+
+<p>She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping,
+but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that
+her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a
+vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have
+foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the
+galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many
+fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who
+died God's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that
+it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of glass
+which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a
+dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the
+victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of
+this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and
+wept and wept, until she fell asleep.</p>
+
+<p>It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she
+remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past
+few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a
+light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that
+it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want
+to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet
+terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those
+superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and
+waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps
+that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more&mdash;they
+were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was
+the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep
+and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing
+heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he
+was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he
+was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you
+poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"</p>
+
+<p>But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt
+down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face
+from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent
+of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words
+and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute&mdash;oh, such a
+brute. Do, do forgive me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.</p>
+
+<p>"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly,
+and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and
+the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my
+love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"</p>
+
+<p>He broke into anguished laughter. "No, you wee little thing!" He
+strained her to him and faltered vehemently: "You generous dear! When
+I've insulted and bullied you and shouted at you, you ask me if you've
+hurt me! I wish you had. It would have given me some of the punishment I
+deserve. Oh, keep me, you wonderful, strong, forgiving dear! Keep me
+from being a hound, keep me from forgetting&mdash;whatever it is we've found
+out. You've seen what I'm like when I've forgotten it. Oh, love me! Love
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I will, I will!"</p>
+
+<p>They clung together and spent themselves in reconciling kisses.</p>
+
+<p>"It was my fault, too," she whispered. "I was awful hard on you. And
+maybe I took you up too quick."</p>
+
+<p>"No, it was all my fault," he answered softly. "I was worried and I lost
+my head."</p>
+
+<p>"Worried? What are you worried about, my darling? You never told me
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. It's not a definite worry. It's to
+do"&mdash;his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of
+the room&mdash;"with my mother."</p>
+
+<p>If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft. "Your
+mother?" she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said petulantly. It struck her that there was something
+infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might
+feel against its nurse. "She's been the centre of my whole life. And now
+... I don't know whether she cares for me at all. I don't believe she
+ever cared for anybody but my father. It's puzzling."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were fixed on the shadows. He had quite forgotten her. She
+leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling
+of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.</p>
+
+<p>He dropped a kiss on it and went on: "So, you see, I fell back on you
+for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me. It's
+funny the change it makes in everything. I became&mdash;so conventional. When
+you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn't follow you because
+I was conscious that I oughtn't to come into your room. Afterwards,
+when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by
+you, I didn't care a damn for any rule." Their lips met again. She had
+to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about
+anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a
+woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more
+fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for
+you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...
+that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The
+corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like
+my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot
+her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came
+back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.
+"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know
+why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.
+Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that
+time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you
+might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in
+the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your
+living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially
+happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those
+lustful old swine."</p>
+
+<p>She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she
+had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and
+what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she
+had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she
+was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as
+if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them lustful?"</p>
+
+<p>In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could
+see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them
+proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you
+if he'd been young."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it
+meant, but accepted it.</p>
+
+<p>A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and
+began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that
+means?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."</p>
+
+<p>In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured: "Sometimes. A little."</p>
+
+<p>He was trembling. "You poor thing. You poor little thing. Yet I can't
+tell you."</p>
+
+<p>She clapped her hands over her ears. "Ah, no. I couldn't bear to listen
+if you did." They sank into a trembling silence. Her black eyes, fixed
+on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white
+evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying
+under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which
+seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other
+sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in
+them proofs that the core of life was darkness. There came on her
+suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when
+she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard. She
+remembered it with a singular lack of dismay. There ran through her on
+the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new
+experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid
+annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had
+fallen down about her shoulders. They stood easily together in the light
+of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head,
+he looking down on the disordered glory.</p>
+
+<p>"But what's that for?" he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the
+middle of the floor.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes filled with tears. "I was packing to go back to Edinburgh."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said solemnly. "I came near to imperilling a
+perfect thing." He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss
+her, but she started away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, maircy! What cold hands!" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle. It was
+freezing. And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and
+shaking with rage."</p>
+
+<p>"You poor silly thing!" she cried lovingly. "Give me yon bits of ice!"
+She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.</p>
+
+<p>For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great
+for him to bear, and he whispered: "This is all it is! This is all it
+is!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"What you fear ... is just like this. You will comfort my whole body as
+you are comforting my hands...."</p>
+
+<p>She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her
+face, and she answered loudly, plangently: "Then I shall not be afraid!"
+They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy: "I will marry
+you any day you like." When he answered, "No, no, I will wait," she
+jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I
+want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they
+travelled far into a new sphere of love.</p>
+
+<p>It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from
+her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express
+train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her
+that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.
+But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder
+out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and
+pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear.
+She swung round to see what it was.</p>
+
+<p>A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.
+Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that
+the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what
+was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with
+her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that
+these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet
+interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut
+unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass
+buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the
+woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored
+skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were
+ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."</p>
+
+<p>The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting
+clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the
+shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they
+should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured
+the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect
+harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in
+disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.
+She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into
+their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection
+and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover
+what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.
+There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united
+several qualities that one would not have thought could be found
+together. She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet
+worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at
+the shoulders as if she were fragile. But the man was odd enough. He was
+pale and had a very long neck, and wore an expression of extreme
+foolishness. From the frown with which he was accompanying his gaping
+stare it was evident that his mind was so vague and wandering that he
+found it difficult to concentrate it; she was reminded of an inexpert
+person she had once seen trying to put a white rabbit into a bag. She
+looked again at the girl, with that contempt she felt, now that she had
+Richard, for all women who let themselves mate with unworthy men, and
+found that her dark eyes were fixed sullenly, almost hungrily, on
+Richard. She laid her hand on Richard's arm and cried: "If it's not
+impudence, it's the next thing to it, staring like that into a pairson's
+room! They're collecting, I suppose. Away and give them a penny."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Richard. "They are not collecting. That is Roger."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2IX" id="CHAPTER_2IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ellen could not understand why Richard whispered explosively as they
+turned away from the window: "Pin up your hair! Quickly! We must go down
+at once!" or why he hurried her downstairs without giving her time to
+use her brush and comb. When they got down into the old parlour Richard
+went to the side door that opened into the farmyard and flung it open,
+beginning a sentence of greeting, but there was nothing to be seen but
+the grey sheds, the wood-pile, and the puddle-pocked ground. He uttered
+an exasperated exclamation, and drew it to, saying to Ellen: "Open the
+front door! Please, dear." She did so, but saw nothing save the dark and
+narrow garden and the black trees against the white north sky. "What in
+Christ's name are they doing?" Richard burst out, and flung open the
+side door again. Both put their heads out over the threshold to see if
+the two visitors were standing about anywhere, and a gust of wind that
+was making the trees beat their arms darted down on the house and turned
+the draught between the two open doors into a hurricane. Ellen squealed
+as her door banged and struck her shoulder before she had time to steer
+clear of it. "Oh, my poor darling!" said Richard, and he was coming
+towards her, when they heard the glug-glug-glug of water dripping from
+the table to the floor, and saw that the draught had overturned a vase
+filled with silver boughs of honesty. He picked it up and uttered
+another bark of exasperation, for it had cracked across and he had cut
+his hand on the sharp edge of the china.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, damn! oh, damn! oh, damn!" he cried, in a voice that rage made
+high-pitched and childish, sucking his finger in between the words.
+"What a filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two
+halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of
+distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered
+uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a
+desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the
+maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards
+the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved
+it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round
+till I've found that fool and that woman! This is some new
+folly&mdash;probably I'll have to get him away before mother comes! Come on!
+Perhaps they're hanging about the garden, though God knows why!" After
+making a savage movement towards the broken vase, as if he could not
+bear to leave the disorder as it was, and checking it abruptly,
+jarringly, he rushed into the dining-room, and Ellen followed him.</p>
+
+<p>The two were there, their faces pressed against the window-panes. Behind
+them the grey waste of stormy shallow waters, and the salt-dimmed
+pastures, and the black range of the Kentish hills, hung with
+grape-purple rainclouds, made it apparent how much greater dignity
+belongs to the earth and sea than to those who people them. As Richard
+and Ellen halted at the door the faces receded from the glass. The woman
+stepped backwards and, looking as if she were being moved on by a
+policeman, passed suddenly out of sight beyond the window's edge.
+Richard crossed the room and opened the French window, but by the time
+he had unlocked it the man in uniform, who had been beckoning to his
+companion with long bony hands, had gone in search of her. As Richard
+put his head round the door to bid them enter, the wind, which was now
+rushing round the house, made itself felt as a chill commotion, an icy
+anger of the air, in which both he and Ellen shivered. Presently the
+pair in uniform appeared again, but at some distance across the lawn,
+and too intensely absorbed in argument to pay any attention to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, damn! oh, damn!" sobbed Richard. The wind was blowing earth-daubed
+leaves off the flowerbeds through the open door into the prim room. He
+stepped into the gale and shouted: "Roger! Roger! Come in!"</p>
+
+<p>Roger waved his arms, which were too long for the sleeves of his coat,
+and from his mouthings it was evident that he was shouting back, but the
+wind took it all. In anger Richard stepped back into the room and made
+as if to close the doors, and at that the two on the lawn ran towards
+the house, with that look which common people have when they run for a
+train, as if their feet were buckling up under them. Richard held the
+door wide again, but when the couple reached the path in front of the
+house they were once more seized with a doubt about entering and came to
+a standstill.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in," said Richard; "come in."</p>
+
+<p>The man took off his cap and ran his hands through his pale, long hair.
+"Is mother in?" he demanded in a thin, whistling voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in," said Richard; "come in."</p>
+
+<p>The man began: "Well, if mother's not in, I don't know&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Richard fixed his eyes on the woman's face. "Come in," he said softly,
+brutally, loathingly. Ellen shivered to hear him speak thus to a woman
+and to see a woman take it thus, for at once the stranger moved forward
+to the window and stepped into the room. As she brushed by him she
+cringingly bowed her shoulders a little, and looked up at him as he
+stood a head and shoulders higher than herself. He looked back steadily
+and made no sign of seeing her save by a slight compression of the lips,
+until she passed on with dragging feet and stood listlessly in the
+middle of the room. It was evident that they completely understood one
+another, and yet their understanding sprung from no recollection of any
+previous encounter, for into the eyes of neither did there come any
+flash of recognition. There could be no doubt that Richard was feeling
+nothing but contempt for this woman, and her peaked yet rich-coloured
+face expressed only sick sullenness; yet Ellen felt a rage like
+jealousy.</p>
+
+<p>Richard turned again to the garden, and said: "Come in."</p>
+
+<p>"Now don't be high-handed, old man," expostulated the stranger. But then
+he seemed to remember something, and stretched out both his arms, held
+them rigid, and opened his mouth wide as if to speak very loudly. But no
+sound came, and his arms dropped, and his long bony hands pawed the air.
+Then suddenly his arms shot out again, and he exclaimed very quickly in
+a high, strained voice: "Pride has always been your besetting sin,
+Richard. You aren't a bad chap in any way that I know of. But you're
+proud. And it doesn't become any of us to be proud"&mdash;his spirit was
+shaking the words out of his faltering flesh&mdash;"for we're all miserable
+sinners. You needn't order me"&mdash;he spoke more glibly now, the flesh and
+the spirit seemed in complete agreement&mdash;"to come out of the garden like
+that. I wish Poppy hadn't gone in." He caught his breath with something
+like a sob; but the woman in uniform made no movement, and turned her
+eyes to Richard's face as if it were he that must give the order. "I've
+got a reason for staying out here. I know mother's not got Jesus. If
+she's ashamed of me now that I'm one of Jesus' soldiers, I won't come
+in. I'll go and wrestle on my knees for her soul, but I won't hurt her
+by coming in. So here I stay till she tells me to come in."</p>
+
+<p>"But she's out," said Richard.</p>
+
+<p>The man in uniform was discomfited. The light went out of his face and
+his mouth remained open. He shifted his weight from one foot to the
+other and muttered: "Ooh-er, is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Richard pleasantly. "She's gone over to Friar's End, but
+she'll be back any time now. I wish you'd come in. I haven't seen you
+for years, and I'd like to swap yarns with you about what we've been
+doing all the time."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd have the most to tell," answered the other wistfully. "You've
+been here, there, and everywhere in foreign parts. And I haven't been
+doing nothing at all. Except&mdash;" he added, brightening up, "being saved."</p>
+
+<p>"That's your own fault," Richard told him. "I've often wondered why you
+didn't try your luck abroad. You'd have been sure to hold your own.
+Well, anyway, come in and have some tea. I don't know what mother would
+say to me if she came in and found I'd let you stay out in the cold.
+She'd be awfully upset."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think she would?" the man in uniform asked, and seemed to
+ponder. He looked up at the grey sky and shivered. "'Tis getting
+coldish. And the cloth this uniform is made from isn't the sort that
+keeps out cold weather. God knows I don't want to grumble at the uniform
+I wear for Jesus' sake, but me having been in the drapery, I can't help
+noticing when a thing is cheap." He stared down at his toes for a time,
+lifting alternately his heels and pressing them down into the wet
+gravel; then raised his head and said nonchalantly: "Well, old man, I
+think I will come in after all." But he halted yet again when he got one
+foot over the threshold. "Mind you, I'm not coming in just because it's
+cold," he began, but Richard, exclaimed, "Yes, yes! Of course I know
+you're not!" and gripped him by the arm and pulled him into the room. He
+did not seem to resent the rough treatment at all, and went over at once
+to the woman in uniform, and, looking happily about him, cried: "Isn't
+this a lovely home? I always say there's nobody got such a nice home as
+my mother."</p>
+
+<p>His voice whistled; and Ellen in her mind's eye saw a vision of some
+clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy
+and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and
+breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise.
+She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard,
+meaning to tell him by a smile that she would help him to be kind to
+Roger. But Richard was still occupying himself with the window,
+examining with an air of irascibility a stain of blood which his cut
+finger had left on the white paint near the lock. His eyes travelled
+from it to the muddy footprints of the two who had come in from the
+garden and to the spatter of earth-daubed leaves on the polished floor,
+and his mouth drew down at the corners in a grimace of passion that made
+Ellen long to run to him and kiss him and bid him not give way to the
+madness of order so prevalent in this house. But he did not even look at
+her, so she could do nothing for him.</p>
+
+<p>He went forward to Roger, determinedly sweetening his face, and shook
+his hand heartily. "It's good that you should have turned up just at
+this moment, for I'm going to be married before long to Miss Melville,
+whom I met in Scotland when I was working at Aberfay. Ellen, this is my
+brother, Roger."</p>
+
+<p>Roger took Ellen's hand and then seemed to remember something. After
+exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked
+steadfastly into her face and said sombrely: "I hope all's well with
+you, sister! I hope all's well with you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pairfectly," answered Ellen; and after a pause added, shyly: "And I'm
+pleased to meet you. I hope anyone that's dear to Richard will be
+friends with me."</p>
+
+<p>He flung his head backwards and cried, in that whistling voice: "Yes,
+I'll be that! And I'm a friend worth having now I've got Jesus! And He's
+given me Poppy too! Aha, old man!" With a little difficulty he put both
+his thumbs inside the corked edge of his armholes and began to stride up
+and down, taking steps unnaturally long for thin legs. "You aren't the
+only man who's thought of getting married! Great minds think alike, they
+say!" With a flourish he stretched out his hand, and it was plain that
+he thought he would touch the woman in uniform, though he was some feet
+away. Richard's and Ellen's eyes met; it was repulsive to see a man
+dizzied by so small a draught of excitement. "Richard, Miss Melville,
+this is Lieutenant Poppy, who's going to be my wife."</p>
+
+<p>It was difficult to know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although
+she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which
+conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was
+glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted
+darkness of her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"We're going to be married as soon as I've served my year of probation.
+That's a long time ahead, for I've only been at it a fortnight. I expect
+you'll be getting married much sooner. Things always went easier with
+you than me," he complained. "But it'll be a happy day when it comes,
+and I get the two blessings at the same time, becoming a full soldier of
+Jesus and marrying Poppy. She's nearly a full soldier already. She
+joined the Army seven months ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you preach in the streets?" asked Richard.</p>
+
+<p>Roger's eyes filled with water. Ellen reflected that he must be
+curiously sensitive for one so dull-witted, for the rage and disgust
+behind the question had hardly shown their heads. "Yes, I do!" he said
+pettishly. "And if Jesus doesn't object, I don't see why you should."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't object at all," Richard assured him amiably. "I only wondered
+what sort of work you did. I suppose you haven't come to work at the
+Hallelujah Colony here, have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's just what I've done!" answered Roger joyfully. "I joined up at
+Margate and I've laboured there for three weeks. I didn't do so bad. Did
+I, Poppy? Not for a start? No one could exactly shine at street
+preaching at first, you know. They will laugh so. But I didn't do worse
+than other people when they begin, did I, Poppy? However, they've
+transferred me over here to the Colony, to do clerk work." He added with
+a touch of defiance: "And, of course, they'll want me to take services
+too, sometimes. In fact I'm going to take a service this evening."</p>
+
+<p>"How long are you to be here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe always. They may feel I do the best work for Jesus here." He drew
+a deep, shuddering breath, and took his cap off and threw it on the
+table with a convulsive gesture. "If mother doesn't turn me away because
+I've given myself to Jesus," he said with that whistling note, "I'll be
+able to see her every day."</p>
+
+<p>"She won't turn you away."</p>
+
+<p>There was folly, there was innocence in Roger's failure to notice that
+Richard was speaking not in reassurance but in grimness, as one might
+speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place
+where he stood. "You ought to know, old chap," he murmured hopefully.
+"She's always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me.... I
+don't know.... Oh, I've prayed...."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'll know for yourself in a minute," said Richard. "I heard the
+front door open and close a second ago."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the
+sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached
+him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother's being. She
+longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all
+the other things, but again he wouldn't pay attention to her. Indeed, he
+could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up
+to pain and apprehension. Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the
+case against Roger. He was sickening like something that has been fried
+in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral
+flaw made it all the more sinister. If there was not vileness in his
+will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded
+into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor,
+and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair. She looked at him
+accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum
+version of the emotion of embarrassment was sucking and gnawing one of
+her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true
+love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used
+despitefully. Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.</p>
+
+<p>The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger. But when
+Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else,
+because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held
+in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>There was stillness till Richard whispered: "Mother."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, "Oh,
+Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the
+parlour."</p>
+
+<p>He answered softly: "No one broke it. The wind blew it down when I
+opened the door to Roger."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes did not move from his. Her mouth was a round hole. He put out
+his hand to take the piece of china from her. They both gazed down on
+it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance. She gave it to
+him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger. When she found him
+she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the brass buttons, and
+the brass studs on his high collar. Then she became aware of the woman,
+and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her
+uniform. His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it
+up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters
+on the magenta ribbon.</p>
+
+<p>"So you've joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?" she said, in that
+muffled, indifferent tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you preach in the streets?" Her voice shook.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>She gave the cap another turn on her hand. "Are you happy?" she asked,
+again indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him.
+"Oh, my boy!" she cried. "Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at
+last!" Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room,
+and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger
+crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all
+soft, mothering curves to him.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor. Roger's sobbing made a
+queer noise. Ah&eacute; ... ah&eacute; ... ah&eacute;.... It had an unmechanical sound, like
+the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard's
+motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a
+mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an
+unmechanical situation. It must break down soon. She looked across at
+Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but
+not so dejected as she might have feared. It struck her that he was
+finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the
+situation which was making her grieve&mdash;which must, she realised with a
+stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with
+that wrongness. He would rather have things as they were, and see his
+mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been
+natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing
+her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their
+children do. Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the
+far view of the river and the marshes.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother!" spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion.
+"I'm a rich man now! I've got Jesus, and you, and Poppy! Mother, this is
+Poppy, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can."</p>
+
+<p>The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as
+if she would have liked to jump through it. One could imagine her
+alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some
+small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short
+hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and
+abjectly: "I didn't want to come."</p>
+
+<p>Marion answered smoothly: "But now that you are here, how glad I am
+that you have," and took her two hands and patted them. Looking round
+benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed: "I'm
+a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week." She was
+behaving like an old mother in an advertisement, like the silver-haired
+old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh's
+toffee or who reads the <i>Weekly Telegraph</i> in plaques at
+railway-stations. The rapidity with which she had changed from the
+brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching
+hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been
+resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the
+perfection with which she had assumed this bland and glossy personality
+at a moment's notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration. She liked
+the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate. She was
+glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel
+proud on joining a pirate crew. She went over and stood beside Richard
+and slipped her arm through his. Uneasily she was aware that now she,
+too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it
+was. She drooped her head against Richard's shoulder, and hoped all
+might be well with all of them.</p>
+
+<p>"You see, mother, since I saw you I've had trouble&mdash;I've had trouble&mdash;"
+Roger was stammering.</p>
+
+<p>Marion turned from him to Richard. "Ring for tea," she said, "and turn
+on the lights. All the lights. Even the lights we don't generally use."</p>
+
+<p>Roger clung to her. "I don't want to hide anything from you, mother," he
+began, but she cut him short. "Oh, what cold hands! Oh, what cold
+hands!" she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him. As the lights went
+up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in
+the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as
+long and yellowish and covered with warts. The parlourmaid came in and,
+over her shoulder, Marion said easily: "Tea now, Mabel. There're five of
+us. And we'll have it down here at the table."</p>
+
+<p>She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an
+armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a
+look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it
+became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that
+Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant
+was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when
+she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies
+the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short
+and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been
+talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in
+watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation,
+which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched
+Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in
+their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors,
+were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor
+her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly
+to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned
+and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body,
+taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of
+attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was
+no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a
+second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been
+very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm
+cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on
+the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward.
+And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard
+and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about
+it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that
+she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs
+had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was
+this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate
+Broadway&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they
+all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she
+nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways
+they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at <i>Margate</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got,
+Poppy!"</p>
+
+<p>Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided
+shoulders as she passed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and
+take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be
+very comfortable when one's tired."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red
+fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at
+once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed
+thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular
+curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round
+Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls
+horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember
+also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses
+dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the
+bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of
+sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand
+among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for
+the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave
+her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones
+marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared
+that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her
+bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to
+destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was,
+perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there
+had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned
+effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the
+pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind
+the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking
+just like this; but it was gone immediately.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going
+along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band
+playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to
+pass it by&mdash;think of it, mother, I was going to pass it by!&mdash;when the
+band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy.
+Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful
+voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a
+pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw
+her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was
+plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked
+straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that
+is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother
+for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were
+really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but
+when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you
+know, mother, Poppy <i>is</i> Spanish&mdash;half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her
+mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good
+family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died
+when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by
+a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married
+again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other
+side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very
+godless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man
+who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted
+to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so
+cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she
+never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as
+she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."</p>
+
+<p>After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the
+appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."</p>
+
+<p>The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung
+about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got
+Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden
+pale, febrile passion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to
+their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Roger," she answered him. "You'll be very happy&mdash;a husband that
+any woman would be proud of."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm not nearly good enough for Poppy," he said deprecatingly. He
+seemed used to Poppy's silence, and, indeed, whenever her silent absence
+from speech was most marked, he bent towards her in a tender attitude
+which showed a resolution to regard it as maidenly bashfulness. "Well,
+to get back to my story. I stood there peering through the crowd for
+another look at her, and an officer began preaching. Captain Harris it
+was. I didn't take any particular notice of him." He jerked his whitish
+face about contemptuously. "He's a poor preacher, isn't he, Poppy? He
+never gets a grip on the crowd, does he? And they can't hear him beyond
+the first few rows. I don't think I heard more than a few sentences that
+first evening. If I'd had been in the Army as many years as he has, and
+I couldn't preach any better than that, I'd find some other way of
+serving Jesus. I would really.</p>
+
+<p>"But after that"&mdash;he stopped, looked at some vision in the air before
+him which filled his eyes with tears and fire, and sighed
+deeply&mdash;"Captain Sampson preached the gospel. It's Captain Sampson I've
+been working under since I joined the Army. Oh, mother, mother, I wish
+you could hear him preach. He would give you Jesus. That first evening I
+heard him I saw Jesus as plain as I see you. I saw Him then looking
+fierce like He was when He scourged the moneychangers out of the temple.
+But when I'm alone, I see the other Jesus, the way he was most times."
+He put his head back and bleated: "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' The
+One that loves us when we're weak and when we fall, and loves us all the
+better for it. Even you"&mdash;he looked at Richard with a faint, malign
+joyfulness&mdash;"must feel the want of Him sometimes. Life can't be a path
+of roses for any of us, however strong and clever we are. So I say it's
+not good preaching to go on always about fighting for Jesus and being a
+good soldier, and making it seem as if religion was just another trouble
+we had to face." His voice broke with petulance. "It's a shame not to
+show people Gentle Jesus."</p>
+
+<p>He checked himself. Remorse ran red under his pale skin. "What am I
+saying?" he cried out. "Captain Sampson is a holy man! If he's harsh to
+those that work under him it's right he should be. God chasteneth whom
+He loveth, and it's the same way with Captain Sampson I expect. It's
+really a way of showing that he cares about you and is anxious about
+you. And anyway, he did give me Jesus that evening. Oh, mother, it was
+so wonderful!" The words rushed out of him. "He made you feel all
+tingling like you do when the fire engine goes past. Oh, it's an evening
+to remember! And it gave me Jesus! Oh, mother, you don't know what it's
+like to find Jesus! To know"&mdash;his voice whistled exultantly over the
+stricken tea-table&mdash;"that there's Somebody who really loves you!"</p>
+
+<p>For one second Marion covered her face with her hands.</p>
+
+<p>Unseeingly he piped on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into
+thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night,
+instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that
+happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been
+born as I wasn't any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel
+lovely and warm. And I've got earthly happiness as well. I've got Poppy.
+Oh, I'm a lucky man, lucky man! And I've got a lifework instead of being
+an odd-come-short. I'll always have something to do now. They've had
+experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into
+soldiers for Jesus. Surely they'll be able to find some work for me,
+even if they don't want me to preach. Look at what I'm going to do now.
+Even if I don't do anything but clerk work, it's helping the Labour
+Colony along&mdash;helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living
+under Bible influence when, if they weren't, there they'd be, roaming
+about the streets hungry and in sin. I'll be doing my bit, won't I,
+mother?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen felt contemptuous. She had read about those Hallelujah Army
+Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour
+meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the
+pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing
+with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few
+hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions. The very
+consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the
+flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the
+meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter
+(which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost
+security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard
+talk of revolution. She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence
+of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that
+made this world as unsightly as himself. And it was like him to talk
+about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of
+things that weren't true. The spectacle of this mean little intelligence
+refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and
+Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common
+hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingratitude to the great and
+wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man
+had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society. She
+leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone: "But you must
+know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the
+fringe of the problem. There's no way of settling the question of
+unemployment until the capitalist system's overturned."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with wide eyes and assumed an air of being engaged in
+desperate conflict. It was evident that his egotism was transforming
+this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon. "Ah! You're
+a Socialist. They only think of giving people money. But it isn't money
+people need. Oh, no. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
+world and lose his own soul?' It's Jesus they need. Give them the Bible
+and all their wants will be satisfied," he cried in a shrill peewit cry.</p>
+
+<p>"But the Bible isn't final. There's lots of things we know more about
+than the people who wrote it. Look at all yon nonsense they put in about
+Adam and Eve because they didn't know about evolution. That alone shows
+it's absurd to rely solely on the Bible...."</p>
+
+<p>She looked round for signs of the others' approval. She knew that
+Richard agreed with her, for among his Christmas presents to her had
+been Huxley's Essays, and when he had talked to her of science she had
+seen that research after that truth was to him a shining mystic way
+which he would have declared led to God had he not been more reverent
+than Church men are, and feared to use that name lest it were not sacred
+enough for the ultimate sacredness. But to her amazement he kept his
+eyes on the crumbs which he was picking up from the tablecloth, and
+through his parted lips there sounded the faintest click of
+exasperation. She looked in wonder at Marion, and found her eyes also
+downcast and her forefinger tapping on her chin as if she were seeking
+for some expedient to stop this dangerous chatter. Ellen despised them
+both. They had been terribly exercised at the thought that Roger was
+going to preach in the streets, but they did not care at all that he was
+delivered over to error. She looked at him sympathetically over the
+table, feeling that since these horrid people with whom she had got
+entangled did not like him, he might be quite nice, and found him
+exchanging a long, peculiar glance with Poppy, which was followed on
+both sides by a slow, meaning nod.</p>
+
+<p>He looked in front of him again and his round eyes vacillated between
+Richard and Ellen, growing rounder at each roll. Presently he swallowed
+a lump in his throat and addressed himself to her. "Ah, you're an
+unbeliever," he said. "Well, Captain Sampson says there's always a
+reason for it if people can't believe." He moistened his lips and panted
+the words out at her. "If you've been doing anything that's wrong&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A sob prevented him. "Oh, I can't go and spoil this lovely tea, even if
+I ought to for Jesus' sake!" he cried. "We're all so happy, I can't bear
+to break it up by telling you what it's my duty to do! Poppy, doesn't
+mother have everything nice? I've often thought of this tea-table when
+I've been eating at places where they did things, roughish. Look at the
+flowers. Mother always has flowers on the table, even when it's winter.
+Jesus wouldn't expect me to break this up." His face became transfused
+with light. "I believe Jesus loves everything that's done nicely,
+whether it's a good deed or bread-and-butter cut nice and thin. That's
+why," he mourned, so wistfully that all of them save the impassive woman
+in uniform made a kind, friendly bending towards him, "I mind not to be
+able to do anything really well. But Jesus loves me all the same. He
+loves me whatever I'm like!" His brow clouded. "But because He loves me
+I owe Him a debt. I ought to preach Him wherever I am, in and out of
+season. But I can't spoil this. Aren't we all happy, sitting here? I'll
+tell you what. They've asked me to take the Saturday evening service
+to-night because the Commandant and the two under him are all down with
+influenza. If you'll come and hear me I'll tell you what Jesus wants you
+to hear. Oh, mother, Richard, do, do come!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Roger dear, we'll come."</p>
+
+<p>"You won't ... make fun of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no! Oh no!" Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy. "We
+haven't seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought.
+There are lots of things about me you don't know. For all you know, what
+you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me...."</p>
+
+<p>"What I said about Richard?..."</p>
+
+<p>"About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help
+one...."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a
+pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining: "Oh, mother, if I
+could bring you to Jesus! Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I
+want!" But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started
+to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards. "Yes,"
+he cried reproachfully, "Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I
+reward Him!"</p>
+
+<p>They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the
+tea-leaves in her cup.</p>
+
+<p>"I told a lie!" he answered their common mute enquiry.</p>
+
+<p>"A silly, vain lie. I told you they'd asked me to take the Saturday
+evening service to-night. They didn't. I offered to take it. Nobody ever
+asks me to preach. They say I can't. Mind you, I don't think they're
+right. I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn't speak so
+badly. But that's not the point. I told a lie. I distinctly said they'd
+asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a
+success of things like Richard always does. Oh, what a thing to do to
+Jesus!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry. It
+wasn't a deliberate lie."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother, you don't understand," he fairly squealed. "You haven't
+been saved, you see, and you're still lax about these things. It does
+matter! It was a lie! I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees.
+Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?"</p>
+
+<p>Marion answered tenderly: "My dear, of course you can," but Poppy
+clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish,
+considered exasperation: "You haven't time. We ought to be at the chapel
+half an hour before the meeting. It's a quarter to six now."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear! oh dear! Is it as late as that? I wanted to write on a piece
+of paper what I'm going to say! Now I won't have time! Oh, and I did
+want to preach well! Oh, where's my cap?" He began to stumble about the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set
+an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal. Richard
+and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the
+anticipation of disorder always provoked in them. "Tcha!" exclaimed
+Poppy contemptuously. "But it's there! On the armchair!" cried Ellen:
+she could not bear the look on Richard's and Marion's faces. "Where?"
+asked Poppy. It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen.
+"There! There! Among the cushions," she answered, and rose and went
+round the table to pick it up herself. Richard came and helped her.</p>
+
+<p>Roger seemed a little annoyed when Richard and Ellen found the cap for
+him among the cushions. Having to thank them spoiled, it could be seen,
+some valedictory effect which he had planned. He stood by while they
+shook hands with Poppy, who turned her head away as if to hide some
+scar, and when she had gone across to Marion tried to get in his
+designed tremendousness. By the working of his face, which made even
+his ears move a little, they knew they must endure something very
+characteristic of him. But into his weak eyes there bubbled a spring of
+joyful tenderness so bright, so clear, so intense that, though it would
+have seemed more fitting on the face of a child than of a man, it yet
+was dignified.</p>
+
+<p>"You make a handsome couple, you two!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard, you're a whole lot taller than me. When I'm away from you I
+forget what a difference there is between us. And the young lady, she's
+fine, too."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.</p>
+
+<p>He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he
+murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite
+ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well,
+good-bye, mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out
+myself, my dears."</p>
+
+<p>Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat
+down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he
+would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an
+overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and
+stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the
+sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door:
+Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the
+click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger,
+which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all,
+the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn
+of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark.
+But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body,
+and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him
+as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the
+dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to
+their own lives.</p>
+
+<p>When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps
+save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber,
+fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to
+polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped
+in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the
+candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four
+chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair
+had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have
+known that Ellen had been sitting there too.</p>
+
+<p>Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol
+of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words.
+Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that
+have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."</p>
+
+<p>"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh
+formula.</p>
+
+<p>"But you must have an &eacute;clair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used
+to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the
+table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that
+her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties
+they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed
+their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite
+which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than
+whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be,
+little, sweet, and moderate.</p>
+
+<p>Marion brought her an &eacute;clair on a plate. She took it and stood up,
+asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and
+Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found
+herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into
+the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been
+laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the
+stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes
+which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone
+of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've
+no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little
+gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more
+than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked
+draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the
+disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the
+mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side
+by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like
+rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and
+its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable&mdash;this tall man
+who could assail all things with his outstretched strength, this
+broad-bodied woman whom nothing could assail because of her crouching
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>Marion stretched out her hand to the fire. Her insanely polished nails
+glittered like jewels.</p>
+
+<p>She said in that indifferent tone: "Well, it wasn't so bad."</p>
+
+<p>Some passion shook him. "Mother! Mother! To think of him bringing that
+woman into this house&mdash;to meet you and Ellen!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, oh hush! He does not know."</p>
+
+<p>"But, mother! He ought to! Anyone could see&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What she was. Yes, poor woman. But remember I made a bad job of Roger.
+I gave him no brains."</p>
+
+<p>"Mother&mdash;it mustn't happen again. She can't come here again."</p>
+
+<p>She grew stern. "Richard, you must say nothing to Roger. Nor to her.
+She's his love and pride. So far as he's concerned, she's a better woman
+than I am. I never put my love and pride in his life. If you speak to
+either of them you will ... add to my already heavy guilt. Besides ...
+how can she hurt Ellen and me? She's very weak. We're very strong."</p>
+
+<p>"But, mother, you saw what she was."</p>
+
+<p>"More than you did. She's had a child not long since."</p>
+
+<p>"A child?" He stared at her curiously, reverently. "How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Some people get a brown stain on their face when they're having a baby,
+and afterwards it lingers on. I had it with you. Not with Roger. She has
+it now." She slowly drew her fingers over her face, her eyes wide in
+wonder. "It's a queer thing, birth...."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen tingled with shame because such things were spoken of aloud, by
+someone old. But Richard muttered huskily: "I wonder what the story
+is...."</p>
+
+<p>"Something horrible. She's come from a good home. Her teeth were well
+looked after when she was a girl. That hair took some conscientious
+torturing to make it what it is. She was caught, I suppose, by her love
+of beauty. Did you ever hear anything more pathetic than her name&mdash;Poppy
+Alicante?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see anything more in it than it's an obvious lie."</p>
+
+<p>"It was much more than that. Think of her as a little girl going with
+her mother into a greengrocer's and hearing about Alicante grapes, and
+asking what Alicante was, and being told it was in Spain, and making the
+most lovely pictures of it in her mind and keeping them there ever
+since. Oh, she's a poor, beauty-loving thing. That's how the handsome
+sailor picked her up in Chatham High Street on Saturday night."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt you're right," he said, looking into the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"And she hated giving up the child. That's why she snarls at Roger.
+Until she gets another she'll be famished. It was taken over, I expect,
+by a married sister or brother who've got no children of their own.
+She's not allowed to see it now. Not since she left the nice place that
+was found for her after she'd got over her trouble. Twenty pounds a
+year&mdash;because of her lost character; and for the same reason rather more
+work than the rest of the servants, who all found out about it. So she
+ran away."</p>
+
+<p>He interrupted her: "Supposing all that's true. And I know it is. It's
+like you, mother, to read from a patch of brown skin on a woman's face
+things that other people would have found out only by searching registry
+records and asking the police. It's like the way you always turned your
+back on the barometer and read the sky for news of the weather. You're
+an old peasant woman under your skin, mother." His voice was hazed with
+delight. He had forgotten the moment in the timeless joy of his love for
+her. Ellen, in the shadows, stirred and coughed. He broke out again:
+"Well, supposing all that's true! Are you going to be honest and be as
+clear-sighted about what happened after she ran away? Mother, think of
+the things that have been done to her, think of the things she's seen!"</p>
+
+<p>The indifferent tone continued now, although she said: "Think of the
+horrible things that have been done to me, think of the horrible things
+I've seen! Oh, you're right, of course. Unhappy people are dangerous.
+They clutch at the happy people round them and drag them down into the
+vortex of their misery. But if you're going to hate anybody for doing
+that, hate me. Look how I've dominated you with my misfortunes, look how
+I've eaten up your life by making you feel it a duty to compensate me
+for what I've endured. Hate me. But don't hate Poppy. Oh, that poor,
+simple creature. Even now, after all that's happened, she'd be pleased
+like a child if you took her to a fair where there were merry-go-rounds.
+Oh, don't hate her. And don't hate Roger." Wildness flashed through her
+like lightning through a dense dark cloud. "Don't hate him, Richard!
+Take your mind off both of us. We're all right. I can manage everything
+quite well. I'm hard. I haven't got all those fine feelings you think I
+have. I'm quite hard. I can arrange everything beautifully. Roger's
+happy in the Hallelujah Army. He's gone to Jesus for the love I ought to
+have given him. I know they're thinking of turning him out. But I'll see
+to it that they keep him. I'll pretend to have leanings towards their
+religion, and I'll give them money from time to time so that they won't
+dare get rid of him. It will be rather amusing squaring them. I shall
+enjoy it. We will be all right. Leave us alone. Don't think of us. Think
+of Ellen. Think of Ellen. How you hold back from your happiness!" she
+cried gibingly. "I tell you, if I had had your chance of happiness when
+I was young, neither my mother nor my father would have held me back
+from it!"</p>
+
+<p>It was as if her soul had leapt, naked and raging, from out of her mouth
+when she said that. Ellen stirred among the cushions, feeling
+unformulated shame. She wondered how Richard could endure hearing that
+hoarse vehemence from the lips of one whom he must wish to be gentle and
+unpassionate. But he was gazing at his mother trancedly and with slight
+movements of his hands and feet, as if she were dancing and he desired
+to join her in her spinning rhythm; and she, mad, changeable woman,
+shivered and pressed her fingers against her mouth to silence herself,
+and looked down on her skirt, drawling lazily: "Well, here I am,
+standing about in my outdoor clothes. If there's anything I hate, it's
+wearing outdoor clothes in the house. However, it'll save me changing,
+and I've none too much time if I'm going to be punctual for Roger's
+meeting."</p>
+
+<p>She moved towards the door. He followed softly, as her shadow, and held
+it open.</p>
+
+<p>When he made to follow her out of the room she turned sharply. "You
+needn't come."</p>
+
+<p>"I promised Roger," he said falsely.</p>
+
+<p>"What nonsense!" she blazed. "I'll tell him you had to stay here with
+Ellen."</p>
+
+<p>She banged the door on him. He stood staring at its panels, which were
+rosy with firelight, and Ellen closed her eyes for weariness. After some
+seconds she heard his tread and felt him bend over her. "Ellen," he
+mumbled, "I must go with mother. That fool will be too awful on the
+platform. I must see her through."</p>
+
+<p>From the dark fey shape he made against the firelight she knew that he
+was not thinking of her, that the life she had given him by her love no
+longer ran in his veins. She scratched one of her wrists. If she could
+have let the life he had given flow out of her veins she would have done
+it. "Ay, do," she said. "I like you to be good to your mother. You never
+know how long you may have her with you," she added piously and not
+without cheerfulness.</p>
+
+<p>He left her with a kiss that was dry and spurious like a paper flower.
+She sank back into the chair and closed her eyes again, and listened for
+the closing of the front door which would leave her free to weep or rage
+or dance or do whatever would relieve the pressure of the moment on her
+brain. She filled in the throbbing tune by thinking of the visitors. It
+gave her a curious thrill, such as she might have felt if she had
+gratified her ambition to carry a heavy-plumed fan like Sarah
+Bernhardt's, to reflect that she had sat in the same room with a bad
+woman. A desire for unspecified adult things ran through her veins, as
+if she had just heard the strong initial blare of a band. Then she
+checked all thoughts, for from the hall she heard the sound of argument.</p>
+
+<p>The door was flung open by Marion. She moved towards the hearth with a
+burly speed which marked this moment a crisis in the house of languid,
+inhibited movements, and cast herself down on a low stool by the fender.
+Richard followed and stood over her, the firelight driving over his face
+like the glow of excited blood, the shadows lying in his eye-sockets
+like blindness. She cried up at him: "No, I will not go if you come too.
+How can I go and sit listening to him, with you beside me hating him!"
+He swayed slowly, but did not answer. She stripped herself of coat and
+furs and thrust them on him. "There. Take them up to my room. I'm not
+going. I'll tell some lie. Better than you hating him like this. And
+while you're up you'll find some papers on my desk about the mortgage on
+Whitewebbs. Attend to these. And don't come back just now. You drive me
+mad when you hate Roger so."</p>
+
+<p>When he had softly shut the door she put her hand to her head and said:
+"Oh, Ellen, what has happened to me? I have lost all my strength."</p>
+
+<p>But her voice was still level, and she was but a squat, crouching mass
+against the firelight. Ellen did not know whether she was really moved,
+nor, if she were, whether she could feel comradely with such emotion,
+since she had seen the woman blench at the thought of her son preaching
+in the street yet stay complacid at the prospect of him being lost in
+intellectual error. So she did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"You must go for a long walk with Richard to-morrow," said Marion
+presently. "Over to Rochford, perhaps, where Anne Boleyn lived. It's
+pretty there."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be nice," Ellen answered. She liked it when they talked as
+if they were merely strangers. "Do you think it will be fine to-morrow?
+Richard said you were awful clever at telling the weather."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't say. I only looked out for a moment. The clouds are going and
+the moon's rising. But there's a queer feeling in the air to-night. It's
+not like the winter or spring or summer or autumn. It's as if we had
+come into some fifth season of the year." She fell silent and sat
+tapping the floor with her foot; and asked more loudly but in the same
+tone: "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen was sure she was being mocked; grown-up people never asked one's
+advice. She muttered sullenly: "I don't know"; but as she spoke she
+heard from Marion's dark shape a sound of discovery such as a searcher
+might make when his groping fingers closed on the lost pearl. Its
+intensity convinced, and she leaned forward, crying in full friendship:
+"You've thought of something to settle them?"</p>
+
+<p>But Marion answered, with that indifference grown nearly to a sneer:
+"Oh, no.... Oh, no...."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen leaned back, hating these adults that like to keep their secrets
+from the young.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2X" id="CHAPTER_2X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ellen was still on her knees fiddling with the lock of the French window
+in an effort to discover why Marion had found it so difficult to open
+and shut, when she saw through the lacquer of reflection which the lit
+room painted on the uncurtained glass that a dark mass had come to a
+halt just outside. It moved, and she perceived that it was a skirt. She
+stood up to face the intruder and looked through the glass into Marion's
+eyes. For a moment she stared back in undisguised anger. Of course, if
+the woman had had any sense she would never have formed this daft idea
+of going for a dander on the marshes at this hour of the night, whether
+her nerves were troubling her or not; but she never ought to have
+pretended to be so set on it, and let a body feel sure of having the
+evening alone with Richard as soon as he had finished with those beastly
+papers, if she was going to turn back in five minutes. Then she
+remembered that this was Richard's mother, and that for some reason he
+set great store by her; and she tried to smile, and laid her fingers on
+the doorknob to open it. But Marion shook her head and put out a
+prohibitory hand with so urgent a gesture that the unlit lantern which
+hung by a strap from her wrist bumped against the glass.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she remained for some seconds longer with her face pressed close to
+the window. She was peering into the room with an expression of wanting
+to fix its contents and its appearance in her memory, which was odd in
+the owner of the house. Ellen moved aside in order not to impede her
+vision, and stood disliking her for her pervasive inexplicability and
+for her extreme plainness. She had been very ugly all that evening since
+she came down to dinner, and now the shining glass in front of her face
+was acting in its uncomeliness like a magnifying lens. Her hair had
+suddenly become greasy during the last few hours, and it showed in lank
+loops where her hat had been carelessly jammed down on her head. In the
+same short space of time her face seemed to have grown fatter, and her
+skin had taken on the pallor of unhealthy obesity. Against it the dark
+down on her upper lip looked like dirt. Her eyes were not magnificent
+to-night. After she had stared round the room she looked again at Ellen,
+and gave her a forced smile that looked the more unpleasant because the
+corners of her mouth were joined to her nose by deep creases. It so
+manifestly did not spring from any joy, that Ellen could not answer it
+save by just such another false grin. Her honesty hated this woman who
+had thus negotiated her into insincerity, and she turned away. When she
+looked back the face had gone.</p>
+
+<p>She went back to the fire and sat thinking bitterly what a daft thing it
+was for a wife to go wandering round her own house in the night like a
+thief. But Marion was altogether an upsetting woman. She had kept the
+dinner waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and when she came down
+it was revealed that she had caused this delay, which must have
+inconvenienced the kitchen and was sheer cruelty to Richard, who had
+made next to nothing of a tea, by dressing herself up in a black and
+gold brocade affair that it was sheer madness to waste wearing when
+there was no company, and putting on jewels which made her stricken
+plainness look the more soiled and leaden. Then, once they sat down to
+the meal she had done her best to spoil, she had eaten so slowly that it
+dragged on interminably; and all the while had kept her great eyes fixed
+on Richard's face, so that though he sometimes turned aside and spoke to
+Ellen, he was always drawn away from her by his sense of that strong,
+exigent gaze. The minute they had finished, when there seemed a chance
+of their settling down in some more easy grouping by the fire, Marion
+had curtly and disagreeably asked him if he had gone through the papers
+about the mortgage; and when he answered that he had not been able to
+keep his mind on them she had told him to go upstairs and finish them
+just as if he were a child.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen raised her upper lip over her teeth at the thought of Marion's
+subsequent awkwardness. There had not, when she announced her plan of
+taking Richard and Ellen up to town the next morning and spending the
+day shopping and going to a theatre, been the least real party-giving
+joy in her tone. Her will seemed to be holding her voice in its hands
+like a concertina and waving it to and fro and squeezing out of it all
+sorts of notes; but the sound of generous happiness would not come. And
+when Ellen tried to tell her that it was very kind of her, but for
+herself she would rather stay quietly in the country and go for a walk
+with Richard, the woman had simply lifted her voice to a higher pitch
+and said: "Oh, but it'll be great fun. We must go before Sunday is on
+us." She was evidently one of those managing bodies who are accustomed
+to ride rough-shod over the whole world, and often do it under the
+pretence of kindness. It was most cunning the way she rang for the cook
+to try and make it seem that there was a pressing domestic reason for
+her taking this jaunt. But cook had let her down badly, staring in such
+ingenuous amazement, and blurting out: "Oh Lor', mum, I don't want no
+aluminium set now. All I said was I thought our copper saucepans would
+need re-coppering in a year or so, and that, considering the trouble and
+expense that meant, we might as well restock with aluminium." There had
+been a hysterical stridency about the way in which Marion had flouted
+the woman's protests by repeating over and over again: "Yes, you shall
+have them now. There's not the smallest reason why you should wait for
+them. I shall go up to Harrod's to-morrow morning."</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face
+and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing
+gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening
+the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die
+if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life
+could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the
+creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the
+garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely.
+Ellen crossed to one of the small leaded windows which were on each side
+of the French window and looked out of the open pane in its centre. It
+was as she feared. The light streaming from the room showed her Marion
+standing half-way across the lawn, looking up at the top storey of the
+house. As the ray found her she lowered her head and made a jerky,
+embarrassed movement in the direction of Ellen, who, feeling merciless,
+continued to hold back the curtain. Marion drew her cloak collar up
+about her ears and stepped aside into the darkness. Ellen went and sat
+down by the fire. From something in Marion's bearing, she knew that she
+would not be back for some time.</p>
+
+<p>It would be beautiful when Richard came down to her. Now that the room
+was purged of its late occupant she felt herself becoming again the
+miracle that Richard's love had made her in the days before they left
+Edinburgh. Her heart beat quicker, she was sustained by a general mirth
+and needed no particular joke to make her smile. She felt the equal of
+the tall flame that was driving through the fire. It did not worry her
+that Richard was not with her, for she knew that at each moment she was
+recovering more and more of that joy in life which had previously come
+to her every morning, though those were greyer than here: which had been
+a real possession, since Richard had often, when he was tired, found
+such restoration in reading its signs on her as a footsore man might
+find in throwing himself in long grass: which had been gradually going
+from her ever since the house had begun to draw her into its affairs.
+Now she was regaining it; though, indeed, ever to have become conscious
+of it, as she had during the time of being without it, was to have lost
+the glad essence of it. She quailed and rejoiced like a convalescent who
+sets out to put his strength to the test, when she heard the slamming of
+a door overhead.</p>
+
+<p>He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said:
+"Where's Marion?"</p>
+
+<p>It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the
+window, of the dark loiterer in the garden. Murmuring, "Oh, she'll be
+back in a minute," she opened her arms to him.</p>
+
+<p>He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very
+close. "Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run
+across the road!" he whispered in her ear. She knew immediately, from
+the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his
+lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he
+too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself
+with it. She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he
+avoided her kiss and said irritably: "I wonder if Roger made an awful
+ass of himself preaching to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've no doubt," answered Ellen, "that he made Jesus most dislikeable.
+But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a
+setback here and there."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having
+mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had."
+He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his
+face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers;
+but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift
+from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill
+with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer,
+closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with
+him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a
+steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they
+were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as
+itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times
+which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found
+the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye
+first saw.</p>
+
+<p>"'Lamport and Holt. <i>Bruy&egrave;re</i>, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for
+Rosario. <i>Lalande</i>, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande.
+<i>Leighton</i>, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. <i>Vestris</i>, left
+Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to
+Pernambuco?"</p>
+
+<p>"Once," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."</p>
+
+<p>"Like Venice? Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be
+suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some
+symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he
+had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating
+past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had
+made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the
+silence settle.</p>
+
+<p>After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"</p>
+
+<p>She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as
+it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out,"
+she said timorously.</p>
+
+<p>"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and
+that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to
+the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the
+east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird
+of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the
+end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he
+exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen
+felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the
+woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There
+was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and
+yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.</p>
+
+<p>"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He
+turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been
+incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me
+she was doing this?"</p>
+
+<p>Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it?
+You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each
+other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like
+children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces.
+She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this
+trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all
+day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him,
+slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing
+that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her
+head after the day she'd had. And I could never think she was a woman
+who'd be afraid of walking in the dark. And it seemed natural enough.
+Because it has been a day for her, hasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>He agreed grimly: "Yes, it's been a day," and looked over his shoulder
+at the quiet silvern garden, and shivered. "Tell me," he asked, with a
+timidity that filled her with fear, since it was the last quality she
+had ever expected to colour his tone to her, "what was she like, before
+she went out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, verra bright," said Ellen, with conscious acidity. "She was all for
+making arrangements for you and me to go up to town with her to-morrow
+and see a play, and I don't know all what. And she had the cook in to
+tell her about some aluminium saucepans that we're going to buy
+to-morrow if we go."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" He was manifestly relieved. "Well, I suppose it's all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's all right," she told him pettishly; and then tried to make
+amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion. "I can understand why your
+mother thought it would do her good to go out. If you've lived all your
+life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you. No
+doubt," she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she
+was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion's more pathetic aspect,
+"the poor thing's gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit
+of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young. Richard,
+Richard, what have I said?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her coldly. "Nothing. What could you have said?" But he
+went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him
+hasten, and opened it and stepped outside. Against the moonlight he was
+only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to
+the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful
+look of rage which had made her cry aloud. He stepped in again and said:
+"I'm sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her."</p>
+
+<p>She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with
+him. "May I come with you?" she asked through tears.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, it wouldn't be any fun for you," he answered fussily,
+"scrambling about these fields in the dark."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me come with you!" she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows
+knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be
+to him sombre with the day's events, and cried: "I shall feel afraid,
+waiting here."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. Go and put your things on. But be quick."</p>
+
+<p>He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged
+the time spent in waiting for her. Wearily she followed him out of the
+window. From what her mother had told her about men, she had always
+known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of
+worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that
+she was being tiresome when she was not. But she would never have
+believed that it could come so soon. And it was spoiling her. She no
+longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of
+her own nobility. Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by
+pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which
+tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his
+presence no matter at what price. There was no knowing where all this
+would end.</p>
+
+<p>But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it
+had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had
+handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard,
+while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like
+walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised
+a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated
+with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like
+ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard
+piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white
+paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled
+hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had
+gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into
+the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and
+led her up in a slanting course towards the top of the elm-hedge that
+striped the hill. It was rough walking over the steep frozen hummocks,
+and she wished he would not walk so fast. But it was lovely going up
+like this, and with every step widening the wide, whitely-blazing view.
+The elm trees stood like chased toys made by silversmiths where the
+light struck them; and in the darkness seemed like harsh twiggy nets
+hung on tall poles to catch the stars. Scattered over the polished
+harbour, the black boats squatted on their shadows and the tide licked
+towards them with an ebony and silver tongue. But far out in the fairway
+a liner and some lesser steamers carried their spilling cargo of orange
+brightness, and the further fringe of the night was spoiled by the
+comprehensive yellow wink of a lighthouse; and these things tainted the
+black and white immaculacy of the hour. It was not on earth but overhead
+that the essence of the night displayed itself. Light rushed from the
+moon into the sky like a strong wind, carrying before it some shining
+vapours that might have been angels' clouts blown off a heavenly line.
+It was as if some horseplay was going on among the ethereal forces; for
+the stars, dimmed by the violent brilliance of the moon, were like
+tapers seen through glass, and were held, perhaps, by invisible beings
+who had been drawn to their windows by the sound of carnival. To its
+zenith the night was packed with gaiety.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard, Richard, is it not beautiful?" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>They reached the topmost elm in the row, and opened a gate into a field
+which stretched inland from the hill's brow. Under the shadow of its
+seaward edge they still walked westerly, the ploughed earth looking like
+a patch of grey corduroy lying to their right. It struck her that he was
+moving now like a hunter stalking his quarry, as if the lightness of his
+feet were a weapon, as if he were looking forward to an exciting kill.
+At the corner of the field they stopped before a gap in the hedge.
+Triple barbed wire crossed a vista of close-cropped grass running to
+trees that lifted dark spires against the pale meridian starlight.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," said Richard.</p>
+
+<p>He went forward and stamped down the long grasses at one side of the
+gap, and then bent nearly double and seemed to be pressing against
+something with his hands and his knee. The barbed wire began to hum, to
+buzz excitedly; there was the groan of cracking wood, and the grunt of
+his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her
+face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am
+like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be
+true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced
+and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the
+stake which supported it.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They
+walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was
+hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled
+by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide
+Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads.
+It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who
+was walking on ahead, though there did not seem any reason why they
+should walk in single file, for the ground was level and the grass
+short. There was indeed a suavity about this place which was not to be
+found in fields or commons. The line of trees towards which they were
+going was only a spur of a dense wood that stretched inland, and light
+from some moonflooded place beyond outlined their winter-naked bodies
+and showed them beautiful with a formal afforested grace.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this a park?" she whispered, running forward to his side.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. My father's park."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" she breathed in surprise; then, flaming up in loyalty, cried:
+"What a shame it isn't yours!"</p>
+
+<p>He made an exclamation of anger and disgust, and said coldly: "Can't you
+understand that I am glad that nothing which was his is mine?"</p>
+
+<p>Meekly she murmured: "That's natural, that's natural," and fell behind.</p>
+
+<p>They passed the lacy clump of withered bracken, casting a shadow much
+more substantial than itself, which was the last dwindled outpost of
+the screen of trees; and Richard hissed over his shoulder, "Hush!"
+though she had not spoken. But nothing could spoil this. The silver
+forest waited in a half circle round a clearing that looked marshy with
+moonbeams; and in the centre of the arc, set forward from the trees,
+shone a small temple, looking out to sea. It had four white pillars,
+which were vague with excessive light, columns of gleaming mist; and
+these upheld a high pediment, covered with deep stone mouldings which
+cast such shadows and received such brightness that it looked like a
+rich casket chased by some giant jeweller. That it should last longer
+than a sigh did not seem possible.</p>
+
+<p>But it endured, it endured; until the urgent advocacy of romance which
+was somehow inherent in its beauty, and which was not likely to be
+fulfilled, caused an ache. She caught her breath in a sob.</p>
+
+<p>"You think it beautiful?" asked Richard, close to her ear.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"I had a summer-house in that villa of mine at Rio," he said, hotly and
+defiantly, "which was just like this, but much more beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>He stepped forward and began to move towards the temple with that air of
+stalking a quarry. She followed him wearily, feeling that it was not
+right that they should have come here like this. They should have come
+in some different way. At each step the temple grew higher before them,
+more candid, more immaculate, but its beauty did not soften his
+inexorable aspect. When they could see the pale wedges which the moon
+drove in between the columns he paused and stared, and drew from his
+pocket something dark which lay easily in his hand. "What's that? What's
+that?" she asked in panic. "Only an electric torch," he muttered,
+without surprise at her suspicion, and went with springing, silent,
+detective gait up the three steps of the temple.</p>
+
+<p>She remained without, drooping. Would he find his mother there? She
+hoped so, for then they could all go home and leave this place, which
+she felt despised her. The tall trees of the forest, lifting their bare
+branches like antlers against the stars, seemed to be holding their
+heads high in contempt of her defeat. For so to be forgotten was defeat.</p>
+
+<p>No sounds came from the temple, and she timidly went up the steps and
+passed into the interior, which was cut by the colonnade into narrow
+chambers of shadows and broader chambers of light. At first she could
+not see him anywhere, and cried in alarm: "Richard!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm here," he answered. He was standing beside her, leaning against a
+pillar, but put out no hand to soothe her fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you not found her?" she quavered.</p>
+
+<p>He let the yellow circle of the electric torch travel over the cracked
+stucco-wall that faced them, the paintless door at its left extremity,
+the drift of dead leaves on the stone floor.</p>
+
+<p>"What does that door open on to?" asked Ellen, forgetting the reason for
+their search in the queerness of the place.</p>
+
+<p>"A staircase up to the room above."</p>
+
+<p>"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the
+existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up
+there, do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall
+high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I
+stood up there, wouldn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like
+a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has
+she told you anything about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just
+thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You
+take me up too quick."</p>
+
+<p>His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course
+she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's
+what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here
+together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely
+he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche,
+though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular
+soilure.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand
+on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those
+bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered,
+sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to
+slow thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands,
+close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted
+by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out
+towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the
+woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the
+trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene
+in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and
+the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little
+thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud
+laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree
+and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands,
+and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered
+with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw
+suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a
+dancing lantern.</p>
+
+<p>She ran back to the temple. All she cared for really was pleasing him.
+"Richard, Richard! I've found her! She's down there on the marshes!"</p>
+
+<p>He was out beside her in a second. "Where? How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw her lantern down on the marshes!"</p>
+
+<p>When they got back to the hill's edge the light was still to be seen,
+bobbing along towards the elm brow. Richard clipped Ellen's waist to
+show her how well pleased he was with her. "Ah, that'll be Marion!" he
+said. "Nobody else would be on the marshes at this hour." Then a little
+wind of anger blew over his voice. "Has she been to his tomb? Can she
+have been to his tomb in the time? It's a steep climb for her. I
+wonder.... I wonder...."</p>
+
+<p>The lantern bobbed out of sight behind the elm row. Feeling that they
+were again alone together, Ellen raised her lips to be kissed, but he
+had already turned away. "Let's go home now!" he said urgently. "I want
+to know where she's been."</p>
+
+<p>The place seemed far more beautiful to her than it had done before. "Oh!
+Now you're sure she's quite safe, mayn't we stay here a little?" she
+begged.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. Some other night. I'll bring you to-morrow night. But not now,
+not now."</p>
+
+<p>She followed laggingly, looking about her with infatuation. There was
+something religious about the scene. Rites of some true form of worship
+might fitly be celebrated here. All appeared more majestic and more
+sacred than in the strained, bickering moments before she showed him the
+lantern. Now she perceived that it was the silver circle of trees which
+was the real temple, and that the marble belvedere was but a human
+offering laid before the shrine. It was in there, along the ebony paths
+which ran among the glistening thickets, that one would find the
+presence of the divinity.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Richard! It will never be so beautiful as this on any other night!
+Let us stay!"</p>
+
+<p>"No. It will be just as good any moonlit night. I swear I'll bring you.
+But now I want to get back home."</p>
+
+<p>He slipped her arm through his to make her come. She stumbled along,
+turning her face aside towards those mystic woods. At the end of those
+paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all
+sides by the forest; and there was something there.... Another temple? A
+statue? An event? She did not know. But if they found it, they would be
+happy for ever....</p>
+
+<p>"Richard&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the
+ploughed field. When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row
+they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard
+gate, the bobbing lantern.</p>
+
+<p>"She's going fairly quickly," he said softly, speculatively. "I wonder
+if she's been to his tomb? Do you think she's had time?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when
+he must be aware she could not tell.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and
+bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth
+at their feet. "We'll find out when we get home. Let's hurry back."</p>
+
+<p>They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread
+that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite
+nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance. The
+humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at
+shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the
+lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She
+was the lucky woman, Marion.</p>
+
+<p>"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in
+fine style."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to
+ask her where she has been."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull,
+drilling persistence.</p>
+
+<p>When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she
+standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such
+extraordinary things?"</p>
+
+<p>Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the
+left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady
+rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she
+said pettishly.</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which
+pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment
+there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed
+on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed
+past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in
+the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"</p>
+
+<p>The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen
+crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and
+prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight
+beams were still unclouded.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a
+revolver.</p>
+
+<p>Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a
+doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.</p>
+
+<p>"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"</p>
+
+<p>It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's
+sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and
+wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown
+some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm
+Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my
+married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would
+auntie give us the clothes she was making?"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the kitchen
+brightness at them.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is your mistress?" Richard asked them, cutting into the girl's
+sweet, silly speech. "Has she come back?"</p>
+
+<p>The servants all started making twittering, consequential noises. "No,
+sir, she isn't." "We didn't know, any of us, you was out till the lady
+and gentleman come."</p>
+
+<p>"What lady and gentleman?"</p>
+
+<p>The two younger women shrunk back and left the cook to answer. "Mr.
+Roger Peacey, sir, and the lady." From the hindmost girl there came a
+giggle.</p>
+
+<p>That was why they had not heard the knocking at the door. They had all
+been sitting laughing at his mother's other son and going over the
+family history. Ellen shrank back from the light. Marion's misfortunes
+made things very ill to deal with; they seemed to bring out the worst in
+everybody. And how the whole affair was hurting Richard! He turned on
+his heel and walked back to the trellis arch and went through it without
+waiting for her. By the time she had followed him round the corner of
+the house he was opening the French window into the dining-room. He
+found it quite easy to open; again she thought with rage and contempt of
+the way that Marion had fumbled with the handle. She had to run along
+the path lest in his forgetfulness he shut her out into the night.</p>
+
+<p>She found him halted just within the room, pulling off his gauntlets
+and forcing a white smile towards Roger, who was standing swaying on the
+hearthrug, his cheeks dribbled with tears. Poppy stood beside him,
+staring sullenly at a blank wall, her mouth a little open with distaste
+for him.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're giving us another visit," said Richard, in that hollow
+conscientious tone of kindness he had used to them in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>Roger opened his mouth but could not speak; then flapped his hands to
+make it plain this was an occasion of importance, and cried bleatingly:
+"I've come to say that I forgive you all."</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive us!" exclaimed Richard, swept away to the bleak extremity of
+rage. Then checked himself. "Oh, for not coming to your meeting. We
+hoped you would. Ellen was tired."</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't bear to think of you p'raps going to bed and feeling that I
+was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I've got
+Jesus I'll forgive anything that anybody does against me!" His voice
+wallowed rhapsodically. "So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of
+going straight back to the Colony."</p>
+
+<p>Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to
+disassociate herself from him, from the situation.</p>
+
+<p>"That was good of you," said Richard.</p>
+
+<p>"And now"&mdash;the whistling tone came back in his speech&mdash;"I want to tell
+mother!"</p>
+
+<p>"You can't do that. She isn't in."</p>
+
+<p>"What, weren't you all out together? Didn't she come home with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, love o' goodness, where is she at this time of night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Down on the marshes," said Richard casually. "She had a headache. She
+thought a walk in the night air would do her good." Slowly and
+deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and
+straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the
+wood. Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his
+brother's face. "Here! What's the matter with mother?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing! Nothing!" exclaimed Richard in exasperation. "She's down on
+the marshes, having a walk."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but you can't take me in that way!" the pallid creature cried,
+wringing his hands. "I can see you're frightened about mother!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not," said Richard vehemently.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't try to fool me. I'm stupid about everything else, but not
+about mother! And I could always feel what was going on between you two.
+Many's the time I've had to leave the room because you two were loving
+each other so and I felt out of it. And now I know you're frightened
+about her! You are! You are!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not!" shouted Richard.</p>
+
+<p>Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and
+had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight. "If you'd got
+Jesus," he said tartly, "you'd learn to be gentle. Like He was." He
+recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy's hand, which she tendered him
+deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for
+orders. "Now you'd better tell me what it is about mother that's making
+you frightened. She'd not be pleased, would she, if she came in and
+found you treating me like this, as if I hadn't a right to know anything
+about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?"</p>
+
+<p>That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see. He looked down at his
+white knuckles and unclenched his hands. "It's really nothing," he told
+Roger in that false, kind voice. "I went upstairs after dinner to look
+over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here. When I
+came back Ellen told me she'd gone out for a walk on the marshes. It
+struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went
+out and had a look round, but couldn't see her anywhere. There's not the
+slightest occasion for worry."</p>
+
+<p>Roger stared at him, sucking his front teeth. "But you're frightened!"
+he said explosively.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not."</p>
+
+<p>"You are. You think she's come to some harm down on the marshes." He
+slipped past him and flung open the French window, calling in a thin,
+whistling voice that could not have been heard fifty yards away:
+"Mummie! Mummie!"</p>
+
+<p>A convulsion of rage ran through Richard. With one hand he jerked Roger
+back into the room by his coat-collar, with the other he slammed the
+French window. "Be quiet. I tell you she's all right. I know where she's
+gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Where, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind."</p>
+
+<p>"Where? Where?" His hands fumbled for the doorhandle again.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, stop that!" Richard loosed hold of him with the expression of one
+who had grasped what he thought to be soft grass and finds his palms
+scored by a fibrous stalk. He said, and Ellen could see that he liked
+saying it as little as anything that he had ever said all his life long:
+"If you must know, I think she's gone up to my father's tomb."</p>
+
+<p>Roger shook his head solemnly. "No. You're wrong. She hasn't gone there.
+And she's come to harm."</p>
+
+<p>"Why in God's name do you say that?" burst out Richard.</p>
+
+<p>"I know. I've known all the evening. That's really why I came back here
+after the service. That talk about forgiveness was just something I made
+up as an excuse. I knew quite well that something was wrong with
+mummie." His pale eyes sought first Richard and then Ellen. "Don't you
+believe a person might know if something happened to another person," he
+asked wistfully, "if they loved them enough?"</p>
+
+<p>There was indeed such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard
+and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it
+is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of
+the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really,
+Roger, she was quite bright before she went out. Ellen, tell Roger...."</p>
+
+<p>But Roger stared out at the empty silver garden and whimpered
+inattentively: "I can't help it. I want to go down to the marshes and
+look for her."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," agreed Richard, blinking. The sight of the love in those
+weak eyes made his voice authentically kind. "We'll go down. She ought
+to be easy to find as she's carrying a lantern. You're quite sure she
+has got a lantern with her, Ellen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," said Ellen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back
+and looked through the window."</p>
+
+<p>"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his
+mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the
+door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the
+glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went
+away."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in
+amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a
+reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before
+she went out."</p>
+
+<p>She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her
+that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all
+in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about
+us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and
+talked to her about saucepans."</p>
+
+<p>"What saucepans?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aluminium saucepans."</p>
+
+<p>"But what about them?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple
+in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the
+narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on
+hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get
+them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."</p>
+
+<p>For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her
+because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She
+really was all right, Ellen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."</p>
+
+<p>Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure
+of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring
+things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was
+not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it
+had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned
+towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face,
+which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will
+most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."</p>
+
+<p>Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He
+turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here,
+Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so
+preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for
+Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."</p>
+
+<p>They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than
+their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate
+into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but
+he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop
+about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and
+Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and
+hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.</p>
+
+<p>Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an
+extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do
+that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the
+exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the
+teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and
+drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:
+"Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with
+her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the
+flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life
+was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk
+restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly:
+"That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in
+the sky. Is that Chatham?"</p>
+
+<p>With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that
+those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered
+what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in
+Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it
+was."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed
+her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was
+quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.</p>
+
+<p>Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What
+chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this
+woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so
+wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's
+brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and
+ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes
+fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned
+out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the
+moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she
+was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and
+crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night
+searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.</p>
+
+<p>She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had
+whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window
+into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and
+advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the
+farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound
+of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there
+was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was
+no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family
+had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been
+unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran
+downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she
+begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the
+parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in
+her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut
+on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had
+been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look
+like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.</p>
+
+<p>There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was
+sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the
+night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on
+the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections
+of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as
+pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head
+on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly
+enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the
+breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that
+had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood
+Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered
+about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o'
+you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear
+nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went
+in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said:
+"Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the
+fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was
+held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it
+were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became
+more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture
+of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her
+wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"</p>
+
+<p>That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped
+back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he
+muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric
+switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the
+sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it
+difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In
+the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the
+right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there
+over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for
+years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right
+up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."</p>
+
+<p>Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked
+foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story,
+"But when did you find the lantern?"</p>
+
+<p>"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way
+along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon
+as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the
+lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."</p>
+
+<p>They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any
+moment it might move or speak.</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the
+light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of
+those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened
+yet!"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead.
+There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's
+dead."</p>
+
+<p>It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if
+he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly
+unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and
+hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously
+stricken by a disease one sits and waits.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank
+into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick
+and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her
+flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but
+the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken
+all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat;
+and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously
+exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food."
+He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked
+round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling
+in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head
+mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a
+thing on my stomach."</p>
+
+<p>"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying
+for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."</p>
+
+<p>That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor
+Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.</p>
+
+<p>Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he
+laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did
+you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing
+but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to
+worry."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone.
+"It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled:
+"Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to
+the sallowness of the morning.</p>
+
+<p>When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his
+hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was
+saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you
+silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"
+and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.
+"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"</p>
+
+<p>But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had
+been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's
+mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was
+deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."</p>
+
+<p>She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for
+persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint,
+barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife
+for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been
+alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a
+charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should
+understand her sacrifice and grieve.</p>
+
+<p>"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so
+that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.
+"She wore high heels for her age&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She
+was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the
+chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.
+This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she
+had gone back on it.</p>
+
+<p>"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on
+the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room
+where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to
+the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much
+longer."</p>
+
+<p>"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly
+when she was unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not
+know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal
+her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear,
+you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."</p>
+
+<p>Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.
+Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do
+nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in
+the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a
+theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as
+anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must
+notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and
+final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of
+force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that
+never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect
+crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always,
+till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell
+him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring
+were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering
+nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the
+window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the
+ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had
+seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his
+inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate
+her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her
+life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he
+would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained
+inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened
+women....</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it
+was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate
+and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which
+chair?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yon, at your hand."</p>
+
+<p>He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out
+of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she
+wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very
+upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And
+for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just
+because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily
+enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they
+needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him stroking the soft
+velvet, laying his cheek against it.</p>
+
+<p>"And the desk? You say she sat there while she talked to cook?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>She hated the way he sat down in front of it; in a heap, like a tired
+navvy. By her death Marion deprived her of her beautiful lightfooted
+lover. But she must wait. He would come back. She became aware that
+Roger was speaking to her. It appeared that he had sobbed in his cup and
+had sent jets of tea flying over the tablecloth, and he was now
+apologising.</p>
+
+<p>"Never heed," she told him comfortingly; "we'll have a clean one for
+lunch." "I didn't mean to," he quavered piteously, but she checked him.
+Richard had turned over his shoulder a white face.</p>
+
+<p>"She sat here?..."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. While the cook stood talking to her, she sat there."</p>
+
+<p>"She ... You didn't notice ... when she was sitting there ... if she was
+scribbling on the blotter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she did. I noticed that."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah ... ah...."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>She was beside him in the time of a breath. But he had not fainted,
+though his head had crashed down on the wood, for his fingers, buried in
+his hair, still laced and interlaced. She did not dare touch him; but
+she grovelled for the blotter, which at the moment of his groan had
+fallen to the floor, and stood staring at it. For a second her attention
+was dispersed by a shudder of disgust, for she felt Roger's noisy
+mouth-breathing at her ears. Then the proof leapt to her eyes. There was
+a rim of plain paper round the calendar on the inside of the cover, and
+this was covered with words and phrases written in the exquisite small
+script of Marion. "This is the end. Death. Death. Death. This is the
+end. I must die. Give him to Ellen. I must die."</p>
+
+<p>Roger tumbled back towards Poppy. "The awful sin of self-destruction!"
+he wailed.</p>
+
+<p>This proof struck through her with an awful, unifying grief. She had had
+evidence of Marion's intention which had convinced her mind, but it was
+all derived from ugliness: from the awkwardness of the woman's talk, the
+plainness of the face against the glass, the intrusive loitering of a
+squat figure in the garden. The soul had hearkened to these ugly
+messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it
+had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as
+briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the
+power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at
+its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living
+might grieve for any that is dead, now knew the sorrow appropriate to
+the destruction of Marion's wide, productive body. For what her spirit
+learned and admitted it had always known of that burning thing which had
+been Marion she looked round the room in reverence, since she had lived
+there. The light on the handle of the French window caught her eye, and
+she wept. She had been annoyed with Marion because she could not turn
+it. But who would not find it difficult to open a door if it was death
+on which it opened?</p>
+
+<p>"Richard, I love your mother!" she sobbed. "I love your mother so!"</p>
+
+<p>He muttered something. In case he was speaking to her she bent down and
+listened. But he was repeating over and over again in accents of irony:
+"Give him up to Ellen. Give him up to Ellen. Oh, mother, mother...."</p>
+
+<p>By the passion for Marion that was wringing her she could measure the
+flame that must be devouring him. There was a strong impulse in her to
+feel nothing but pity for him; to apprehend with resignation that there
+might be a period ahead during which he might feel hatred for her,
+loathing her for being alive when his mother, who deserved so well, was
+dead. She stepped backward from the desk so that he need not be vexed by
+any sense of her. Yet she had a feeling as she moved that she was
+taking a step infinitely rash, infinitely dangerous....</p>
+
+<p>She became aware that behind her Roger was shaking words out of his
+weeping body. "You ought to be on your knees, you two! You've killed my
+mummie with your wickedness!"</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" she murmured, turning on him. "What's that?" She was not
+quite attentive. A picture was forming in her consciousness which, when
+it was clear, would tell her why it was perilous to leave Richard to his
+grief....</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, shut up!" hissed Poppy, and tugged at his arm.</p>
+
+<p>But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She
+saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out
+what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught
+you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said
+pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till
+Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it
+wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."</p>
+
+<p>Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual
+shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when
+she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far
+worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been
+appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because
+there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain
+the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a
+thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was
+glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were
+reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being
+evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself
+the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose
+dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd
+accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it
+was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is
+felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious
+man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in
+her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has
+come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and
+a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over
+the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with
+resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there
+should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and
+perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round
+which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but
+of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned
+against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery
+of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses
+which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she
+had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would
+have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always
+suspected to be danger....</p>
+
+<p>"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I
+thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that
+she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her
+for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you
+weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you,
+and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers
+thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first
+service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."</p>
+
+<p>It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell
+her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to
+his passion.</p>
+
+<p>"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I
+suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay
+here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave
+you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"</p>
+
+<p>Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother,
+shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of
+the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which
+housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel
+dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly
+as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly,
+but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who
+allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than
+themselves to dwell in their men's attention.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark
+what your brother's saying of us!"</p>
+
+<p>He stirred. He sat up.</p>
+
+<p>"He says we're bad."</p>
+
+<p>He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face,
+though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use you looking at me like that," said Roger tearfully but
+resolutely. "I'm as good as you. In fact, I'm better now that I've got
+Jesus. And I tell you straight, you've killed my mummie with your
+beastly lust. Mind you," he cried, in a tone of whistling exaltation
+inappropriate to his words, "I'm not pretending I'm without sin myself.
+I did evil once with a woman at Blackburn, but I saw the filthiness of
+my ways. Old man, I do understand your temptations!"</p>
+
+<p>What was Richard's hand searching for on the breakfast table? She bent
+forward to see, so that she might give it to him.</p>
+
+<p>Richard had found what he wanted. His fingers tightened on the handle of
+the breadknife.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's put an end to this," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He drove the knife into Roger's heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Mummie!" breathed Roger. Meekly, but with no sign that he had any other
+quarrel with the proceedings save that they were peremptory, he sank
+down on the chair beside him and fell forward, his head lying untidily
+among the tea-cups. This, no doubt, was the disorder which Marion had
+always foreseen; to prevent which she had practised her insane tidiness.</p>
+
+<p>He held the attention much less than one had thought a dead man could.</p>
+
+<p>"God," said Poppy, "this is a copper's business. I'm off before they
+come. They think I know something about a thing that happened down in
+Strood last Easter, though God help me I don't. They kind of mixed me
+up with someone else. Let me go."</p>
+
+<p>"Right," said Richard, and put his hand into his pocket and brought out
+a fistful of coins. "Take this. Good luck."</p>
+
+<p>She snatched it, and with no further look at any of the company, ran out
+by the French window.</p>
+
+<p>They stood looking down on Roger. Death revealed no significance in him.
+The smallness of his head, the indefinite colour of his hair, palliated
+what had occurred and made them feel incredulous of their knowledge that
+presently much importance would be attached to it.</p>
+
+<p>Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Well, it's all cleared up now,"
+he murmured. "It is as if she had never seen Peacey...."</p>
+
+<p>Ellen broke into sobs. "'Tis I who made you do it. I thought of my poor
+mother and how she'd suffered through not making my father think of her
+first and last&mdash;and you were sitting there thinking of nothing but
+Marion&mdash;and I knew if you heard what Roger was saying about us you'd
+think of me, so I made you listen. If I hadn't given you yon dunts on
+your shoulders you never would have heard him and never would have
+killed him. Oh, my love, what I have done to you, and me that would have
+died rather than hurt you! But I saw my mother plain&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his
+arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"</p>
+
+<p>"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."</p>
+
+<p>"But there's nothing left."</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's
+something still."</p>
+
+<p>He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes
+roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked
+thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it
+and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.</p>
+
+<p>"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.</p>
+
+<p>There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and
+contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's
+infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like
+for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the
+kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not
+to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."</p>
+
+<p>At the door he turned.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure,
+as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no
+going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about
+her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it
+was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror
+of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but
+horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there
+broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the
+miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home
+in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in
+brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago
+dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged
+but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.</p>
+
+<p>He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said. "Come."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_2XI" id="CHAPTER_2XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...</p>
+
+<p>Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no
+tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the
+seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the
+further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it
+confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds
+pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they
+could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to
+take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden
+staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they
+could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the
+grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and
+she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his
+shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be
+there when he returned.</p>
+
+<p>But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what
+life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a
+corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread
+between two human tendencies: the insane sexual caprice of men, the not
+less mad excessive steadfastness of women. Roger had died, Richard was
+about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female
+faults&mdash;Harry and Marion ... Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and
+father.... And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life's
+disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous. Her love had not been
+able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love; and
+how like a doom that love had lain on him.... Since life was like this,
+she would not do what Richard asked. She tried to rise that she might
+flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs
+of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.</p>
+
+<p>But she could not move. Although her mind was still arguing the matter,
+all the rest of her being had consented. She was going to do this thing.
+In panic she looked along the wall at Richard, wishing he would come
+back to her. But he was going on talking to the fishermen, though he
+held their waders in his hand. She quite understood why he was doing
+that, and watched him through tears. This was the last time he would be
+able to exercise that charm of which he was a little vain, since on all
+his few future days his intercourse with his fellows would be strictly
+specialised; so he was taking the opportunity. In watching him and the
+reflection of his magnificence in the fishermen's smiling subjugation,
+she was shot through by a pang of pride and exultation. Though the night
+should engulf Richard and Marion, the triumph was not with the night. In
+throwing in her lot with them and with the human race which is
+perpetually defeated, she was nevertheless choosing the side of
+victory....</p>
+
+<p>She leaned back against the slope and waited. This was a good place to
+wait. The call of the redshanks, the cloud shadows that moved over the
+marshes like the footprints of invisible presences, made her feel calm.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless her heart could not help but beat quick with fear. She
+wished that he would come and comfort her. But though he had left the
+fishermen he was not coming straight to her. He had climbed the sea-wall
+and was looking out to the east, to the open sea, over the country of
+the mud. He was thinking of Marion, and wondering where the tide had
+carried her. The inexorable womb was continuing to claim its own. She
+wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his
+obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in
+the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out
+before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the
+safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant
+demand.</p>
+
+<p>She sat and looked at the island, and wondered whether it was a son or
+daughter that waited for her there.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Judge, by Rebecca West
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Judge
+
+
+Author: Rebecca West
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 24, 2005  [eBook #16125]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+THE JUDGE
+
+by
+
+REBECCA WEST
+
+Author of "The Return Of The Soldier"
+
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+1922,
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+THE MEMORY OF
+
+MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+BOOK ONE
+
+
+
+
+     "Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of
+     the father."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I
+
+
+It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
+crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it
+as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The
+office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those
+decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of Edinburgh
+New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that opened just
+opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock
+and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the
+southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that
+strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it
+keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the
+cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy
+with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and
+remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms
+beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was
+ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched
+it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
+weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
+the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
+proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
+regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
+bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate
+and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly
+night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of
+dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a
+past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
+And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
+lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and
+said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
+monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
+Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
+of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
+shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
+appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
+look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
+shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
+myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
+the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
+make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
+am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
+succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
+they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
+to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
+themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
+spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
+part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one
+had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it
+its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough
+stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked
+desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was
+nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months
+since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by
+this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in
+Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult
+people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known
+as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.
+Less than that would do: just to see people's faces doing something else
+than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something
+else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got
+people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no
+part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had
+first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too
+comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert
+beginning.
+
+"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this
+rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere
+congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did
+the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time
+she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy
+of the twilight.
+
+Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those
+Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at
+school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville
+had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket
+with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
+they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
+steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
+squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
+delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
+the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
+was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
+and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
+known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
+come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
+terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
+Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
+and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
+flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
+be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
+keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
+terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
+rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
+slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
+the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
+unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
+for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
+after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
+off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
+salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
+channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
+protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
+face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
+his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
+Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the
+Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an
+Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
+disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
+get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
+gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
+fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
+Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
+into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
+to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
+round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
+death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
+the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.
+
+From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
+sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
+when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
+mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
+green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
+Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
+where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
+seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
+had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
+that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
+feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
+had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
+feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
+mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
+beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
+and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
+might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the
+landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed
+ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers
+of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset
+swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and
+lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would
+sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.
+
+She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would
+reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with
+a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to
+see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not
+come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.
+But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light
+again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of
+her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent
+that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in
+Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of
+inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk
+with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She
+thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the
+Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept
+them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay
+white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had
+seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak
+to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though
+there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out
+of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,
+constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild
+capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified
+by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and
+she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their
+nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose
+thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised
+it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching
+vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a
+Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord
+Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed
+out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish
+swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and
+the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the
+aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she
+was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had
+worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather
+pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer
+than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing
+in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had
+two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever
+girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen
+had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She
+was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin
+brown paper out of _Weldon's Fashions_ on to stuff that must not on any
+account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with
+the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her
+shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the
+good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her
+thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had
+always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,
+as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now
+dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in
+Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been
+hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
+wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
+among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
+cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
+wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
+spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
+hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used
+to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the
+housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered
+it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At
+the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these
+accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....
+
+The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly
+on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles
+against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their
+persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the
+representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised
+his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most
+impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,
+and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a
+high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing
+his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right
+of way, and Menzies & Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at
+Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"--that greeting by which Scot links himself
+to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.
+Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth
+he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that
+led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would
+prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the
+respected townsman. He had meant from the first to end with a paunch.
+But now wealth was inalienably his and Beauty could beckon him on no
+strange pilgrimages, his soul retraced its steps and contemplated this
+bright thing as an earth creature might creep to the mouth of its lair
+and blink at the sun. And there was more than that to it. He loved her.
+He had never had enough to do with pitiful things (his wife Elizabeth
+had been a banker's daughter), and this, child had come to him, that day
+in June, so white, so weak, so chilled to the bone, for all the summer
+heat, by her monstrous ill-usage....
+
+He said, "Nelly, will your mother be feared if you stop and take a few
+notes for Mr. Philip till eight? There is a chemist body coming through
+from the cordite works at Aberfay who can't come in the day but Saturday
+mornings, and you ken Mr. Philip's away to London for the week-end by
+the 8.30, so he's seeing him the night. Mr. Philip would be thankful if
+you'd stop."
+
+"I will so, Mr. James," said Ellen.
+
+"You're sure your mother'll not be feared?"
+
+"What way would my mother be feared," said Ellen, "and me seventeen
+past?"
+
+"There's many a lassie who's found being seventeen no protection from a
+wicked world." He emitted some great Burns-night chuckles, and kicked
+the fire to a blaze.
+
+She said sternly, "Take note, Mr. James, that I haven't done a hand's
+turn this hour or more, and that not for want of asking for work. Dear
+knows I have my hand on Mr. Morrison's door-knob half the day."
+
+Mr. James got up to go. "You're a fierce hussy, and mean to be a partner
+in the firm before you've done with us."
+
+"If I were a man I would be that."
+
+"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good
+man comes by."
+
+She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to
+defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,
+but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late. Sometimes
+she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an imaginary
+group of people whom she desired to be with--well-found people who would
+disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and beautiful results;
+who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid social life that had
+been previously nurtured by separate tender intimacies at hearths that
+were more than grates and fenders, in private picture-galleries with
+wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries adorned with big-nosed
+marble busts. She knew that that environment existed for she had seen
+it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League picnic in the grounds of an
+Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the secretary had taken her up to the
+house. They had waited in a high, long room with crossed swords on the
+walls wherever there were not bookshelves or the portraits of men and
+women so proud that they had not minded being painted plain, and there
+were French windows opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on
+an ornate balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many
+flowering trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so
+broad the intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered
+river-bed below. On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few
+unnecessary fires she had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity
+that the books lying on the great round table were mostly the drawings
+of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to
+them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the
+pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee
+that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society
+of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin
+like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and
+whose hair had no short ends round the neck.
+
+But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
+specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had
+chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and
+restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the
+plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh
+to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town
+she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there
+flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad
+in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a
+more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,
+than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a
+string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her
+neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody
+of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the
+Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the
+pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious
+stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down
+into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,
+but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it
+dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
+that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
+since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
+nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by
+the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the
+town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the
+English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade
+unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir
+Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a
+facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on
+the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested
+that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and
+dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of
+which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as
+inadequately represented by AEneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at
+the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the
+corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace
+ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked
+G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as
+noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the
+Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept
+undisguisedly.
+
+
+II
+
+"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the
+gas and seen that she was crying.
+
+At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to
+this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that
+she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards
+the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in
+it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her
+motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So
+she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"
+
+Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and
+bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way
+she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always
+felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at
+the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman
+whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the
+expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has
+forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,
+but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through
+an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,
+dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed
+by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his
+train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired
+himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on
+her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would
+presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite
+uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially
+conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man
+going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at
+her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it
+radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the
+sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was
+characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He
+had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a
+great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a
+tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day
+when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped
+towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It
+was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked
+her very much.
+
+He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what
+should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"
+
+She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of
+shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh
+accent and always carried an umbrella. He was so like hundreds of young
+men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an
+air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow,
+that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other
+representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the
+impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity,
+for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his
+half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So
+she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are
+awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he's a
+doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and
+going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy. I don't
+know what's the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and
+see new people. This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw
+the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit
+heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was near
+turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go
+hang!"
+
+They were both law-abiding people. They saw the gravity of her case.
+
+"Not that I want the Pentlands. Dear knows I love the place, but I want
+something more than those old hills. I want to go somewhere right far
+away. The sight of a map makes me sick. And then I hear a band play--not
+the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott's poetry, which I never
+could bear, but a band. I feel that if I followed it it would lead me
+somewhere that I would like to go. And the posters. There's one at the
+Waverley station--Venice. I could tear the thing down. Did you ever go
+to Italy, Mr. Philip?"
+
+"No. I go with the girls to Germany every summer."
+
+"My patience!" said Ellen bitterly. "The way the world is! The people
+who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany. And I--I'll die if I don't
+get away."
+
+"Och, I often feel like this," said Mr. Philip. "I just take a week-end
+off at a hydro."
+
+"A hydro!" snorted Ellen. "It's something more like the French
+Revolution I'm wanting. Something grand and coloured. Swords, and people
+being rescued, and things like that."
+
+"There's nothing going on like that now," he said stolidly, "and we
+ought to be thankful for it."
+
+"I know everything's over in Europe," she agreed sadly, "but there's
+revolutions in South America. I've read about them in Richard Harding
+Davis. Did ever you read him? Mind you, I'm not saying he's an artist,
+but the man has force. He makes you long to go."
+
+"A dirty place," said Mr. Philip.
+
+"What does that matter, where there's life? I feel--I feel"--she wrung
+her inky brown hands--"as if I should die if something didn't happen at
+once: something big, something that would bang out like the one o'clock
+gun up at the Castle. And nothing will. Nothing ever will!"
+
+"Och, well," he comforted her, "you're young yet, you know."
+
+"Young!" cried Ellen, and suddenly wept. If this was youth--!
+
+He bent down and played with the fire-irons. It was odd how he didn't
+want to go away, although she was in distress. "Some that's been in
+South America don't find it to their taste," he said. "The fellow that's
+coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he
+doesn't mean to go back."
+
+"Ah, how can he do that?" asked Ellen unsteadily. The tears she was too
+proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby. "Property in Rio de
+Janeiro! It's like being related to someone in 'Treasure Island.'"
+
+"'Treasure Island!' Imph!" He had seen his father draw Ellen often
+enough to know how to do it, though he himself would never have paid
+enough attention to her mental life to discover it. "You're struck on
+that Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn't so much. My Aunt Phemie was
+with him at Mr. Robert Thompson's school in Heriot Row, and she says he
+was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and
+gossiping with the cabmen on the rank. She wouldn't have a word to say
+to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when
+all the English were licking his boots. I'm not much on these writing
+chaps myself." He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he
+had disposed of art.
+
+"And who," asked Ellen, with temper, "might your Aunt Phemie be?
+There'll not be much in the papers when she's laid by in Trinity
+Cemetery, I'm thinking! The impairtinence of it! All these Edinburgh
+people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once,
+just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of
+Edinburgh!" She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak
+shutter.
+
+Mr. Philip chuckled. When a woman did anything for itself, and not for
+its effect on the male, it seemed to him a proof of her incapacity to
+look after herself, and he found incapacity in women exciting and
+endearing. He watched her with a hard attention that was his kind of
+tenderness, as she sat humped schoolgirlishly in her shapeless blue
+overall, averting her face from the light but attempting a proud pose,
+and keeping her grief between her teeth as an ostler chews a straw.
+
+"He had a good time, the way he travelled in France and the South Seas.
+But he deserved it. He wrote such lovely books. Ah," she said, listening
+to her own sombre interpretation of things as to sad music, "it isn't
+just chance that some people had adventures and others hadn't. One makes
+one's own fate. I have no fate because I'm too weak to make one." She
+looked down resentfully on her hands, that for all her present
+fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on
+her lap, and thought of Rachael Wing, who had so splendidly departed to
+London to go on the stage. "But it's hard to be punished just for what
+you are."
+
+He wondered whether, although she was the typist, there was not
+something rare about her. He could not compare her in this moment with
+his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for
+bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing
+to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with
+which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and
+violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have
+evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than
+that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they
+could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite
+distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she
+was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name
+that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of
+beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed
+for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform
+these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because
+human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. Suddenly he
+wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of
+naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying
+there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh
+his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a
+thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was
+but for participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so
+suspicious of her vividness that he felt furtive and red-eared while he
+searched in the purse of his experiences to find the coin that would
+admit him to her world. The search at first was vain, for most of them
+that he cared to remember were mere manifestations of the kind of
+qualities that are mentioned in testimonials. But presently he gripped
+the disappointment that would buy him her pity.
+
+He said, "I'm right sorry for you, Miss Melville. But you know ... We
+all have our troubles."
+
+She raised her eyebrows.
+
+"I wanted to go into the Navy."
+
+"You did? Would your father not let you?" She said it in her red-headed
+"My-word-if-I'd-been-there" way.
+
+"Aye, he would have liked it fine."
+
+"What was it then?" She leaned forward and almost crooned at him. "What
+was it then?"
+
+His speech became more clipped. "My eyes."
+
+"Your eyes!" she breathed. He suddenly became a person to her. "I never
+thought."
+
+"I'm as short-sighted as a bat."
+
+"They look all right." She frowned at them as though they were traitors.
+
+He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the
+University."
+
+She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how
+sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well,
+well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed
+to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw
+you capped."
+
+"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."
+
+"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw
+your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll
+be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when
+I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"
+
+"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He
+vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he
+asked.
+
+"I did at school--"
+
+"Don't you go to dances?"
+
+She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.
+
+With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he
+could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her
+brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come
+to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his
+own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible
+to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the
+daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,
+the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville
+unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he
+wished he could dance with her.
+
+Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances
+for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to
+enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and
+steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black
+ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about
+with in "La Dame aux Camelias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.
+Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which
+was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,
+just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without
+attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint
+meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse
+his private satisfaction. He was still aware that he was Mr. Philip of
+the firm, so he was not going to tell her that for two nights after he
+had heard the decision of the Medical Examiners he had cried himself to
+sleep, though he was fourteen past. But it was exquisite to know that if
+he had told her she would have been moved to some glorious gesture of
+pity. His imagination trembled at the thought of its glory as she turned
+to him with a benignity that was really good enough, and said
+diffidently, because her ambition was such a holy thing that she feared
+to speak of his: "Still, there are lots of things for you to do. I've
+heard...."
+
+He was kindly and indulgent. "What have you heard?"
+
+Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why,
+that you're going to stand for Parliament."
+
+"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.
+
+"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me
+something safe."
+
+"But what will you do?"
+
+He didn't follow.
+
+"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed
+with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to
+do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are
+you going to do?"
+
+"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence.
+"We've always been Liberals."
+
+"Ach! _Liberal!_" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep
+the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards
+by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed
+again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to
+discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on
+her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her
+clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to
+the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's
+heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.
+
+"It is so. I asked her to do a chop for me, so that I won't need to dine
+on the train...."
+
+"Mercy me! We'll see the fine cook she is!" She ran out to the landing
+(she had never known he was so nice). Mr. Philip found that her absence
+acted curiously as a relief to an excitement that was beginning to buzz
+in his head. Then she came back with the tray, her cheeks bright and her
+mouth pursed, for she and the caretaker had been sandpapering each
+other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil
+a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's
+not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father,
+who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the
+place."
+
+He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment.
+There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was
+putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that
+were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt
+absolutely right.
+
+"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when
+he lunches in?" she said.
+
+"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's
+room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him,
+fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
+Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt
+for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the
+bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went
+back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not
+be, as he put it, _infra dig_. And sure enough, when he entered the room
+a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got
+the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling
+himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and
+she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and
+a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."
+
+He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he
+said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join
+me...."
+
+She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing
+there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was
+behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face
+was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her
+mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping
+quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to
+something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will
+you have some Burgundy?"
+
+She was shocked. "Oh no!"
+
+He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although
+principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to
+it. Instead, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she
+oughtn't to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.
+
+He said, "But it's so pretty!" He could not imagine why he should have
+said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an
+argument that would weigh with her.
+
+She sighed as who makes a concession. "Oh yes, it's pretty!" And then,
+to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose. She was absorbed
+in the red beauty in his glass.
+
+It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing. "You'll have a
+glass?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"You'll surely have a taste?"
+
+"Ah, no--"
+
+"Just a drop...."
+
+Their eyes met. He was peering into her face so that he could be sure
+she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising
+her infinite pleasure.
+
+She muttered, "Well, just a drop!" and found herself laughing unhappily.
+
+He passed her his glass.
+
+"But what," she asked in dismay, "will you drink from?"
+
+Almost irritably he clicked his tongue, though he still smiled. "Drink
+it up! Drink it up!"
+
+She raised the glass to her lips and set her head back that the sin
+might have swift progress, expecting the loveliest thing, like an ice,
+but warm and very worldly; and informed with solemn pleasure too, for
+such colours are spilt on marble floors when the sun sets behind
+cathedral windows, such colours come into the mind when great music is
+played or some deep voice speaks Shakespeare....
+
+"Ach!" she screamed, and banged the glass down on the table. "It's
+horrid! It draws the mouth!" She started up and stood rubbing her
+knuckles into her cheeks and twisting her lips. She had never thought
+wine was like this. It was not so much a drink as a blow in the mouth.
+And yet somehow she felt ashamed of not liking it. "The matron at
+school used to give us something for toothache that was as bad as
+this!" she said peevishly, and tears stood in her eyes.
+
+Mr. Philip stood up, laughing. The crisis of his pleasure in persuading
+her to do the thing which she hadn't wanted to do was his joy that she
+hadn't liked it when she had done it. And suddenly one of the walls of
+the neat mental chamber in which he customarily stood fell in; by the
+light that streamed in upon him he perceived that his ecstasy was only
+just beginning. At last he knew what he wanted to do. With gusto he
+marked that Ellen too was conscious that the incident was not at its
+close, for she was still wringing her hands, though the taste of the
+wine must long have gone from her mouth, and was stammering miserably,
+"Well, if yon stuff's a temptation to any poor folk--!" Again he felt
+that their relationship was on a proper footing; he moved towards her,
+walking masterfully. Oh, it was going to be ecstasy.... There was a loud
+knocking at the outer door.
+
+
+III
+
+She forgot all about the wine at once, he was so very big. And he looked
+as though he had gold rings in his ears, although he hadn't; it was just
+part of his sea-going air.
+
+He looked at her very hard and said as though it hardly mattered, "I
+want to see Mr. James. My name's Yaverland."
+
+"Will you step inside?" said Ellen, with her best English accent. "Mr.
+Philip's expecting you." She was glad he had come, for he looked
+interesting, but she hoped he would not interrupt her warm comfortable
+occupation of mothering Mr. Philip. To keep that mood aglow in herself
+she stopped as they went along the passage and begged, "You'll not make
+him miss his train? He's away to London to-night. He should leave here
+on the very clap of eight."
+
+The stranger seemed, after a moment's silence, of which, since they
+stood in darkness, she could not read the cause, to lay aside a
+customary indifference for the sake of the gravity of the occasion. "Oh,
+certainly; he shall leave on the very clap of eight," he replied
+earnestly.
+
+He spoke without an accent and was most romantically dark. Ellen
+wondered whether Mr. Philip would like him--she had noticed that Mr.
+Philip didn't seem to fancy people who were very tall. And she perceived
+with consternation as they entered the room that he had suddenly been
+overtaken by one of his moods. He had taken up the tray and was trying
+to slip it into the cupboard, which he might have seen would never hold
+it, and in any case was a queer place for a tray, and stood there with
+it in his hands, brick-red and glowering at them. She was going to take
+it from him when he dunted it down on the window-seat with a clatter.
+"What for can he not go on with his good chop?" thought Ellen. "We're
+putting on grand company manners for this bit chemist body, surely," and
+she pulled forward a chair for the stranger and sat down in the corner
+with her note-book on her knee.
+
+"You're Mr. Yaverland?" said Mr. Philip, shooting his chin forward and
+squaring his shoulders, and looking as though his father were dead and
+he were the head of the firm.
+
+"I'm Richard Yaverland. Mr. Frank Gibson said you might be good enough
+to see to my affairs for me. I've got a letter from him...."
+
+Decidedly the man had an air. He slid the letter across the table as if
+he did not care in the least whether anybody ever picked it up and
+retreated into a courteous inattention. She felt a little cross at Mr.
+Philip for not showing that Edinburgh too understands the art of
+arrogance, for opening the letter so clumsily and omitting to say the
+nice friendly thing. Well, if he was put about it was his own fault for
+not going on with the chop, it being well known to all educated persons
+that one cannot work on an empty stomach. If this man would go soon she
+would run down to Mrs. Powell and get her to heat up the chop again. She
+eyed him anxiously to see if he looked the kind of person who left when
+one wanted him to, and found herself liking him for the way he slouched
+in his chair, as though he wanted to mitigate as much as possible his
+terrifying strength and immensity. What for did a fine man like him help
+to make cordite, the material of militarism, which is the curse of the
+nations? She wished he could have heard R.J. Campbell speak on peace the
+other night at the Synod Hall; it was fine. But probably he was a
+Conservative, for these big men were often unprogressive. She examined
+him carefully out of the corner of her eye to estimate the chances of
+his being brought into the fold of reform by properly selected oratory.
+That at least was the character of contemplation she intended, but
+though she was so young that she believed the enjoyment of any sensory
+impression sheer waste unless it was popped into the mental stockpot and
+made the basis of some sustaining moral soup, she found herself just
+looking at him. His black hair lay in streaks and rings on his rain-wet
+forehead and gave him an abandoned and magical air, like the ghost of a
+drowned man risen for revelry; his dark gold skin told a traveller's
+tale of far-off pleasurable weather; and the bare hand that lay on his
+knee was patterned like a snake's belly with brown marks, doubtless the
+stains of his occupation; and his face was marked with an expression
+that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she
+could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not
+hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and
+yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent
+demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly
+satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a
+drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the
+controlled but embarrassed movements of a highly-bred animal approached
+by a stranger, that he knew she was watching him, and she took her gaze
+away. But she had to look again, just to confirm her feeling that
+however fanciful she might be about him his appearance would always give
+some further food for her imagination; and presently, for though she was
+the least vain person in the world she was the most egotistical, began
+to compare the large correctness of his features with the less academic
+spontaneity of her own. "Lord! Why has everybody but me got a straight
+nose!" she exclaimed to herself. "But it's all blethers to think that an
+indented chin means character. How can a dunt in your bone have anything
+to do with your mind?" She rubbed her own chin, which was a little white
+ball, and pushed it forward, glowering at his great jaw. Then her
+examination ended. She noticed that all over his upper lip and chin
+there was a faint bluish bloom, as if he had shaved closely and
+recently but the strong hair was already pressing through again. That
+disgusted her, although she reminded herself that he could not help it,
+that that was the way he was made. "There's something awful like an
+animal about a man," she thought, and shivered.
+
+"Och, aye!" said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset,
+for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by
+exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred
+in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some
+well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property
+in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it
+appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five
+years' lease, which had nearly expired. There was no likelihood of Capel
+requiring any extension of this lease, for he was going back to the
+States. So now Yaverland wanted to sell it. There ought to be no trouble
+in finding a buyer, for it was a famous house. "Everybody in Rio knows
+the Villa Miraflores," he said. She gasped at the name and wrote it in
+longhand; to compress such deliciousness into shorthand would have been
+sacrilege. After that she listened more eagerly to his voice, which she
+perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with
+suppressed laughter. The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a
+straight face than he found in using the flat phrase. And as she
+gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his
+speech slipped the business leash. There were hedges of geranium and
+poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless
+palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the
+courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many
+fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of
+precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house
+was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a
+_rastaqouere_. "Mhm," said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral
+slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined
+_rastaqouere_ to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost. She would have
+laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still
+upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he
+would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable
+expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had
+noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and
+cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been "done."
+
+But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland's answer.
+He hadn't the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa. It happened
+this way. He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk! Tchk!" said Mr.
+Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his
+waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the
+atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt
+no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to
+try to show that he wasn't a Jew. Ellen hated him for that. She believed
+in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as
+a propagandist measure. And then he had remembered that a friend of his,
+de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move. Even
+Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he'd given it plenty of fun.
+There had been great times at the villa. His phrases, which seemed to
+have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine
+on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale's snout, and
+hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in
+his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this
+delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that
+time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money
+from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the
+servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a
+sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the
+dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing
+white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the
+Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of
+birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he
+so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and
+were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a
+good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed
+by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment,
+that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about
+somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she
+herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect
+crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a
+piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their
+inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to
+honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed
+towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all
+respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific
+manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "Tits,
+tits, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the
+woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the
+impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers
+Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were,
+as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by
+the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by
+intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the
+cosmic process. It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the
+truth....
+
+Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had
+knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had
+posted to his agents without reading. He had only the vaguest idea how
+much money had changed hands. Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled
+knowingly, "Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in
+Scotland," and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of
+the property: the orange grove, for instance. At that Yaverland was
+silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered
+insolence that he couldn't see why he should, since he wasn't a
+marmalade fancier. "Besides, that's an impossible proposition. It's like
+selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium
+bed...." In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation
+of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed
+under a tooth while one was eating a good cake. She was disturbed and
+wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy
+by talking like that. And the reflection came to her that it would be
+sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever,
+that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected
+of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way. But it
+struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose
+that he would be interested. His talk was in the nature of a monologue.
+He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.
+
+Still, he was wonderful. She did not take it as warning of any coldness
+or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a
+human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are
+pictures too fine for private ownership. Just then he was being
+particularly fine in an exciting way. He sat up very straight, flung out
+his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have
+no more to do with this house. So might a conqueror speak of a city he
+was weary of looting. He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr.
+Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the
+Rio agents. "It's all here," he said, and took from his pocket-book a
+packet of letters. "They hold the title-deeds and you'll see how things
+are getting on with the deal. But I suppose the language will be a
+difficulty. I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on
+the correspondence?"
+
+"Och, we can send out to a translator--"
+
+A tingling ran through Ellen's veins. The men's words, uttered on one
+side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had
+suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life. She had previsioned many
+moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled
+world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely
+to arrive. It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river
+just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the
+countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for
+women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim. It was
+improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just
+when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women
+being what it is, she should be given a high military command. But there
+had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her
+obscurity. It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the
+prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm
+and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.
+For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth
+in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering
+innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on
+the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after
+being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a
+gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.
+
+"Mr. Philip," she said.
+
+Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark
+glance on her.
+
+"Mr. Philip," she said. He looked across at her with a blankness she
+took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at
+Skerry's. I took a first-class certificate. Maybe I could manage the
+letters?"
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Yaverland explosively. He appeared to be about to make
+some objection, and then he bit back the speech that was already in his
+mouth. And as he tried to find other words the beauty of her body caught
+his attention. It was, as it happened, very visible at that moment. The
+fulness of her overall had fallen to one side as she sat on the high
+stool, and so that linen was tightly wrapped about her, disclosing that
+she was made like a delicate fleet beast; in the valley between her high
+small breasts there lay a shadow, which grew greater when she breathed
+deeply. He looked at her with the dispassionateness which comes to men
+who have lived much in countries where nakedness offers itself unashamed
+to the sunlight, and said to himself, "I should like to see her run." He
+knew that a body like this must possess an infinite capacity for
+physical pleasure, that to her mere walking would give more joy than
+others find in dancing. And then he raised his eyes to her face and was
+sad. For sufficient reasons he was very sensitive to the tragedies of
+women, and he knew it was a tragedy that such a face should surmount
+such a body. For her body would imprison her in soft places: she would
+be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than
+births. But her face was haggard, in spite of its youth, with appetite
+for travel in the hard places of the world, for the adventures and
+achievements that are the birthright of any man. "It's rotten luck to be
+a girl," he thought. "If she were a boy I could get her a job at Rio....
+Lord, she has lovely hair!" He perceived sharply that he was not likely
+to be of any more use to her than most men would. All he could do would
+be to avert the humiliation which the moment seemed likely to bring down
+on her.
+
+"Oh, this is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people
+studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful
+too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a
+marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too
+manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the
+reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded
+himself. "It's the language to learn," he said aloud. "It's the language
+of the future. Ever been in Spain, Mr. James?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Philip, "but I was thinking of going there--or mebbe
+Italy--ma Easter holidays." Ellen smiled brilliantly at him, for she
+knew that he had had no such thought till that evening's talk with her;
+she had converted him to a romantic. He caught her eye, only to glare
+coldly into the centre of her smile.
+
+It was Yaverland's opportunity, for he had spent two years as chemist at
+the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of
+talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly
+literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain,
+but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of
+social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance
+them. "The mines are Baird's, you know--Sir Milne Baird; it's a Glasgow
+firm...." "Mhm," said Mr. Philip, "I know who you mean." Detestable,
+thought Yaverland, this Scotch locution which implies that one has made
+a vague or incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence
+of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself
+suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its
+disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater
+willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the
+commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their
+own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by
+Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general,
+which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of
+Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.
+Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad
+political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the
+national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over
+the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.)
+Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few
+difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was
+sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who,
+though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better
+by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself
+Algodonales on the map and calls itself Aooae.
+
+He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.
+
+It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by
+forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,
+as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and
+a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her
+mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed
+through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to
+Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a
+dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt
+attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks
+deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,
+describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow
+decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled
+with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the
+Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius
+Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women
+that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered
+by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He
+was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase
+that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such
+things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,
+advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip
+could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere
+foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the
+country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows
+what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks
+and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and
+carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness passed
+over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as
+though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had
+scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes
+became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader
+streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the
+tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became
+charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The
+people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating
+themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or
+cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.
+
+He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of
+loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had
+revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to
+the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and
+had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any
+of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and
+the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to
+match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of
+being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone
+into a cafe and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a
+wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of
+an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who
+had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not
+lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night,
+forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit
+here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl
+who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and
+famined...."
+
+But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay
+account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had
+framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily
+pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the
+long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland
+that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding
+path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly
+in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a
+forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a
+Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and
+asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at
+another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their
+dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers
+of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time there was
+trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was
+treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the
+rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the
+many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to
+the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its
+snowy crest. Ah, such a country!
+
+He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged
+bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation
+settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely
+they're crool. Bullfights and that--"
+
+He could not let that pass. "You don't understand. It's different over
+there."
+
+"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.
+Philip.
+
+"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in
+space...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much
+crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of
+view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other
+and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's
+life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there were the
+horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from
+the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that
+gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,
+rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it
+wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far
+back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified,
+with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your
+unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of
+a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its
+governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence
+till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't
+attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our
+civilisation.
+
+Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the
+experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his
+magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and
+yet was as substantial as any man of action.
+
+Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of
+primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest
+swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The
+echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching
+sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it
+wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found
+his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and
+eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions
+were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy
+over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp
+fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,
+envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he
+was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be
+the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some
+night the position might not be reversed--that it would not be he who
+stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some
+happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That
+was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even
+now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;
+and Ellen thrilled to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to
+a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to
+persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern
+history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the
+visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and
+the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling
+lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times
+existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive
+man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the
+bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were
+the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much
+decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of
+meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and
+dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't
+see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by
+the number of people who never saw.
+
+"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get
+over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."
+
+Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and
+perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk
+in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is
+buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread
+out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.
+Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,
+thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for
+themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they
+repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had
+responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't
+perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this
+fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that
+all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a
+national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns
+sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the
+British Empire--keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and
+blows to mules and dogs.
+
+It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new
+that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He could give them another
+illustration of that. He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a
+flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo--"that's a street,"
+he interjected towards Ellen, "called after a statesman they
+assassinated, they don't quite know why." In the flat there lodged a
+priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning,
+as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an
+automobile and took him away for an hour. Presently he was told the
+story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had
+listened to it as one didn't often listen to twice-told tales, for it
+was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra
+Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the
+Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the
+roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode. The man in the
+automobile had lost his wife. He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he
+had gone through a good deal to get her. When he first met her she was
+another man's wife. He said nothing to her then, but presently the way
+that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the
+Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and
+her husband called him out. The duel was fought on some sandy flat down
+by the river, and the husband was killed. It was given out that he had
+been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who
+had killed him. In another year she was dead of fever. Her husband gave
+great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house
+where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable
+gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad. When he returned
+he went back to live in that house, but now no one ever entered it
+except the priest; and he went not for any social purpose, but to say
+Mass over the woman's bed, which her husband had turned into an altar.
+Every day those two said Mass at that bed, though it was five years
+since she had died. That was a queer enough story for the present day,
+with its woman won by bloodshed and the long unassuagable grief of the
+lover and the resort to religion that struck us as irreverent because it
+was so utterly believing; it might have come out of the Decameron. But
+the last touch of wildness was added by the identity of the man in the
+automobile. For he was the Marquis d'Italica, the finest Spanish
+aviator, a man not only of the mediaeval courage one might have guessed
+from the story, but also of the most modern wit about machines....
+
+Yaverland bit his lip suddenly. He had told the story without shame, for
+he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the
+bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman's
+bed may sometimes be an altar. But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and
+his ears were red. Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.
+
+For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen. "I had forgotten
+she was a girl," he thought miserably. "I thought of nothing but how
+keen she is on Spain. I don't know how girls feel about things...." But
+she was sitting warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at
+a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder. She had
+liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made
+her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her
+sex always did. But the rest she had thought lovely. It was a beautiful
+idea of the Marquis's to turn the bed into an altar. Probably he had
+often gone into his wife's room to kiss her good-night. She saw a narrow
+iron bedstead such as she herself slept in, a face half hidden by the
+black hair flung wide across the pillow, a body bent like a bow under
+the bedclothes; for she herself still curled up at nights as dogs and
+children do; and the Marquis, whom she pictured as carrying a robin's
+egg blue enamelled candlestick like the one she always carried up to her
+room, kneeling down and kissing his wife very gently lest she should
+awake. Love must be a great compensation to those who have not political
+ambitions. She became aware that Yaverland's eyes were upon her, and she
+slowly smiled, reluctantly unveiling her good will to him. It again
+appeared to him that the world was a place in which one could be at
+one's ease without disgrace.
+
+He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was
+gripping Mr. Philip's hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his
+face. "Ah, there's one thing," he said quite lightly, though the vein
+down the middle of his forehead had darkened. "You see from those
+letters that a Senor Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house.
+He's not to have it. Do you understand? Not at any price."
+
+The effect of this restriction, made obviously at the behest of some
+deep passion, was to make him suddenly sinister. They gazed at him as
+though he had revealed that he carried arms. But Ellen remembered
+business again.
+
+"Those letters," she reminded Mr. Philip, "had I not better read them
+over before Mr. Yaverland goes?"
+
+Yaverland caught his breath, then spoke off-handedly. "You're
+forgetting. They don't speak Spanish in Brazil, but Portuguese." And
+added confidentially, "Of course you were thinking of the Argentine."
+
+She was as hurt by the revelation of this vast breach in her omniscience
+as the bright twang of knowingness in her voice had told him she would
+be.
+
+"Yes," she said unsteadily, "I was thinking of the Argentine."
+
+He shook hands with Mr. Philip, and she took him down the corridor to
+the door. She blinked back her tears as he stood at the head of the
+stair and put up his collar with those strange hands that were speckled
+like a snake's belly, for it seemed a waste, like staying indoors when
+the menagerie procession is going round the town, to let anything so
+unusual go away without seeing as much of it as possible. Then she
+remembered the thing that she had wanted to say in the other room, and
+wondered if it would be bold to speak, and finally remarked in a voice
+disagreeable with shyness, "The people up on the Pentland Hills use that
+word you said was in Shakespeare. Snow-broth. When the hill-streams run
+full after the melting of the snows, that's snow-broth."
+
+He liked women who were interested in queer-shaped fragments of fact,
+for they reminded him of his mother. He took pains to become animated at
+her news.
+
+"They do, they do!" Ellen assured him, pleased by his response. "And
+they say 'hit' for 'it,' which is Anglo-Saxon."
+
+He noticed that her overall, which she was growing out of, fitted
+tightly on her over-thin shoulders and showed how their line was spoilt
+by the deep dip of the clavicle, and wondered why that imperfection
+should make her more real to him than she had been when he had thought
+her wholly beautiful. Again he became aware of her discontent with her
+surroundings, which had exerted on her personality nothing of the
+weakening effect of despair, since it sprang from such a rich content
+with the universe, such a confident faith that the supremest beauty she
+could imagine existed somewhere and would satisfy her if only she could
+get at it. He said, with no motive but to confirm her belief that the
+world was full of interest, "You must go on with your Spanish, you know.
+Don't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine
+stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to
+whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young
+girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who
+had landed on his feet.
+
+"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.
+
+He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in
+something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She
+attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first
+excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in
+bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village
+street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the
+ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold
+rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining
+with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a
+yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not
+imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and
+long scrolls.
+
+Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a
+second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on
+his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to
+lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not
+half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up
+your chop, if you'll wait."
+
+"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.
+
+She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and
+winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days
+before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her
+departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes
+came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was
+watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a
+conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was
+standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though
+he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not
+step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was
+set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew
+what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the
+door. Because the thing that he had meant to do seemed foul when he
+looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,
+he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to
+have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that
+had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always
+thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,
+dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with
+such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which
+she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they
+became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until
+it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him
+stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than
+the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was
+making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his
+degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and
+the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then
+she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this
+trouble she had brought on him.
+
+When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.
+Yaverland's a most interesting man."
+
+He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for
+his heart was making him very uncomfortable. He wished some crude
+gesture, some single ugly word, would do it. "You thought him an
+interesting man?" he asked naggingly. "You don't surprise me. It was a
+bit too plain you thought so. I'll thank you not to be so forward with a
+client again. It'll give the office a bad name. And chatting at the door
+like that!"
+
+He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the
+hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the
+needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he
+placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for
+emergencies, a book of court plaster.
+
+"I'm sure I'll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville," he
+said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of
+the door. "Good night."
+
+
+IV
+
+She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.
+
+"It can't hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She
+wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of
+Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered
+the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's
+blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip
+can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm
+a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world
+except the enfranchisement of women and getting on...."
+
+She felt better. "There's nothing in life you can't get the better of by
+thinking about it," she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes
+with her handkerchief. She could easily pass off her tearstains as the
+marks of a bad cold. "It's a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body's
+affliction, but sometimes I'm glad mother's so short-sighted.
+
+"He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how," she thought,
+with a sudden renewal of rage. "Now I should have minded awful if he had
+noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish. It was a
+mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine." But
+indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure
+that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent. She began to
+recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against
+a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a
+marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through
+a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of
+solidification of a sunset. Dreamily she moved to the little house in
+the corner....
+
+It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were
+the man of the house.
+
+"Mercy, Ellen, you're late! I was getting feared!" cried her mother, who
+had gone to the kitchen to boil up the cocoa when she heard the key in
+the lock. She liked that sound. Ellen thought herself a wonderful new
+sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been
+surprised if she had known how many of her stern-browed ambitions, how
+much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own
+soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend
+her daughter was a son.
+
+"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with
+masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+I
+
+
+Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold _Votes for Women_ in Princes Street,
+and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green
+poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.
+This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for
+it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should
+be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been
+sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as
+there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady
+Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many
+bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had
+lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty
+she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a
+careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the
+passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to
+tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.
+For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds,
+which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the
+black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the
+dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic
+shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because
+the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and
+made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to
+appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the
+people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her
+silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her
+by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the
+height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,
+if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous
+causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous
+old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had
+been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and
+her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel
+women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for
+personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments
+irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung
+scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian
+environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the
+smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant
+ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought
+Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to
+do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."
+
+She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it
+with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're
+mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her
+teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got
+thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad
+as you, my dear, thinking you look like Phyllis Dare with yon wee, wee
+pigtail. You evidently haven't realised that a Scotch girl can't help
+looking sensible. That graceful butterfly frivolity that comes so easy
+to the English, and, I've haird, the French, is not for us. I think it's
+something about our ankles that prevents us." She looked at the girl's
+feet, said "Ay!" in a manner that hinted that they confirmed her theory,
+and turned away, remarking over her shoulder, "Mind you, I admire your
+spirit, setting out to look like one of these light English actresses
+when your name's Davidina Todd." The wind was trying to tear the poster
+from the cord that held it to her waist, the cold was making her sniff,
+and as she gave her back to this flimsy little fool she caught sight of
+a minister standing a yard or two away and giggling "Tee hee!" at her.
+It was too much. She darted down on him. "Are you not Mr. Hunter of the
+Middleton Place United Free Church?" she asked, making her voice sound
+soft and cuddly.
+
+He wiped the facetiousness from his face and assented with a polite
+bob. Perhaps she was the daughter of an elder. Quite nice people were
+taking up this nonsense.
+
+"I heard you preach last Sunday," she said, glowing with interest. He
+began to look coy. Then her voice changed to something colder than the
+wind. "The most lamentable sairmon I ever listened to. Neither lairning
+nor inspiration. And a _read_ sairmon, too."
+
+As his black back threaded through the traffic remorse fell upon her.
+"Here's an opportunity for doing quiet, uncomplaining service to the
+Cause," she reproached herself, "and I'm turning it into a fair picnic
+for my tongue." Everyone was rubbish, and she herself was no exception.
+Her hair was nearly down. And she had to stay there for another hour.
+
+But she determined to endure it; and Richard Yaverland, who afar off had
+formed the intention of stopping and speaking to the girl with the
+poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and
+romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on
+the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come
+into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had
+distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh.
+He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his
+emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being
+and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his
+desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for
+their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it
+was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does
+not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was
+not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and
+kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but
+powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to
+himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying.
+Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I
+must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until
+he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.
+
+And Ellen thought, "Why, here is the big man who has been in Spain and
+South America and has the queer stains on his hands! How big he is, and
+dark! He looks like a king among these other people. And how wonderful
+his eyes are! He is miles away from here, seeing some distant beautiful
+thing. Perhaps that mountainside he told us about where the reflection
+of the sky is like a purple shadow on the snow. A poet must look like
+that when he is thinking of a poem. But--but--if he keeps on staring up
+there he won't see me and buy a paper. I should like to interest him in
+the Cause. And I daren't speak to him." She flushed. Though Mr. Philip's
+claw had not done all the hurt it hoped, it had yet mauled its victim
+cruelly. "That would look bold."
+
+But in the nick of time his eyes fell on her. He gave a start of
+surprise and said in his kind, insolent voice:
+
+"Good morning. So you're a Suffragette."
+
+She was pleased to be publicly recognised by such a splendid person, and
+answered shyly; but caught a glint in his eyes which reminded her that
+she wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of
+the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it
+possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not
+have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had
+given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her
+brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with
+such a pliable profile.
+
+"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the
+change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I
+think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all
+these blighters going by."
+
+"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one
+hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for
+the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark
+Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But
+you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally
+clear and audible speakers. Women are."
+
+"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair,
+or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"
+
+"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff
+that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never
+admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she
+was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment
+someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a
+schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.
+But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen
+past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."
+
+"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded
+it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better
+write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow
+and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of
+person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket
+they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she
+wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get
+it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that
+vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find
+out about this little girl--I who don't care a damn about anything or
+anybody?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she
+had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her
+signature. Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most
+beautiful people who have ever lived. It was like climbing to a towered
+castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called
+"Seaview." She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey
+weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night
+before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female
+creature would have worn. But she had looked even younger then; he
+remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and
+receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a
+party. It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had
+been having in that dreary office could possibly be. And into the pretty
+print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising
+through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little
+solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the
+beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and
+twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he
+had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.
+He looked at her sharply and said to himself: "I wonder...."
+
+Oh, surely not! The note of her face was pure expectancy. As yet she had
+come upon nothing fundamental of any kind. He had no prepossessions in
+favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same
+class as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved. He would have hated
+this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.
+
+There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any
+longer. "Good-bye; I hope I'll see you at the meeting," he said; and
+then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, "and
+look after my villa for me."
+
+"Yes, we'll do that," she said competently, and looked after him with
+smiling eyes. "Oh, he looks most adventurous!" she thought. "I wonder,
+now, if he's ever killed a man?"
+
+
+II
+
+"Is my frock hooked up all the way down?" wondered Ellen, as she stood
+with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall. "Not that I care a button
+about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry
+was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind,
+for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings. She had
+taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling
+up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss
+Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had
+spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her
+grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of
+love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the
+hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and
+up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near
+unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people
+were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as
+herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic
+women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by
+sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were
+making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl's
+penknife and more like a soldier's sword. "I'm being a politikon Zoon!"
+she boasted to herself. She had always liked the expression when she
+read it in _The Scotsman_ Leaders.
+
+And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause
+and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their
+way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a
+viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered
+her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of
+the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a
+heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of
+dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark
+Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved
+swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily
+choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous
+of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to
+say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone
+might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there
+was no doing anything for them.
+
+But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances
+on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a
+peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a
+heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring
+at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against
+his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent
+interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the
+woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of
+the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took
+his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like
+him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."
+
+She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his
+neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and
+oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes
+maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the
+platform. "How long he is looking at them!" she said to herself
+presently. "No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle. I believe such
+men are very susceptible to beautiful women. I hope," she continued with
+sudden bitterness, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will
+take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at
+Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he
+went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed
+otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which
+made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet
+when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his
+attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with
+panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes. She did not permit herself
+irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not
+terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and
+stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently: "What have I to do
+with this man? I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.
+Then I suppose I will have to use them as pawns in my political and
+financial intrigues."
+
+Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman's
+speech. Dr. Munro had just sat down. Her sensible square face looked red
+and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and
+from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what
+she had been doing. This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen,
+who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic
+of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its
+affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the
+bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and
+untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality
+but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet
+this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which
+nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn
+a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered
+activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"
+she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the
+grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the
+doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner
+all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a
+community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly
+be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was
+content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her
+perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous
+and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend
+with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought,
+and her heart turned over with fear.
+
+But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain
+against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very
+far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends
+in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with
+its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its
+shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a
+sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great
+music. Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind
+bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses
+hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying--for
+already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from
+the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her
+followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the
+hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were
+imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and
+how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells,
+huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats, clad in nothing but
+coarse vests because they would not wear the convict clothes, breathing
+the foul sewage-tainted air for all but that hour when they were carried
+up to the cell where the doctor and the wardresses waited to bind and
+gag them and ram the long feeding-tube down into their bodies. This they
+had endured for six weeks, and would for six weeks more. She spoke with
+a proud reticence as to her sufferings, about her recent sojourn in
+Holloway, from which she had gained release by hunger-striking a
+fortnight before.
+
+"Ah, I could die for her!" cried Ellen to herself, wet-eyed with
+loyalty. "If only it weren't for mother I'd go to prison to-morrow." Her
+love could hardly bear it when Mrs. Ormiston went on, restrained rage
+freezing her words, to indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her
+and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous
+education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional
+distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the
+meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind
+her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things
+Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life
+with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views
+confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt
+an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had
+always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were
+sombre, such as deep symphonies of an orchestra, the black range and
+white scaurs of the Pentland Hills against the south horizon, the idea
+that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns
+cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of
+life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the
+field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in
+eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she
+rapturously recognised that same authentic quality.
+
+But what good was it if one woman had something of the dignity of nature
+and art? Everybody knew that the world was beautiful. She sent her mind
+out from the hall to walk in the night, which was not wet, yet had a
+bloom of rain in the air, so that the lights shone with a plumy beam and
+all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock
+was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the
+mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the
+lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that
+would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass
+that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end
+of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's
+pictures--the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a
+fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking
+in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made
+loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at
+the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong
+hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there
+was no question!
+
+But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly
+parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could
+hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the
+Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure
+motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face
+about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like
+that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was
+seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.
+Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride
+up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that
+shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting
+policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could
+not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in
+geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat
+brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and
+she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her
+yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at
+the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones
+lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen
+had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John
+Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anaemia or
+spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within
+themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of
+hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of
+actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to
+assert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts
+were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling
+kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater
+earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of
+establishing their sex. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type,
+who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political
+abasement before the male, a new way of calling attention to what
+otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would
+detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the
+Government and the majority of respectable citizens were on the side of
+this pale, sickly, mad young woman against the brave, beautiful Mrs.
+Ormiston. People were horrible.
+
+And there was Mr. Philip.
+
+Oh, why had she thought of him? All the time that she had been in the
+hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her
+untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for
+her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the
+accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not
+then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that
+anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers
+sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror
+of the event, called massacres. She had begun to know better late last
+Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room after taking down
+some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick,
+ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr.
+Mactavish James's desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom
+that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before
+she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.
+
+"Have you come straight off the train?" it was in her mind to say. "Will
+I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?" But he looked strange. The
+driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the
+shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was
+performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and
+hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his
+breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and
+has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved,
+and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead
+to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the
+clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle
+that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and
+whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one,
+and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this
+accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity,
+and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making
+advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.
+
+"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else
+for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the
+umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously,
+and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no
+need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of
+hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could
+not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit
+he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top
+window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a
+cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her
+alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual
+refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and
+ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's
+all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward space of silence
+fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are
+you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in
+typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness
+with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.
+Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always
+made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a
+gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and
+drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made
+him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and
+set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you,
+lassie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her
+shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be
+well spoken of. But there was worse than that--something so bad that she
+would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought
+of it in a harsh, short sentence. _"When Mr. Morrison went out of the
+room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."_
+Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip
+being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I
+will kill him...."
+
+There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had
+finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.
+Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of
+the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.
+Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped,
+but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the
+advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in
+the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call
+sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced
+that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.
+Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument
+between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an
+indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment
+against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried
+mothers.
+
+Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of
+unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of
+woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that
+she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl
+and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had
+only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And
+she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There
+was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the
+world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,
+that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them
+for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she
+came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the
+garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves
+and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's
+houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.
+Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for
+somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was
+the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in
+pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she
+would not know.
+
+Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna
+McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair
+and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about
+married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had
+broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and grass and
+daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by
+the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's
+books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words
+on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was
+wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering
+had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her
+hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove
+her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But
+there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret
+with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was leaning against
+the wall in that dark place beyond the window laughing at her, partly
+because she was such a wee ninny not to know, and partly because when
+she did know the truth there would be something about it which would
+humiliate her. She cast down her eyes and stared at the floor so that
+none might see how close she was to tears. She was a silly weak thing
+that would always feel like a bairn on its first day at school; she was
+being tormented by Mr. Philip. Even the very facts of life had been
+planned to hurt her.
+
+Oh, to be like that man from Rio! It was his splendid fate to be made
+tall and royal, to be the natural commander of all men from the moment
+that he ceased to be a child. He could captain his ship through the
+steepest seas and fight the pirate frigate till there was nothing
+between him and the sunset but a few men clinging to planks and a
+shot-torn black flag floating on the waves like a rag of seaweed. For
+rest he would steer to small islands, where singing birds would fly out
+of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run
+aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long,
+loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while
+he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed;
+at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there
+would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful
+kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away
+from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died
+there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and
+princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern
+face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now
+they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of
+course, but it was a joy to think of him.
+
+She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.
+
+
+III
+
+There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his
+motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this
+ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors
+in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas
+made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd;
+that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was
+coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he
+was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure
+had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the
+half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen
+Melville. The coarse light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that
+it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was
+wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the
+eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had
+remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as
+a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her
+profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was
+very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile
+than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was
+something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him
+feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the
+spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other
+beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.
+
+The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping
+reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found
+that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman
+with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand
+and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some glasses which
+manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not
+beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had
+she, like most plain women, some scrap of comeliness, slender ankles or
+small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and
+believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious
+pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been
+stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the
+ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far
+forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how
+vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking--as just for the moment that
+the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he
+certainly had thought--that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the
+discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.
+The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a
+cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch
+face--the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the
+world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was
+sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the
+_Gondomar_, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that
+medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from
+Mukden. Harsh things she was saying--harsh things about the decent
+Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London
+for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being
+shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for
+solicitation.
+
+He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the
+Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the
+world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian
+man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the
+celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same
+stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.
+For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag
+to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at
+their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of
+pity.
+
+The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because
+she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection
+of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her
+beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the
+audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in
+which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather
+than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways
+that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly
+and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their
+intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to
+fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict
+with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then
+they should wear soft lustrous dresses that were good to look at and
+touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was
+neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had
+the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this
+irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,
+half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed
+on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey
+suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was
+vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She
+was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their
+beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from
+the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.
+She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made
+a garden of his soul, had any right to be.
+
+That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at
+grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of
+shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of
+the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as
+she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under
+her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him
+haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he
+nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught
+her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious
+swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.
+
+But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention
+to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way
+she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged
+body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his
+mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was
+one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern
+for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often
+thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by
+those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the
+chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting
+their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the
+tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening
+to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.
+
+The resemblance went no further than this spiritual attitude, for this
+woman was second-rate stuff. Her beauty was somehow shoddy, her purple
+gown the kind of garment that a clairvoyant might have worn, her
+movements had the used quality of photographers' poses. Publicity had
+not been able to change the substance of the precious metal of her soul,
+but it had tarnished it beyond all remedy. She alluded presently to her
+preposterously-named daughters, Brynhild, Melissa and Guendolen, and he
+was reminded of a French family of musicians with whom he had travelled
+on the steamer between Rio and Sao Paulo, a double-chinned swarthy
+Madame and her three daughters, Celine, Roxane and Juliette, who sat
+about on deck nursing musical instruments tied with grubby scarlet
+ribbons, silent and dispirited, as though they were so addicted to
+public appearance that they found their private hours an embarrassment.
+But he remembered with a prick of compunction that they had made
+excellent music; and that, after all, was their business in life. So
+with the Ormistons. In the pursuit of liberty they had inadvertently
+become a troupe; but they had fought like lions. And they were giving
+the young that guarantee that life is really as fine as storybooks say,
+which can only be given by contemporary heroism. Little Ellen Melville,
+on the other side of the hall, was lifting the most wonderful face all
+fierce and glowing with hero-worship. "That's how I used to feel about
+Old Man Guthrie of the _Gondomar_ when I was seventeen," he thought.
+"It's a good age...."
+
+When he was seventeen.... He was not at all sure that those three years
+he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life. It came back to
+him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the
+ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on
+the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open
+sea. The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the
+sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a
+brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a
+sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the
+southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were
+at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen's dreams of land,
+but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith
+Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the
+flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.
+He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the
+island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the
+storms should take him. There were the four crumbling grey towers of
+Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint
+spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling
+white speck which he knew to be his father's tomb. He hated that he
+should be able to see it even from here. All his life that mausoleum had
+enraged him. He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have
+died before his son was a man. He suspected him of creeping into his
+coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his
+son's revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive
+tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.
+
+Eastward, a few fields' length along the ridge, was the belvedere on his
+father's estate. He had not looked at it for years, but from here it was
+so little like itself that he could bear to let his eyes dwell on it. It
+was built at the fore of a crescent-shaped plantation on the brow of the
+hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like
+great green wings spread by a small white bird. And eastward yet a mile
+or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of
+Yaverland's End. Under that thatch was his mother. She would be asleep
+now. Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn. With a
+constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now,
+lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head
+and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn
+across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.
+Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead. At the picture
+he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for
+having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid
+sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on
+the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors. Then he
+recognised the necessity of this adventure. It was his duty to her to go
+out into the world and do great things. He had said so very definitely
+to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.
+So that boy, thirteen years before....
+
+He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to
+do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had
+done nothing and was nothing. He saw his soul as something detached from
+his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and
+acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in
+reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and
+cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the
+woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon
+him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,
+grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her
+distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he
+remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.
+
+"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were
+those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father
+Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation
+were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from
+the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of
+fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were
+the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick
+men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists
+and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the
+strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions
+and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him.
+They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better
+than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a
+suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls.
+"But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with
+himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied
+tartly.
+
+There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably
+good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington
+till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of
+adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his
+imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the
+result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women
+about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite
+with heat and that only with concussion--these facts had from his
+earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it
+had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere
+diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had
+read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But
+now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of
+no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the
+special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches
+without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his
+results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors,
+who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to
+work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all
+species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of
+beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings
+of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that
+would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was
+lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had
+felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest
+discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but
+a Spirit.
+
+But now none of these things mattered. He was caught in the net of life
+and nothing that was above it was of any use to him; as well expect a
+man who lies through the night with his foot in a man-trap to be
+comforted by the beauty of the stars. The only God he could have any use
+for would be the kind the Salvationists talk about, who goes about
+giving drunken men an arm past the public-house and coming between the
+pickpocket and Black Maria with a well-timed text. There was nothing in
+Science that would lift him out of this hell of loneliness, this
+conviction of impotence, this shame of achievementless maturity. He
+perceived that he had really known this for a long time, and that it was
+the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his
+day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to
+be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage
+at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine
+movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared
+at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break
+the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly
+over the commercial uses that were to be made of his work. What was the
+use of sweating his brains so that one set of fools could blow another
+set of fools to glory? Oh, this was hell!...
+
+The detestable blonde was now holding the platform in attitudes such as
+are ascribed to goddesses by British sculptors, and speaking with a
+slow, pure gusto of the horrors of immorality. For a moment her
+allusions to the wrongs of unmarried mothers made him think of the proud
+but defeated poise of his mother's head, and then the peculiar calm,
+gross qualities of her phrases came home to him. He wondered how long
+she had been going on like this, and he stared round to see how these
+people, who looked so very decent, whom it was impossible to imagine
+other than fully dressed, were taking it. Without anticipation his eyes
+fell on Ellen and found her looking very Scotch and clapping sturdily.
+Of course it must be all right, since everything about her was all
+right, but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying
+to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was
+just the final proof of how very much all right she was. Only a girl so
+innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical
+presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and
+made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind
+was white as her hair was red.
+
+He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was
+powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no
+good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that
+makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men
+act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an
+end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that
+these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women
+whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most
+casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's
+entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he
+was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her
+honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but
+would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their
+responsibilities.
+
+Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten
+how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a
+transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio;
+back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner
+at old Hermes Pessoa's preposterous house, that was built like--so far
+as it was like anything else on earth--the Villa d'Este mingled with the
+Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an
+end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the
+guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old
+Pessoa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so
+that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to
+the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed
+out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling
+that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the
+brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood
+six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that
+smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red
+dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this
+mad new house, in this mad new society. He had pulled one out and lain
+back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was
+beating violently. He hated being there, but he had to make sure. Much
+rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of
+those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay. "Then
+marriage is right," he said to himself. "Where there is real love one
+wants to go to church first."
+
+Others who had wearied of the party drifted down to this recess of
+peace. An elderly Frenchman with a pointed black beard, and a slim, fair
+English boy with tears on his long eyelashes, sat themselves down in two
+of these great chairs, with a bottle of wine at their feet and one
+glass, from which they drank alternately with an effect of exchanging
+vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all
+never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the
+Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally,
+mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not
+grieve. It is always thus when one forgets the Church."
+
+There came later another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who
+sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of
+elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him
+alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson
+brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the
+high windows, black with the outer night but streaked and oiled with
+reflections of the inner feast. Opposite there hung a Bouguereau, which
+irritated him--nymphs ought not to look as if they had come newly
+unguented from a _cabinet de toilette_. Below it stood an immense
+Cloisonne vase, about the neck of which was tied a scarlet silk
+stocking. He remembered having seen it there on his last visit six
+months before. She must have been an exceptionally careless lady. Out
+here there were many ladies who were careless of their honour, but most
+of them were careful enough about tangible possessions like silk
+stockings. A fresh outburst in the babel at the other end of the room
+did not make him turn round, though the French banker had cried in an
+ecstasy, "_Tiens! c'est atroce!_" and had bounded up the hall. He sat
+on, hating this ugly place of his delay, while the Frenchman and the boy
+kept up an insincere, voluptuous whisper about God and the comfort of
+the Mass....
+
+At last he rose to his feet. It was a quarter to twelve, and time for
+him to go. He went up the hall, treading on lobster claws and someone's
+wig, and looking about him for a certain person. He could not see him
+among the group of revellers that stood in the space before the large
+folding-doors, and for a minute a hand closed over his heart as he
+feared that for once the person whom he sought had gone home before
+morning. But presently he saw a long chair by the wall, and on its
+cushions a blotched face and a gross, full body. He bent over the chair
+and whispered, "De Rojas, de Rojas!" But the fat man slept. Hatred
+gushed up in him, and a joy that the night was secure, and he passed on
+to the folding-doors. But from the little group that was gathered round
+the table, which before the dinner had supported the Winged Victory that
+now lay spread-eagled on the floor, there stepped Pessoa. He bade him
+good-night and thanked him for a riotous evening, but perceived that
+Pessoa was waving a cocked revolver at him and saying something about
+Leonore. What could he be saying? It appeared incredible, even to-night,
+that he should really be saying that every departing guest must kiss
+Leonore's back and swear that it was the most beautiful back in Brazil.
+
+He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see
+how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor Leonore.
+She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her
+breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled
+down to her waist so that her back was bare. Such a broad, honest back
+it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood
+as a model for Millet's "Angelus." She looked over her shoulder and
+smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy.
+They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had
+gone with hopes of having a good night's rest for once, since Hermes was
+giving a stag-dinner. They had not even given her time to wipe off all
+the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples,
+or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some
+white snippets of the _Jornal de Commercio_. She bore no malice, the
+good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she
+likes to stay there: still, men are men, and mad, so what can one
+expect?
+
+He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one
+woman. He flicked the revolver out of Pessoa's hand and flung it through
+the nearest window. The thick glass took a little time to fall.
+
+"My friends will wait on you in the morning," Pessoa had spouted, and he
+had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to Leonore, and
+kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she
+smiled sleepily, and said in English, "Go on, you bad man!" She spoke so
+slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a
+foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost
+that had found a lodging in her broad mouth. Then the men fell back to
+let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the
+Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple
+livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass
+of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays
+of light which were pollutions of the moonlight. He thought of that
+blotched face, that gross, full body.... It was a night of strong
+moonlight. He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where
+the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness. Palms stood up
+glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight
+fantasy of form. The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas'
+villa gleamed like the spears of heroes. He stared between them at the
+red facade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there.
+The thought struck him with terror. If she were not waiting for him the
+moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his
+heart-beat turn to stillness.
+
+Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores. This was his house. Yet he
+entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall
+that enclosed his own gardens. The magnolias stood blazing white on the
+lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the
+poising fireflies' weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a
+smoke. He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but
+he did not dare to go out into the light. He passed the door that led
+from his to de Rojas' garden, which had been made when a father and son
+had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up
+because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours. If it had not been
+unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty.... He stood in
+the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple,
+not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his
+mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if
+Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to
+him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her
+to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the
+summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw
+the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his
+woman in his arms, finding her lips....
+
+It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember
+nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its
+ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He
+knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it
+meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved
+Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the
+magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.
+Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her
+fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go
+on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable
+of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to
+remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything
+that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan
+a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan
+to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy
+if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind
+himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.
+Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real
+to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest
+had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a
+blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these
+Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.
+
+He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that
+last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one
+she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this
+unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour
+should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out
+their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two
+children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting
+each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and
+unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his
+comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church,
+who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her
+not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two
+tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only
+promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought
+of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her
+were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.
+
+Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest
+of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They
+stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from
+the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon
+immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of
+life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the
+courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that
+questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated
+brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats
+that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars
+because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately
+because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality
+that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet
+surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who,
+if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either
+bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it,
+but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film
+of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one
+could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a
+chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came
+to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could
+laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with
+speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this
+woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing
+satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.
+He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite
+lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen
+Melville.
+
+He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.
+
+
+IV
+
+When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at
+him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set
+eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she
+was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the
+face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she
+couldn't come it over _him_. And he asked if he might see her home.
+
+She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some
+tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air
+of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you
+stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian
+Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park
+Square out by the Meadows!"
+
+"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.
+
+"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a
+queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I
+suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit
+down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the
+takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought
+R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has
+paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so
+full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured
+velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal
+for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a
+minute."
+
+He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became
+melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to
+summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place
+were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood
+about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on
+the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown
+surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would
+jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left
+higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And
+doubtless, if there is a beneficent Providence that really picks the
+world over for opportunities of kindliness, halls which are habitually
+let out for political meetings are allowed means of relieving their
+feelings which are forbidden to other collections of bricks and mortar.
+But he mustn't say that to Ellen. To her political meetings were plainly
+sacred rituals, and in any case he was not sure whether she laughed at
+things.
+
+She called to him from the doorway, "I'm through, Mr. Yaverland!" She
+was wearing a tam-o'-shanter and a mackintosh, which she buttoned right
+up to her chin, and she looked just a brown pipe with a black knob at
+the top, a mere piece of plumbing. He thought it very probable that
+never before in the history of the human race had a beautiful girl
+dressed herself so unbecomingly. But that she had done so seemed so
+peculiarly and deliciously amusing that as he walked by her side he
+could hardly keep from looking at her smilingly in a way that would have
+puzzled and annoyed her. And outside the hall, when they found that the
+mist, like a sour man who will not give way to his temper but keeps on
+dropping disagreeable remarks, was letting down just enough of itself to
+soak Edinburgh without giving it the slightest hope that it would rain
+itself out by the morning, he caught again this queer flavour of her
+that in its sharpness and its freshness reminded him of the taste of
+fresh celery. He asked her if she hadn't an umbrella, and she replied,
+"I've no use for umbrellas; I like the feel of the rain on my face, and
+I see no sense in paying three-and-eleven for avoiding a positive
+pleasure."
+
+By that time Ellen was almost sure that he was smiling to himself in the
+darkness, and was miserable. It was a silly, homely thing to have said.
+"Ah, what for can he be wanting to see me home?" she thought helplessly.
+"He is so wonderful. But then, so am I! So am I!" And as they went
+through the dark tangle of small streets she turned loose on him her
+enthusiasm for the meeting, so that he might see that women also have
+their serious splendours. Hadn't it been a magnificent meeting? Wasn't
+Mrs. Ormiston a grand speaker? Could he possibly, if he cared anything
+for honesty, affirm that he had ever heard a man speaker who came within
+a hundred miles of her? And wasn't Mrs. Mark Lyle beautiful, and didn't
+she remind him of the early Christian martyrs? Didn't he think the women
+who were forcibly fed were heroines, and didn't he think the Liberal
+Governments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times?
+"Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only
+give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy
+barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed
+little things about her. She had had very little to do with men,
+perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not
+naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft
+and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do.
+Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as
+though she trod on grass.
+
+Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you
+must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's
+fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with
+herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she
+was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear
+infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.
+
+To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could
+listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My
+mother's keen on the movement."
+
+"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she
+speak, or organise?"
+
+"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a
+little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary
+gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his
+mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland
+was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the
+stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and
+weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived
+as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the
+darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the
+infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor
+souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which
+disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It
+makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there
+in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any
+more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be
+continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware
+that those questions existed. He simply noted that she was being happy.
+Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each
+other, going home in the rain.
+
+They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like
+shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope.
+"Edinburgh's a fine place," he said. "It can handle even an asphalt
+track with dignity."
+
+"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from
+it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman
+want to go wandering about the world?
+
+From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you
+a sailor?"
+
+"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."
+
+Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"
+
+"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he
+was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she
+thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of
+men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a
+channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man
+who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his
+head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a
+mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the
+reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked
+like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She
+wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her,
+which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that
+even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were
+passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything,
+when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that
+softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel
+anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for
+there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that
+was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of
+soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors. If she lived
+near here she must be very poor. But without embarrassment she turned
+to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and
+pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by
+the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained
+window, to be a very mean little house. "The Square's through here," she
+said. "Come away in and I'll find you a membership form for the Men's
+League...."
+
+Beyond the archway lay the queerest place. It was a little box-like
+square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat
+houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its
+shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its
+neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews. They sent out in front
+of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a
+paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a
+lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as
+a terrier shakes a rat. Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued
+bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins. On the
+fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public
+park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by
+garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and
+beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with
+that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night. He,
+too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible
+that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole
+business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were
+sleeping in these little houses. They were probably poor little people,
+for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one
+lighted window. And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in
+the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he
+had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner
+house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon,
+the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the
+door and invited him in with something of an air.
+
+"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness,
+"Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out
+light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said,
+"What's that you say, Ellen?"
+
+"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a
+minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client
+from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find
+him a membership form."
+
+She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and
+fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew
+she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to
+carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a
+little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it
+were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr.
+Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit."
+A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook
+his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a
+large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured
+by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that
+someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too
+gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had
+not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as
+well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare
+bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet
+once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a
+fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip,
+though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no
+present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.
+The aged are terrible--mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which
+none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered
+round them.
+
+She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had
+been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes
+and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so
+dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself.
+The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the
+wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so
+unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather
+upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big
+steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse
+climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by
+signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers
+Bibles--engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and
+there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn
+from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand
+dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered
+somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.
+
+The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if
+he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had
+been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite
+she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made
+when they heard that his work lay among high explosives. And Ellen's
+rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper
+stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, "Ellen, it
+beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy
+girl about the house!" and Ellen exclaimed, "Och, drat the thing, it
+must be upstairs!" and ran out of the room with her face turned away
+from them.
+
+They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises
+overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on
+the floor. "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly. She began
+to look him over with a maternal eye. "For all you've been six months in
+the North, you've not lost your tan," she said.
+
+"Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America," he answered.
+Their eyes met and they smiled. In effect she had said, "Well, you are a
+fine fellow," and he had answered, "Yes, perhaps I am."
+
+"I like a man to travel," she went on, tossing her head and looking
+altogether fierce Ellen's mother. "I never go into the bank without
+looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on
+their high stools." She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat
+him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the
+mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a
+sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him. "I hope
+you don't think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all
+alone. It's not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for
+this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused. I'm not much of a
+companion to her. I'm getting on, you see. She was my youngest."
+
+"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only
+child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.
+
+"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was
+born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and
+I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as
+the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot
+of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he
+was taken ill."
+
+He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."
+
+"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his
+age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I
+knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New
+Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of
+the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed
+by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There
+was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and
+disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back
+of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave
+birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was
+disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her
+protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very
+meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had
+been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she
+was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody
+would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.
+Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional
+people who are old or not perfectly happy.
+
+"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he
+knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naive and
+touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as
+he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now
+that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming
+into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.
+
+"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex
+for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that
+most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent
+people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother
+was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"
+
+It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on
+a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin
+dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed. Only the continued calm of Mrs.
+Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through
+the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial
+human activity.
+
+"Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger," said Mrs. Melville. "We
+hardly hear it now. You see, they've turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs
+on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they
+make with their feet. It's not a nice place. 'Gentlemen a shilling,
+ladies invited,' it says outside. Still, we don't complain, for the
+noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent."
+
+This was a masterpiece of circumstance. By nothing more than a thin wall
+which shook to music was this little home divided from a thick-aired
+place where ugly people lurched against each other lustfully; and yet it
+had been made an impregnable fort of loveliness and decency by this
+virtuous ageing woman, whose slight silliness was but a holy abstinence,
+a refusal to side with common sense because that was so often concerned
+in cruel decisions, by this girl who was so young that it seemed at the
+sight of her as if time had turned back again and earth rolled unstained
+by history, and so beautiful that it seemed as if henceforth eternity
+could frame nothing but happiness. The smile of Ellen had made a faery
+ring where heavy-footed dancers could not enter; her gravity had made a
+sanctuary as safe as any church crowned with a belfry and casketing the
+Host. And he, participating in the safety of the place, pitied the men
+behind the shaking wall, and all men over the world who had committed
+themselves to that search for pleasure which makes joy inaccessible.
+They had chosen frustration for their destiny. Because they desired some
+ecstasy that would lighten the leaden substance of life they turned to
+drunkenness, which did no more than jumble reality, steep the earth in
+aniline dyes, tinge the sunset with magenta. Because they desired love
+they sought out women who, although dedicated to sex, were sexually
+cancelled by repeated use, like postage-stamps on a much re-directed
+letter, who efficiently went through the form of passion, yet presented
+it so empty of all exaltation that their lovers left them feeling as if
+they were victims of a practical joke.
+
+And here, not half a dozen yards from some of these seekers, was one who
+could bring to these desires a lovelier death than they would meet on
+the dirty bed of gratification or the hard pallet of renunciation.
+Because the untouched truth about her could give ecstasy one would not
+lose the power of seeing things as they are, and she made one forget the
+usual sexual story. Although she was formed for love and the intention
+of being her lover was now a fundamental part of him, she was so busy
+with her voice and body in playing quaint variations on the theme of
+herself that he did not mind how long might be the journey to their
+marriage. She was more interesting than any other person or thing in the
+world. She was going to have more interesting experiences; because her
+unique simplicity comprehended a wild impatience with lies she would
+have a claim on reality that would give her unprecedented wisdom. Now he
+could understand why saints in their narrow cells despise sinners as
+dull stay-at-homes.
+
+And when she burst into the room again he saw that all he had been
+thinking about her was true. It might be that everybody else on earth
+would see her as nothing but a red-haired girl in an ill-fitting blue
+serge dress with an appalling tartan silk vest, but still it was true.
+
+"Here you are," she said, "you put your name _there_." She bent over him
+as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how
+magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.
+
+Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor
+old lady was yawning behind her knitting. He rose and said good-bye,
+wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how
+he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that
+he came for love. If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and
+daughter how easy it would have been! The elder woman's eyes would have
+crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her
+daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they
+contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle
+hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have
+stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty,
+very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if
+to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she
+knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything. But here was
+Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would
+drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that
+warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she
+would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh
+inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people
+delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored
+them because they were difficult.
+
+"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the
+courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw
+that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the
+evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an
+honoured guest. They were dear people.
+
+As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open
+the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have
+been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings,
+which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to
+picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the
+coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a
+tea-biscuit.
+
+"You seem to admire Burns," he said.
+
+"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of
+the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."
+
+"That's a proposition he never butted up against--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.
+You're one of Time's revenges...."
+
+She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with
+pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully
+wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some
+disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to
+stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a
+queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some
+nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness
+beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it
+could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had
+second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that
+something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.
+"Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man
+being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in
+the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony
+transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this
+glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes
+blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be
+subject to death.
+
+"Good-night," he said. He did not know why her breath had failed and why
+she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was
+doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were
+beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on
+till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful. "Good-night," he
+said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path
+simply that they might speak to each other again. "You must shut the
+door. You're letting in the rain and cold."
+
+"No," she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.
+
+He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married
+and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his
+marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+I
+
+
+When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from
+a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry's College, and sat down
+in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the
+kitchen, "Ellen, I've got the grandest surprise for you!"
+
+These fanciful women! "And what's that?" she cried back tolerantly,
+though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees. She thought
+she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had
+sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing.
+But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and
+ask like a little anxious mouse, "You're sure you've not said anything,
+dear? You're sure you've been a careful girl with your work, dear?" and
+would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating
+misfortune. "Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post
+we must just manage." So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though
+that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.
+
+"Away into the dining-room and see what it is," said Mrs. Melville,
+coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand. She had put on her brighter
+shawl, the tartan one.
+
+"You look as we'd been left a fortune," said Ellen.
+
+"No fear of that. If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred
+pounds that's all we can expect. But there's something fine waiting for
+you. Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come. Now!"
+
+She flung open the door.
+
+"Roses!" breathed Ellen. "Mother--roses!"
+
+On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled
+with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long
+held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection
+joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars.
+Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of
+the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have
+jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed
+her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. The flowers
+were beautiful in so many ways. They were beautiful just as roses,
+because "roses" is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white
+because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose
+has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first
+white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that
+dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled,
+attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in
+stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a
+faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.
+
+They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against
+the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.
+
+They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers. They were an outburst
+of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to
+anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here
+though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an
+immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very
+enjoyably if one had the money to buy things. It really was worth while
+struggling to get on....
+
+"Mother, where did they come from?"
+
+"Ah!" said Mrs. Melville waggishly.
+
+"Och, tell me! I don't imagine you went out and pawned the family
+jewels. Och, do tell me! Come on!"
+
+"A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist's, this morning. I could
+have fallen down when I opened the door. And the wee brat of a boy tried
+to convey to me that he wasn't used to coming to such a place. He wore a
+look like a missionary in Darkest Africa. They were left for Miss
+Melville, mind you. Not for your poor old mother. And they're from Mr.
+Yaverland. Yon's his card sticking up against your grandmother on the
+mantelpiece."
+
+Ellen's hands, outspread over the roses, dropped to her side.
+
+"I would have thought he had more sense," she said sulkily. "If he'd
+money to burn he should have sent this lot to the infirmary."
+
+"Och, Ellen, are you not pleased?"
+
+"What's the man thinking of to fill us up with flowers as if we were an
+Episcopal church on Easter Sunday?"
+
+"Ellen, you've no notion of manners. Gentlemen often send flowers to
+ladies they admire. When your Aunt Bessie and I were girls many's the
+fine present of flowers we got from officers at the Castle."
+
+"I've neither time nor taste for such things. It makes me feel like a
+hospital. He'll be sending us new-laid eggs and lint bandages next. The
+man's mad."
+
+"Ellen, you're a queer girl," complained. Mrs. Melville. "If this
+argy-bargying about votes for women makes you turn up your nose at bonny
+flowers that a decent fellow sends you I'm sorry for you--it's just
+tempting Providence to scorn good mercies like this. I'll away and take
+the fish-pie out of the oven."
+
+It was strange that as soon as her mother had left the room she began to
+feel differently about the roses. Of course they were very beautiful;
+and they were contenting in a quite magic way, for besides satisfying
+her longing for pretty things, they seemed to have deprived of urgency
+all her other longings, even including her desire for a vote, for
+eminence of some severe sort, for an income of three hundred pounds a
+year (which was the most she believed a person with a social conscience
+could enjoy), for a perpetual ticket for the Paterson Concerts at the
+MacEwan Hall, and for perfect self-possession. She felt as if these
+things were already hers, or as if they were coming so certainly that
+she need not fret about them any more than one frets about a parcel that
+one knows has been posted, or concerning some desires, as if it did not
+matter so much as she had thought whether she got them or not.
+Especially that dream of being one of a company of men and women whose
+bodies should be grave as elms with dignity and whose words should be
+bright as butterflies with wit struck her as being foolish. It was as
+idle as wanting to be born in the days of Queen Elizabeth. What she
+really wanted was a friend. She had felt the need of one since Rachael
+Wing went to London. Surely Richard Yaverland meant to be her friend,
+since he sent flowers to her. But she wished the gift could have been
+made secretly, and if he came to pay a visit she should be quite alone.
+For no reason that she could formulate, the thought of even her mother
+setting eyes on them together seemed a threat of disgrace. She wished
+that they could be standing side by side at the fire in that five
+minutes when it is sheer extravagance to light the gas but so dark that
+one may stare as one cannot by day, so that she might look at what the
+driving flamelight showed of his black, sea-roughened magnificence. At
+her perfect memory of him she felt a rush of exhilaration which left her
+confused and glad and benevolent.
+
+"Mother, dear," she said, for Mrs. Melville had come back with the
+fish-pie, and was bidding her with an offended briskness to sit forward
+and eat her meal while it was hot, "they're the loveliest things. I
+can't think what for I was so cross."
+
+"Neither can I. There's so little bonny comes our way that I do think we
+might be grateful when we get a treat."
+
+"I'm sorry. I can't think what came over me."
+
+"Never mind. But, you know, you're sometimes terribly like your father.
+You must fight against it."
+
+They sat down to supper, looking up from their food at the roses.
+
+"Mother, the gas is awful bad for them. Carbonic acid is just murderous
+to flowers."
+
+"I was thinking that myself. It was well known that gas was bad for
+flowers even when I was young, though we didn't talk about carbonic
+acid. But if you don't see them by gaslight you'll never see them, for
+it's dark by five. They must fall faster than they would have done."
+
+"Och, no! I'd rather you had the pleasure of them by day, and let the
+poor things last. I must content myself with a look at them at
+breakfast."
+
+"Nonsense! They're your flowers, lassie. But do you not think it would
+do if we brought in the two candles and turned out the gas? It'll be a
+bit dark, but it isn't as if there were many bones in the fish-pie."
+
+And that is what they did. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for then
+there was a bright soft light on the red and white petals, and a drapery
+of darkness about the mean walls of the room, and a thickening of the
+atmosphere which hid the archness on the older woman's face, so that the
+girl dreamed untormented and without knowing that she dreamed.
+
+"Ah, well!" sighed Mrs. Melville after a silence, with that air of irony
+which she was careful to impart to her sad remarks, as if she wanted to
+remove any impression that she respected the fate that had assailed her.
+"I don't know how many years it is since I sat down with roses on the
+table."
+
+"I never have before," said Ellen.
+
+
+II
+
+It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the
+declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park
+Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the
+careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had
+meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when
+the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every
+time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood
+red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew
+more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he
+wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that
+he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused
+consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present
+course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in
+open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There
+was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his
+love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man
+commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research.
+Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh
+he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her
+youth could hold.
+
+But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter;
+and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was
+in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and
+exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was
+larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like
+that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of
+sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her
+something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting
+of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and
+characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great
+pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace
+with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He
+found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a
+complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his
+return in the New Year, which was a breach of her habitual pretence,
+which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for
+that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.
+
+"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her
+as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room,
+which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver
+fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map.
+Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of
+power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just
+finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her
+merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have
+made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin
+leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene
+she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face
+would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness
+would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had
+reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she
+and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along
+the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east
+sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the
+bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she
+had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of
+starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his
+head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.
+
+It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it
+seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because
+he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover
+would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably
+glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet
+suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant
+wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his
+mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to
+Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.
+
+And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else
+happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him
+with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch
+that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten
+minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its
+inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling
+wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood
+spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from
+the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village
+three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be
+need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood
+by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's
+suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was
+disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little
+fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland
+himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known
+from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen
+they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand
+the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay
+among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily
+of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave
+conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell
+spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.
+
+But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when
+it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the
+door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage
+where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He
+shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had
+heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was
+twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of
+his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he
+was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a
+lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but
+went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail
+all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so
+he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out
+into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking,
+lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.
+
+She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she
+stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows
+were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as
+well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the
+marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without
+intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the
+death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac
+and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the
+bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen
+panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their
+coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not
+spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those
+books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft
+voice.
+
+For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and
+dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled
+his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It
+must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the
+hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that
+this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she
+had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew
+followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet
+three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued
+scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his
+arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He
+held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to
+the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But
+I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face
+away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to
+talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a
+thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so
+far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded
+the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly,
+glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if
+you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had
+slept....
+
+And she was going through a bad time like that now.
+
+When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not
+greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not
+reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any
+particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this
+afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.
+But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist
+desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of
+the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He
+certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so
+wonderful as he had remembered her.
+
+But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to
+solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the
+Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the
+white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast
+of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the
+summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by
+his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to
+Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up
+to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous
+thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her
+immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly
+conscientious woman would have gone on selling _Votes for Women_ for at
+least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her
+mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because
+after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the _Scotsman's_
+report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an
+impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed
+even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock
+came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told
+herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there
+had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew
+nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the
+other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of
+him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.
+
+The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much
+lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and
+pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea,
+though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want
+any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation
+to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or
+cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but
+always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill.
+The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically
+irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the
+right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it
+all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how
+he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious
+and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of
+phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative
+gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word
+contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually
+turned on the rest of the world....
+
+But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by
+candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her
+mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less.
+"But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That
+was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious
+and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an
+excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of
+course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll
+keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop
+you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."
+
+He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had
+given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their
+stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in
+their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the
+fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented
+them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering
+murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at
+all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed
+that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very
+pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the
+wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers,
+and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had
+been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of
+tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period
+of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention,
+which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.
+
+But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift.
+They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them
+wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall
+and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic
+("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to
+her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and
+laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by
+those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of
+the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey
+into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the
+happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a
+magical power to give each other the things they wanted.
+
+But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed
+perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the
+frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.
+
+"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."
+
+"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"
+
+She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last
+instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if
+anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy
+and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh
+evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of
+malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr.
+Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her,
+things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark
+thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."
+
+"Ju--?"
+
+"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that
+Caesar was much addicted to."
+
+When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had
+put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the
+mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the
+glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the
+coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,
+evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while
+her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as
+if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same
+time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would
+come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures
+of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she
+should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden
+tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to
+be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on
+the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to
+add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she
+smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one
+beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,
+and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it
+became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into
+a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or
+say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because
+he perfectly knew what she did not.
+
+One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of
+shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed
+to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to
+each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an
+exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that
+his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But
+there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it
+killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was
+inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an
+exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light,
+and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a
+richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold
+her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail
+substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out
+like comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to
+crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set
+out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of
+course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world
+was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the
+table, and she seemed very real.
+
+She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I
+can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her
+pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched
+a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go
+on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went
+and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the
+path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the
+evening as if it were a refuge from him.
+
+But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had
+a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes
+and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a
+trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their
+appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about
+George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had
+he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the
+privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat _ss. Glory_ with
+Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her
+that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of
+London, and not a few came from the special schools for the
+feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper
+that makes a good boxer.
+
+So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was,
+he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other
+place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops
+that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took
+the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its
+narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked
+briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed
+at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other
+trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their
+slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was
+aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent
+than going home to supper.
+
+It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering
+black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the
+midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east
+wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy
+quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much
+aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a
+marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that
+resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and
+circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a
+shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an
+iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a
+wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as
+though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of
+a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever
+seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's
+carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled
+to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the
+price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that
+he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen,
+and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such
+occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy
+texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness
+in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was
+plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual,
+intellectual energy.
+
+In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put
+in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that
+hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like
+a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under
+the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.
+Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage,
+for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it
+seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his
+white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however,
+in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was
+the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary
+life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that
+magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life. The old man
+seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said,
+"If that's the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately."
+Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not
+so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations. But after they
+got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his
+mind: "Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?"
+
+"Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay."
+
+They had come to the end of Ellen's shopping list and she was taking him
+home through St. Patrick's Square. "Look at that lighted window, where
+they've got a blue blind! That's where de Quincey stopped!" she said
+excitedly, and he answered, "Oh, is it?... I say, why did the old chap
+offer to give you change in halfpence?"
+
+"Well, to-morrow's Sunday, you see."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't. I'm stupid. Why do you want halfpence more on
+Sunday than on any other day?"
+
+"Why, for the plate. For the collection. In church. But we always put in
+threepenny-bits. Mother's picked up a lot of English ways. What's taken
+you?" She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her
+that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly
+English taunt that the Scotch are mean. "Och, you don't understand," she
+began to stammer hastily. "I didn't mean that exactly."
+
+And then a hot rage came on her. Why should she make excuses for her own
+people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to
+giggle? Wasn't he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences
+in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness,
+which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to "come it over"
+her? She said acidly, "I'm glad you're amused. I suppose you don't do
+such things in England?" and at his laughing answer, "I don't know; I've
+never been to Church in England. But I shouldn't think so," her
+neatly-brushed and braided temper came down. She came to a sudden stop.
+They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of
+tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had
+none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate
+with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs
+she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping
+from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of
+her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side
+lest he should drop any parcels.
+
+He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that
+it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his
+mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as
+she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were
+held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that
+English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers,
+and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were
+no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the
+implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than
+the English, had defended a larger country....
+
+He woke up at that. He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for
+though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry. She was
+running away from him, but in a circle.
+
+"Scotland bigger than England!" he jeered. "Think of the map! Bigger
+than England!"
+
+She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round
+dismayed hole. But she was not to be beaten. "I was alluding to its
+surface," she said coldly. "It being such an elevated country, there
+must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking
+hardly any space on the map. Consequently I was correct in saying that
+Scotland is bigger than England." She drew breath to go on, but her lips
+began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she
+began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined
+her. They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their
+laughter, from which they did not wish to move. They were standing quite
+still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other's faces,
+trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the
+strong moonlight. It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not
+quite know what to do with it. They did not even know whether to be
+grave or gay. It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue
+and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its
+merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.
+
+But indeed they had no choice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I
+didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person
+all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."
+
+"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an
+expense."
+
+He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur
+the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last
+manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face,
+which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high
+cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I
+didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said
+could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that
+wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of
+tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all
+delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and
+self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to
+acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance,
+accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a
+boy.
+
+And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that
+Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of
+wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she
+should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of
+course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and
+turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these
+desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would
+look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward
+tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the
+ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that
+she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be
+able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would
+prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men
+are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or
+persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which
+he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of
+everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body
+to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in
+spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though
+that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly
+disliked that obligation.
+
+She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And
+Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig.
+Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands
+yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs
+hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The
+water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."
+
+"Take me there, Ellen."
+
+"Would you like to come? Let's go next Saturday. I've got the whole day
+off. Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I've been
+doing. It'll be lovely. I've had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing
+went to London. But would you truly care to come? It's just moors.
+You'll not turn up your nose at it?"
+
+"Anywhere I went with you I'd like."
+
+She started and began to walk on. It was as if the sheet of tissue had
+grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it. Although he
+went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he
+found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly
+answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by
+its collar. Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so
+eagerly? And ought he to have called her by her Christian name? Of
+course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to
+do it. When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a
+light in the dining-room window and said, "Mother's home before us."
+
+She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her
+life. For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed,
+and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because
+soon they would no longer be alone together. Perhaps something like fear
+would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with
+victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of
+timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to
+star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how
+even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily
+contriving their immediate marriage. For there was a steely quality
+about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive
+purpose.
+
+It was apparent to him, when they went in, that Mrs. Melville understood
+what was going on, for she threw him a glance which was not quite a wink
+but which clearly suggested that had she been just a common body it was
+conceivable that she might have winked. As soon as they were alone he
+told her that he loved Ellen, that he wanted to marry her, that he had
+plenty of money, that he was all right, that they must marry at once.
+She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had
+tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her
+with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of
+moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the
+walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and
+the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob
+like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and plainly trusted him, but
+at the same time she was pitifully alarmed. "Mercy me! you've not been
+long.... Well, you've caught a Tartar and no mistake. Never say I didn't
+warn you.... But you'll let the bairn bide for a wee bit longer! She's
+but a bairn!"
+
+It was as if she quite saw that a husband was necessary for Ellen, and
+wanted her to have one, and at the same time believed that any husband
+would inevitably bring her pain. He set it down as one of the despondent
+misinterpretations of life that the old invent in the depression of
+their physical malaise, and answered, reassuringly, insincerely, "Yes,
+yes, I'll wait...." But why should they wait? They were going to be
+radiantly and eternally happy. It might as well begin at once.
+
+
+III
+
+"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed
+at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping
+from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she
+had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland
+an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing
+that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the
+village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and
+now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by
+daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke
+and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the
+upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men
+working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural
+disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of
+the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them,
+laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do;
+there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had
+seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought
+tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to
+the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person
+who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic
+hues.
+
+But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there
+had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the
+trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in
+face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward
+was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a
+slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black
+hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields,
+set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road
+dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate
+frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of
+clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines
+against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride
+and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of
+mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its
+immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it
+was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and
+it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he
+had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood
+showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather,
+and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of
+response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under
+changing skies even as the seas.
+
+Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting
+towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the
+coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly,
+"Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity,
+and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which,
+when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs
+and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind
+was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of
+wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a
+track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously
+between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old
+lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her
+bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes
+had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a
+new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed
+on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted
+everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country,
+these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.
+
+"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a
+voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up
+to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed
+a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind
+without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was
+glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the
+hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at
+his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her
+velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler
+that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big
+for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of
+large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of
+flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort
+of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the
+slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she
+would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music
+heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of
+his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the
+whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the
+range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would
+tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine
+what manner of place it would be--whether there would be grass or
+heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.
+
+"Well, it's no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if
+we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes," said Ellen. "We'd
+best step forward. I'm glad you like the place. I love it. And this bit
+of the road's bonny. When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the
+ploughman's cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one
+day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four. And if
+you'll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as
+bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians. The poor things
+ran like the wind when they saw us. I wish we could have explained we
+meant no harm, for I suppose it's the one time in the day when they
+count on having the world to themselves."
+
+"I've felt like that about a jaguar," he said. "Came on it suddenly, on
+a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina. It had been tidying up a
+monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy. Lord, the sick fright
+in its eyes when it saw me. I'd have given anything to be able to stand
+it a drink and offer to see it home."
+
+"Och!" she murmured abashed. "Me talking about rabbits, and you
+accustomed to jaguars. I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit
+except to look down your nose at it. But we can't rise to jaguars in
+Scotland. But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt."
+
+"I've seen a red deer too," he said, "when I was motorcycling up to Ross
+this summer." It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across
+the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and
+then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, "The sunset was
+on it. It looked the colour of your hair."
+
+"Well, if it did," she cried with sudden petulance, "pity me, that has
+to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast's back. Och,
+come along! Let's run. I like running. I'm cold. There's a bonny bridge
+where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir. Let's run." And for a
+hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then
+stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath. "I don't like
+this," she said half laughingly. "I've a poor envious nature. I'm used
+to running everybody else off their feet, and here you're holding back
+to keep with me. I feel I'm being an object of condescension. We'll
+walk, if you please."
+
+Yaverland said, "Oh, what nonsense! I was just thinking how rippingly
+you ran."
+
+"Havers!" she replied. "You were thinking nothing of the sort. You were
+wondering what for I carried an iron-monger's shop in my pocket. But
+yon rattling's just a tin with some coconuts I've in it that I made last
+night and slipped in in case you'd like it, rubbing up against my
+protractor."
+
+"But why in Heaven's name," Yaverland asked, "do you carry a protractor
+about with you?"
+
+"Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch,
+and I just keep a protractor handy."
+
+Yaverland stopped. "Ellen," he said, "I haven't known you very long."
+There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, "I
+may call you Ellen, mayn't I? This modern comradeship between men and
+women...." "Och, yes," beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic
+catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her
+pure enthusiasms for his own purposes. Sometimes he was conscious of a
+detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not
+respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but
+he could not take back the insincerity. "As I say, I haven't known you
+very long. But may I ask you a favour?"
+
+"Surely," said Ellen.
+
+"Turn out your pockets."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"I want to see what's in 'em."
+
+"Well," said Ellen resignedly, "there are worse vices than
+inquisitiveness. Both pockets?"
+
+"We'll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor,
+please."
+
+"It's too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you'll have to
+take them from me as I get them out. Well, there's the protractor, and
+there's the coconut ice. Have a bit? Ah, well, I notice that
+grown-up--that people older than me don't seem to care for sweeties
+before their dinner. I wonder why. And there's a magnetic compass I
+picked up on George the Fourth Bridge. There's a kind of pleasure in
+finding the north, don't you think? And--fancy this being here! I
+thought I'd lost it long ago. It's a wee garnet I found on the beach at
+Elie. I was set up all the afternoon with finding a precious stone. I
+would like fine to be a miner in the precious stone mines in Mexico. If
+I was a boy I would go. And the rest's just papers. Here's notes on a
+Geographical Society lecture on the geology of Yellowstone Park I went
+to last spring. Very instructive it was. And here's a diagram I did when
+I was working for the Bible examination on the Second Book of Kings--the
+lines of the House of Israel and the House of Judah drawn to scale on
+square paper, five years to a square and set parallel so that you can
+see which buddy was ruling on the one throne when another buddy was on
+the other. I came out fifth in all Scotland. And this is a poem I wrote.
+It's not a good poem. The subject was excellent--reflections of an
+absinthe-drinker condemned to death for the murder of his mistress--but
+I couldn't give it the treatment it desairved. No, you will _nut_ see
+it. I'll just tear it up. There. It'll do the whaups no harm scattering
+over the moor, for they've no aesthetic sensibilities. But I shouldn't be
+surprised if you had, though I've heard that the English don't care much
+for art. I'm not much good at the poetry, but I have the grace to know
+it, and so I've just given it up. I make my own blouses, though I know I
+can't equal the professional product that's sold in the shops, because
+it comes cheaper. But with the Carnegie library handing out the
+professional product for nothing, I see no reason why I should write my
+own poems. That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the
+other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen
+gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole
+in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real
+nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it
+can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after
+all."
+
+"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.
+
+"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No
+wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the
+English if they're all as easily amused as you."
+
+"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like
+a boy."
+
+"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing
+before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were
+nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because
+she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?
+Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!
+And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I
+came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A
+bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!
+Is it not just fine?"
+
+Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he
+perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than
+anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as
+bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.
+He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,
+and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,
+represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing
+for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody
+fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and
+swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her
+soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this
+country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like
+her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that
+stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was
+fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills
+around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with
+some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and
+utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a
+glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the
+very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into
+shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue
+that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the
+hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not
+unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.
+
+But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort
+which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt,
+some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it
+could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden
+from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and
+jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy
+might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible
+lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating
+of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat
+under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the
+thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see
+if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the
+south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and
+said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."
+To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone
+spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.
+
+There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn
+floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an
+invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.
+But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than
+anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy
+and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight
+squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her
+balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky,
+the stern grey stream, the amber grasses that shook perpetually in the
+stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the
+water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.
+
+There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened
+every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a
+windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the
+Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy
+confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its
+yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this
+brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it
+an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath
+the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a
+kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will
+that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall
+from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.
+Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should
+sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow
+lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined
+in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of
+whitish grasses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the
+unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake
+perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It
+suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed passion of malice. It was
+like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in the log
+bubbles slowly floated up through the dark water, wavered a little under
+the glassy surface, and then popped up and made a dirty trail of spume.
+That was like the way Mr. Philip sat in the dark corner beyond the
+fireplace and showed by the way the whites of his eyes turned about that
+something bad had come into his mind, and let a space of silence fall so
+that one thought he was not going to say it after all, and then it would
+come out suddenly, cool and as mean as mean could be and somehow
+unanswerable.
+
+With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver
+birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless
+on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of
+malice. Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed
+with the grassy rottenness beside the whitish grasses. It had had no
+chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that
+although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time
+when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and
+stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave
+him the chance to make a fool of her. It was all right to be here on the
+Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and
+work under Mr. Philip. She could not go on like this. She would have to
+kill herself. She would jump over the Dean Bridge. Mother would just
+have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.
+
+Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the
+rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you
+talk about? Aren't you still pals?"
+
+Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's
+gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on.
+She's never written since the first month."
+
+"Probably she's having hard luck."
+
+"Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside
+her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.
+She's not a bit like me."
+
+"But that's just what you look like."
+
+"Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as
+the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the
+presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the
+disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with
+success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to
+her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face
+and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he
+followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.
+
+When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and
+taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her
+breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she
+said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."
+
+"Why don't you cut yours off then?"
+
+"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she
+answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun
+that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all
+right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere
+nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little
+child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while
+yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl
+was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from
+womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He
+would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right
+angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds
+marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her
+scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman
+smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from
+a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning
+herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult
+love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by
+some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and
+they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.
+
+He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before
+her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary
+austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he
+recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she
+still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss
+her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when
+she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands
+roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as
+children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was
+a woman the passion between them was so strong that the delight of
+touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to
+support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that
+they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and
+invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was
+what he had to say....
+
+It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He
+could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening
+of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great
+height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He
+found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul
+shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let
+his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the passing moment
+as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from
+a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that
+rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life
+because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a
+relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black
+regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt
+of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to
+brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did
+not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness
+than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever
+known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.
+And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness,
+the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race
+among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.
+She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of
+women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon
+her lips.
+
+Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you,
+she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think
+that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in
+the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless
+moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South
+America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her
+mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was
+too young.
+
+There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was
+with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long
+way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the
+whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two
+servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes,
+the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down
+on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that
+distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the
+whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all
+human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young
+girl.
+
+The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin
+along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked
+by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited
+to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder
+of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where
+there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely
+perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the
+clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on
+either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain
+herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated
+animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the
+extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on
+ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her
+pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor,
+her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so
+greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight
+over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he
+wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course
+he never had. There was no one in the world like her.
+
+"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried
+back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun
+to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown
+waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with
+an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in
+the hills where the Logan Burn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark
+polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee
+one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose--was it
+not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into
+his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"
+
+"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here
+than anywhere else in the world."
+
+"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted,
+uninterested in the loving things that he had said.
+
+"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."
+
+"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for
+adventure, "I will go there some day...."
+
+That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern
+himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train
+of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it
+like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the
+waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled
+by a ready, embarrassed murmur from her.
+
+"I can't...."
+
+He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had
+been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly:
+
+"Why not? You've got nailed boots."
+
+But she continued to stand stiffly on a rock by the edge of the red
+pool, and stared over his head at the spray and repeated, "I can't."
+
+He wondered from her blush if in his ignorance of girls he had done
+something to offend her, and turned away; but she misunderstood that,
+and cried fierily:
+
+"Och, I'm not feared! I've done it twenty times. But I took a vow. Oh,"
+she faltered, suddenly the youngest of all articulate things, "you'll
+laugh at me!"
+
+"I won't!" he answered fiercely and gripped one of her hands.
+
+"It was like this," she said, looking round-eyed and dewily solemn like
+a child in church. "Climbing up there used to be a great pleasure to me.
+I used to come here a lot with Rachael Wing. And then I heard Victor
+Grayson speak--oh, he is a wonderful man; he seemed hardly airthly; you
+felt you had to make some sacrifice. I made a vow I'd never climb it
+again till I had done something for the social revolution. And I've not
+done a thing yet."
+
+They exchanged a long, confiding look, a mutual pressure of their souls;
+but before he could say something reverently sympathetic she had uttered
+a sharp exclamation, and was looking past him at the waterfall, which a
+sudden gust of wind had blown out from the rock like a lady's skirt. "If
+we were climbing that now, yon spray would be on our faces, and I love
+the prick of cold water!" she burst out. "Whatever for did I make that
+daft-like vow? A lot of good it's like to do the social revolution! I
+really am a fool sometimes!"
+
+Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if
+he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite
+exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal
+they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to
+him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman.
+She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the
+early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her
+beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her
+soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of
+her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have
+been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional
+languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces
+expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about
+the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so
+busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the
+lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave
+naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing
+the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more
+certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing
+with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of
+the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough
+stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made
+him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead
+for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had
+come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the
+loch.
+
+"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this
+bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig.
+The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a
+gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a
+good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies."
+But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him,
+though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black
+wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile
+long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of
+desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art;
+one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist
+divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human,
+grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so
+thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked
+like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this
+there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that
+it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of
+hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing
+that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no
+ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its
+graveyard.
+
+"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on
+Bell's Hill--do you see it?--told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising
+up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most
+interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit
+of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in
+Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"
+
+He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own,
+and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said,
+"A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what
+cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears
+came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the
+Scotch is your one accomplishment."
+
+But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between
+them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a
+sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical
+changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call
+his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This
+was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world
+became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a
+dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long
+steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and purple leaves looked like
+snips of painted tin; and the Glencorse Burn on the other side of the
+field was overhung by bare trees of gold. Every window of the farmhouse
+across the valley was a loophole of flame; and here it was evident, from
+the passing of a multitude of figures about the farm buildings and a
+babblement that drove in gusts across the valley, there was happening
+some event that matched the prodigiousness of the strange appearance
+lent it by the sunset.
+
+"There's an awful argy-bargying at Little Vantage," said Ellen, "I
+wonder what's going on."
+
+When they crossed over the burn and turned into the road that led back
+to the farmhouse they found the dykes plastered with intimations of a
+sale of live stock. "Ah, it's a roup! Old Mr. Gumley must be dead, poor
+soul!" And indeed the road was lined with farmers' gigs, paint and
+brass-work blazing with the evening light till they looked like fiery
+chariots that would presently lift to heaven. About the yard gate there
+was a great press of hale farmers, gilt and ruddy from the sunset they
+faced, and vomiting jests at each other out of their great bearded
+mouths; and in the yard sheep with golden fleece and cattle as bright as
+dragons ran hither and thither before the sticks of boys who looked like
+demons with the orange glow on their faces, and who cursed and spat to
+show they would some-day be men. Richard and Ellen had to stand back for
+a moment while a horse was led out; and as it passed a paunchy farmer
+jocularly struck it between the eyes and roared, "Ye're no for me, ye
+auld mare, wi' your braw beginnings of the ringbone!" And there was so
+much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much
+patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the
+incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster
+who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest
+sound of a whimper from Ellen.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.
+
+"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening
+sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was
+something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was
+so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from
+which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is
+like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. "A lot of beefy, red-faced angels
+buying us up and taking us off to their own places without a word to us
+of where we're to go to, and commenting most unfeelingly on all our
+failings...."
+
+"You funny person," he murmured, "you're tired. Probably hungry. Where's
+that cottage you talked about where they'll give us tea?"
+
+"Over yonder," she quavered, "but I'm not wanting any tea."
+
+But just then a gig drew up beside them, driven by an old man and laden
+with a couple of tin trunks and a cornucopia of a woman, who had
+snatched the reins out of the old man's hands. "What's this? A roup at
+Little Vantage! Feyther, what's happened?" The old man shook his head.
+"Feyther, ye niver ken onything." She raised a megaphonic voice.
+"Moggie! Moggie Gumley!" A fat young woman with a soap-shining face ran
+out of the farmhouse. "Wha's calling me? Och, it's you, Mistress
+Cairns!" "Ay, it's me. What's ta'en ye all here? I've been awa' for two
+months keepin' hoose for ma brither Jock while his wife's been in the
+Infirmary wi' her chumer. I didn't think I'd come back to find a roup at
+Little Vantage." "So ye've not haird?" gasped the fat young woman
+delightedly. "Feyther's deid o' his dropsy, and Alec and me's awa' to
+Canady this day fortnight." She panted it out with so honest a joy in
+the commotion, so innocent a disregard of the tragedy of death and
+emigration, that Yaverland and Ellen had to turn away and laugh; and he
+drew her across the road to the cottage.
+
+The door was opened before they got there. "It's me, Mrs. Lawson!" said
+Ellen. "Indeed, I kenned that!" replied the housewife. "I was keeking
+out of the window when you came up the road, and I said to masel',
+'There's Miss Melville, and she'll be wanting her tea,' so I awa' and
+popped the kettle on. Bring your gentleman in. He's a new face, but he's
+welcome. Ye'll pardon the parlour being a' of a reek wi' tobaccy, but
+Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Borthwick cam' in and had a cup o' tea and a bit of
+a crack. They were both bidding at the roup and some business thegither.
+I think Mr. Laidlaw means to buy Cornhaven off Mr. Borthwick and give it
+to his son John, wha's married on a Glasca girl, a shelpit wee thing wi'
+a Glesca accent like skirling pipes played by a drunken piper." They
+watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry
+jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip,
+their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the
+superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them
+they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the
+mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires.
+All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; and farmers
+hawked out their last jests at one another, mounted their gigs and drove
+home; and the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle pattered by, bleating
+and lowing not so heartrendingly.
+
+Ellen rose, went over to the mantelpiece and stroked the china dogs, and
+sat down in an armchair by the fire. "This has been a lovely day," she
+murmured. She joined her hands behind her head and crossed her knees and
+smiled blindishly into the shadow; and his heart turned over in him. All
+his life he would remember her just as she was then: the lovely attitude
+of body that was at once angular and softly sensuous, like a
+blossom-laden branch; the pure pearl colour of her skin, the pure bright
+colours of her hair and eyes and mouth; the passionate and funny, shrewd
+and credulous pattern of her features; and that dozing smile, that
+looked as if her soul had ceased to run up and down enquiringly and was
+resting awhile to enjoy the sweetness that was its own climate. He would
+never forget her as she was looking then. She might turn away from him,
+she might get old, she might die, but the memory of her as she was at
+that moment would endure for ever in his heart, an eternally living
+thing. He was aware, reluctantly enough, for he hated such mystical
+knowledge, and would have given the world to see life as a plain round
+of dicing and drinking and wenching, that real love was somehow a cruel
+thing for women; that the hour when she became his wife would be as
+illimitably tragic as it would be illimitably glorious. But love was
+also very kind to women, since it enabled them to live always at their
+loveliest in their lover's memories, there perpetually exempt from the
+age and ugliness that even the bravest of them seemed pitifully to fear.
+
+Yet, of course love was not so kind to every woman. No one remembered
+his mother as he would remember Ellen. He began to ponder what his
+mother must have been like when she was that age, and it marked a
+certain difference between him and other men, that he was grudgingly
+surprised that the girl he meant to marry was as beautiful as his
+mother. Certainly, he reflected, with a bitter, gloating grief, Marion
+Yaverland must have been beautiful enough to deserve a lodging in some
+man's memory. She must have been brilliantly attractive in the obvious
+physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit
+must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he
+suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that
+other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which
+showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark,
+silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.
+
+There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant
+that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come
+back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had
+grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that
+climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull,
+and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her
+hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then
+spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and
+cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality
+flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had
+not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her
+lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who
+stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good
+repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on
+the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the
+unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their
+cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from
+her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble
+that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost
+strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands
+over her face.
+
+Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the
+clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to
+catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."
+
+Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we
+must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its
+intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that
+almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her
+arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her
+red hair. But when they got into the lane outside she hurried towards
+the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath
+sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run,
+although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See,"
+he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't
+anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware
+that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he
+asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it
+possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark?
+He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she
+had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit
+that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of
+matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her
+ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of
+discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for
+the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of
+self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no
+witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened
+with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them
+between sleeping and waking.
+
+It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely
+impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal
+ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.
+It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things
+which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer
+sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy
+shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He
+perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way
+she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her
+hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver
+with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her
+hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of
+fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated
+with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in
+women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's
+life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of
+worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee
+contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt
+for those other women.
+
+The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and
+lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats,
+who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the
+soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen.
+"And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat
+extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and
+found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.
+Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to
+which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength
+too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the _Gondomar_ had been
+scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a
+cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with
+inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all
+right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an
+hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the
+station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone
+that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half
+asleep."
+
+The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take
+a seat in it while he got the tickets. But she did not. Its carriages
+were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those
+burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want
+to take that train. She would have liked to turn back with him through
+the dark avenues into the Pentlands. The sunset, which had somehow been
+as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before
+the kind, sleepy darkness, undisturbed there in the valley by the
+wee-est cottage light. It would be good to lie down for the night on the
+heather of some ledge on the hillside where one could hear the Logan
+Burn talking as it ran from the fall, and to look up and see Mr.
+Yaverland sitting in that nice slouching way he had, a great black shape
+against the stars. But that was a daft idea. She was annoyed for
+thinking of anything so foolish, and when he came out and chid her for
+standing about on the windy platform she found nothing on her lips but a
+cross murmur.
+
+That did not really matter, for one could not hurt grown-up people. They
+were always happy. Everybody in the world was happy except her. Without
+doubt he would think her quite mad if he knew that she was in the grip
+of a depression that seemed to be wringing misery out of her body and
+brain as one wrings water out of a bathing-dress, so when they got into
+the train she turned away, muttered yawningly that she was very tired,
+and buried her face in the crook of her arm so that he might think she
+slept. It puzzled her that she felt so disappointed. What had she
+expected to happen to-day that hadn't happened? Everything had been
+lovely. Mr. Yaverland had talked most interestingly, and the hills had
+been very beautiful. She was ashamed of all those tears that she shed
+more frequently than one would have expected from an intending rival of
+Pierpont Morgan, but these present tears filled her with terror because
+they were so utterly irrational. Irrational, too, was the sudden picture
+that flashed on her mind's eye of Mr. Philip sitting in the opposite
+corner of the carriage, screwing up his dark face with mocking laughter.
+"Mr. Philip is driving me mad," she thought to herself. "Some day soon
+I'll find myself in Morningside Asylum, sticking flowers in my hair and
+flattering myself I'm Queen Victoria. But I will not go mad. I am going
+to get on. I am going to be great. But am I? I think I am not." Her face
+made a wet contorted mask against her sleeve, and a swallowed sob was as
+sharp in her throat as a fishbone; and there struck through her like an
+impaling sword a certainty which she could not understand, but which was
+surely a certificate that there was to be no more happiness, that even
+if Mr. Philip ceased to persecute her she would still be hungry and
+tormented.
+
+Perhaps if she could go to some new country she would escape from this
+misery. She saw a sky like stretched blue silk, stamped with the black
+monograms of palms; a purple bay shaped like a shell and edged with a
+white embroidery of surf. Surely such fair weather killed with sweetness
+such coarse plants as her stupid gloom, as the foul weather here killed
+with its coarseness all sweet-flowering southern plants. She turned to
+Yaverland to ask him if he could help her to find work abroad, but she
+became aware that she was in the grip of an unreasonable emotion that
+prevented her from this. It was as horrible to her to see the coldly
+logical apparatus of her mind churning out these irrational conclusions
+as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in
+drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery
+would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed
+disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery
+unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the
+way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level
+save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that
+he was standing over her, and her heart almost stopped. He said, "I
+think we're just coming into Edinburgh." There was no reason why she
+should feel chilled and desolate when he said that. She must be going
+out of her mind.
+
+And he, since she had shown by the simplicity of her movements that she
+was not afraid of him, was quite happy.
+
+He could see the picture of himself sitting beside the sleeping child as
+if it were printed in three colours on glossy paper. But he was a little
+troubled lest she had walked too far, and as they went up the stone
+steps from the station to Princes Street he bent over her and asked in a
+tone of tenderness that he enjoyed using, "Are you tired?"
+
+"Oh, very tired," said Ellen, drooping her head, and aping a fatigue
+greater than anything she had ever felt in all her young life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I
+
+
+Mr. Philip was crossing Princes Street when he saw them standing in the
+white circle under the electric standard by the station steps. The
+strong light fell on them like a criticism, and it seemed to him brazen
+the way they stood there being so handsome that the passers-by turned
+about to stare at them. Doubtless, since folks were such fools, they
+were whispering that the two made a fine pair. Surely it was the vilest
+indecency that there, under his very eyes, that great hulking chap from
+Rio bent his head and spoke to Ellen, and she answered him?
+
+"She's standing there making herself as conspicuous as if she were a
+street girl!" he screamed to himself, and other shouts filled his ears,
+and he became aware that a cursing driver had pulled up his horse a foot
+away and that the loafers at the kerb were lifting jeering cries. He
+charged it one more offence to Ellen's account that she had caused him
+to make a fool of himself, and vowed he would never think of her again,
+and ran among the people to see where she had gone. Yaverland was
+leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now
+nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did
+not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and
+a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet
+treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised
+with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this
+was anybody but Ellen--Ellen, who was far different from every other
+woman in the world and more desirable. She slowly turned, as if her
+spirit had felt this rage at the fact of her running at her heels, and
+wished to have it out with him. He gripped his stick and raised a hand
+to hide his working mouth, and waited for the moment when she would see
+his face, but it did not come.
+
+The man Yaverland had put out his great ham of a hand and hailed a cab.
+When Mr. Philip tried to stop a cab he usually had to run alongside it,
+and often the driver was most impudent, but this swaggering bully
+checked the thing on the instant, and handed in Ellen and drove off in
+style as if he was a duke with his duchess in their own carriage. What
+did they want in a cab anyway? He followed the black trundling square on
+its spidery wheels as it turned round by the Register House to cross the
+North Bridge, and imagined the fine carryings on they were doubtless
+having in the dark in there. He called Ellen a name he had not thought
+of before.
+
+There was nothing to be done about it. He stood for a while at the
+railing of that strange garden of concrete walks and raised parterres
+and ventilating-shafts that lies at this end of Princes Street, built on
+the roof of the sunk market. Its rectilinear aspect pleased him. It was
+not romantic, the gates were locked, and one could be sure that there
+were no lovers trysting there. Presently he moved along towards the West
+End, keeping still on the side of the street where there were no men and
+girls prancing about and grinning at each other like dirty apes under
+the lights, but only empty gardens with locked gates. What had those two
+been doing? They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very
+long journey it must have been dark before they started. They had been
+in the country alone together when it was quite dark. There came to him
+memories of sounds he had once heard when walking through a twilit wood,
+the crackling of twigs, a little happy cry of distress, and again the
+crackling of twigs; he had been compelled by something, which was not
+specially in him but was a part of the damned way life went, to stand
+and listen, though he knew it was not decent. He saw before him Ellen's
+face lying white on her spilt red hair, and it added to his anguish that
+he could not see it clearly, but had to peer at this enraging vision
+because he could not make out what her expression would be. He had seen
+her look a thousand ways during these last few weeks when she had kept
+on drawing his attention to her with her simpering girl's tricks, but he
+could not imagine how she would look then. It seemed as if she were
+defying his imagination as she defied him every day in the office, and
+he turned his mind away from the matter in a frenzy, but began soon to
+wonder what those two had been doing. They had come in by train. Unless
+they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before
+they started....
+
+He knew he must not go on like this, and looked round him. He had passed
+the classic portico of the Art Gallery and was walking now by the wilder
+section of the gardens, where the street lights shone back from the
+shining leaves of bushes and made them look like glazed paper, and with
+their glare made the trees behind seem such flat canvas trees as they
+set about the stage at theatres when there is need for a romantic glade
+for a lovers' meeting. How often had Ellen met Yaverland?
+
+He ran across the road. It would be better among the people. It was not
+so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were. Everybody
+in the world was happy except him. No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were
+just bursting with merriment in that cab. Would they be at home yet? She
+would be telling him all the office jokes. Well, she might, for all he
+cared. He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip
+Hop-o'-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn't give a straw for it. He
+stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to
+bottom of its window with strings of actresses' photographs, and stood
+there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an
+exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that
+indicated the glittering facades of these charmers' smiles, the milky
+smoothness of their bean-fed femininity. Ah, these were the really fine
+women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin
+slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne. Who
+would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the
+world?
+
+But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so
+beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she
+insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who
+had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience
+that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such
+as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller
+than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He
+hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and
+began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his
+mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness
+of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of
+contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and
+what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social
+contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still
+until one had finished swearing at her.
+
+But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that
+Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would
+have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she
+had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in
+Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among
+the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one
+can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside
+the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found
+it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so
+ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage
+of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen
+without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one
+did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at
+one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He
+had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side
+of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she
+took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an
+iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.
+Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not
+been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office
+fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and
+a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had
+fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men. She had been a
+cruel beast. For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might
+have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering
+things so loud. Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to
+those depths.
+
+He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the
+decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense
+to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved
+accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could
+not come to harm. But that would not alter the fact that he had once
+come to harm. As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw
+that a "To Let" board had been put up since the morning. He wondered why
+the Allardyces were leaving it. He had been at school with the boys. He
+and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school
+sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy. He
+remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy
+sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved
+in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all
+behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see
+them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his
+body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh,
+giving him a cold, pure feeling. Well, he was not a boy any longer. The
+Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that;
+nothing would be the same again....
+
+The solidity of his father's house, the hall into which he let himself,
+with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting
+of his mother's father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him
+feel better. He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most
+respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset
+about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the
+dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with
+deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings. There was a very
+handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights
+and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on
+the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table. "Mhm!" he sighed
+contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the
+whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.
+
+The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He
+put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was
+immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red
+hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He
+met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak
+to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so,
+but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.
+
+There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from
+top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a
+bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which
+contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary,
+which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a
+manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.
+Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a
+stranded whale, reading the London _Law Journal_ and breathing
+disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when
+in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip
+came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the
+entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr.
+Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking
+this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He
+sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather
+than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only
+sons. But he went at it.
+
+"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."
+
+Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the
+faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"
+
+"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just
+seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from
+Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."
+
+"What for should they not?"
+
+"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of
+night."
+
+"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn
+over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet.
+Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs
+we shouldn't be long."
+
+"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He
+forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like
+that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."
+
+At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were
+still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a
+good girl, Philip," he said.
+
+The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those
+inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew,
+where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and
+unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any
+mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial
+tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were
+his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.
+There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his
+urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the
+onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If
+she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her,
+father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"
+
+Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the
+discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could
+surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned
+towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to
+Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up
+at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a
+word."
+
+It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father,
+thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office
+discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he
+said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He
+ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had
+always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her
+conduct....
+
+
+II
+
+The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk
+was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was
+sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and
+staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance
+entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue
+overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and
+the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk
+hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at
+anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in
+Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she
+had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew
+she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still
+knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be
+looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting
+Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the
+desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella
+Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like
+the hand of a young man.
+
+But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose
+the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention
+began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony,
+the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay
+athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when
+I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every
+room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a
+caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it
+like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan
+is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my
+own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I
+keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with
+a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the
+progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright
+head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his
+thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.
+
+"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not
+like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both
+very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be
+sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she
+was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I
+had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh
+that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin
+who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a
+suitable marriage."
+
+He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which
+although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have
+behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors
+which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the
+gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could
+turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he
+had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns'
+love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to
+passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had
+persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the
+high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny
+warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening
+years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety
+darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in
+moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been
+to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been
+to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could
+reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her
+who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady
+young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all
+his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.
+
+But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away
+when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to
+marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered
+how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head
+and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she
+forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to
+make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after
+all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed
+himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a
+time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she
+had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark
+eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though
+tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her
+cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such
+modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a
+capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If
+she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would
+have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had,
+although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his
+first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm,
+and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But
+Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.
+
+His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses
+that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been
+the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking
+over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had
+risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear
+her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest
+pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though
+quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl
+must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that
+proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her
+sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things
+were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had
+been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be
+young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and
+know no after-life.
+
+No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one
+depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and
+orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must
+settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is
+quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely
+with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us.
+But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He
+rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs
+with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.
+
+And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were
+going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had
+waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when
+Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had
+gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any
+way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited
+her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She
+had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say
+good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the
+dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look
+that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face,
+which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with
+interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive
+glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts,
+and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some
+imagination that had given him pleasure.
+
+She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from
+him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it
+was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The
+only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking
+walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her
+mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though
+everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy
+terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was
+just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress
+her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said
+courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all
+night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become
+ringing proclamations of indifference.
+
+Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that,
+though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see
+one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a
+telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had
+asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead.
+Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet
+very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely
+action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil
+to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an
+infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by
+which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which
+he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her
+hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as
+if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so
+that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would
+draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think
+so malignantly of one who had been so kind--so much kinder than anybody
+else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she
+knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that
+Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago
+she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she
+saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex,
+her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her
+that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of
+madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her
+cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the
+quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way
+with derision, of Mr. Philip.
+
+He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"
+
+Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity
+he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told
+him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is
+nobody ready to give me work."
+
+He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"
+
+She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale,
+and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that
+she should have to live in this world where everyone was either
+inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers
+that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them
+at once."
+
+For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and
+at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an
+ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate.
+A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and
+said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude,
+but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his
+hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands
+from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had
+need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were
+doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could
+just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But
+it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"
+
+Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway
+under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the
+strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied
+that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you
+please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to
+speak to you this afternoon?"
+
+"He usually does," replied Ellen.
+
+"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial
+an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth
+puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held
+in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily,
+making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about
+to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign
+of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to
+it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt
+at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to
+be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered
+at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have
+come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"
+
+She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her
+still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the
+trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had
+dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me?
+Whoever's been complaining--and no doubt if your clients once began at
+that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock
+gun--it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm
+practically infallible."
+
+"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing.
+"Perhaps we might call it your play."
+
+He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick
+whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn
+near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making
+wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in
+darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown
+indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his
+features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything
+about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head
+because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with
+all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville,
+a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have
+been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on
+Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist
+chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving
+away. I won't tell you"--he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and
+became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before
+he speaks of evil--"what the client made of it all." And then he bent
+again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in
+an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous
+sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but
+which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and
+she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a
+satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she
+continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this
+misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her
+crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.
+
+But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had
+spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the
+serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her
+tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her
+face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled
+surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably
+precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that
+if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out
+of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to
+a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was
+defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to
+destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it
+was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble
+and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same
+persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and
+planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his
+efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count
+that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety
+was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me
+to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk
+the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my
+time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as
+if she was playing a jig.
+
+He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously,
+"The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now,
+if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through
+her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a
+misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which
+falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the
+recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of
+foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was
+the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could
+effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it
+was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being
+nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had
+talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed
+him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently
+to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his
+shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into
+a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of
+madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that
+in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing.
+For of course it could not be so.
+
+Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my
+wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as
+men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of
+craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no
+mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned
+page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that
+it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always
+gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she
+had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of
+Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in
+her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,
+which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting
+any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt
+in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the
+side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic
+lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding
+bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a
+lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the
+client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes
+Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it
+was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and
+another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and
+flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,
+the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with
+waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and
+tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy
+like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for
+his dealings with his wife's money....
+
+But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one
+thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.
+"Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I
+spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a
+shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months
+to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think
+she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping
+undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were
+just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had
+had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out,
+though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because
+the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a
+quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to
+her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with
+her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her?
+They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man
+on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she
+hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his
+lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she
+rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was
+suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if
+there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string
+was snapping separately.
+
+"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself
+remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the
+world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise.
+"There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to
+sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so
+you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just
+for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had
+been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine,
+which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly
+unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series
+of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the
+dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way,
+and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the
+heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood
+arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by
+the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up
+again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee
+men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought
+proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the
+tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood
+such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.
+It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically
+and mentally.
+
+She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.
+But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on,
+masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of
+that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in
+strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with
+extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running
+red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every
+way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than
+she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast
+for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.
+
+Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate
+adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges
+and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would
+take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women,
+hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage,
+who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try
+to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she
+perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.
+When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would
+have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the
+mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house
+on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a
+furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private
+system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a
+key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in
+one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With
+perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the
+garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as
+monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with
+weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick
+his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor;
+he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands
+of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the
+white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the
+creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken
+roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and
+dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark
+ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience.
+Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....
+
+All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or
+had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step
+was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not
+look up from the table.
+
+"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."
+
+She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he
+had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been
+talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size
+that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other
+hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought
+she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she
+said mournfully.
+
+"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put
+in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly?
+I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let
+me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not
+know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked
+with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage
+on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his
+cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence.
+"Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box
+as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian
+and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must
+be sickening for something."
+
+"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger
+stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her
+hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with
+eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a
+woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish
+James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity
+with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with
+pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and
+purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point
+and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his
+chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant
+occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and
+distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this
+creditable pity.
+
+"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."
+
+She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."
+
+"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could
+also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into
+the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love
+may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing
+under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets
+describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy,
+and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it
+deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is
+just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just
+luck....
+
+"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."
+
+Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a
+client."
+
+He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away.
+All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle
+things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on
+doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which
+did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr.
+Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the
+long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The
+girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of
+life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus
+assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed,
+quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and
+at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a
+child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could
+not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and
+tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell
+you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes
+among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"
+
+"Och, you make fun of me--!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger
+stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not
+bite it.
+
+"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing
+seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish
+pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion,
+until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and
+got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this
+delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little
+of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that
+fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a
+wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that
+particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has
+no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."
+
+Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure
+as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say
+that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad,
+though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking
+arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a
+great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling.
+"The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars
+and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled
+brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but
+wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It
+flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat
+and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see
+what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must
+admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are
+on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would
+not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she
+started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish
+tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger
+stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to
+gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger
+when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back
+for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll
+have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the
+colour...."
+
+While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers,
+the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and
+rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over
+a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds.
+When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of
+soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick
+to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being,
+and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was
+completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life
+was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now
+she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair,
+which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the
+weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable
+women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the
+same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her
+coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that
+people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions
+that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to
+have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.
+
+To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you
+women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with
+the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a
+fine piece in the _Scotsman_ this morning about one of your Suffragettes
+standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would
+think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing
+slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra
+ladylike, I'm sure."
+
+"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith--"
+
+"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he
+sits for Fife."
+
+"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady,
+who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's _Votes for Women_.
+She's a beautiful girl."
+
+"I doubt it, Nelly."
+
+"I'll bring the photo then!"
+
+"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully,
+watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married
+if she is so beautiful?"
+
+"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen,
+admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I
+heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder,
+yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters
+have to be carried out on stretchers."
+
+"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James,
+and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her
+speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.
+
+"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite
+enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while
+we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the
+Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my
+teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't
+admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."
+
+"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his
+eyes on her face.
+
+"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she
+answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her
+arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had
+begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking
+of Yaverland.
+
+She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with
+a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with
+which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off
+her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise,
+and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and
+began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly
+justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it
+until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It
+is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an
+unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is
+performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by
+dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words
+sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance
+and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was
+not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this
+fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his
+mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual
+in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and
+watch his typist dancing.
+
+But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away
+her breath.
+
+She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass,
+and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful
+lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is
+always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as
+soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the
+window-seat and smiled back at the old man.
+
+"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as
+the great Dr. Johnson says."
+
+But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make
+time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was
+just a rude old thing."
+
+"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."
+
+"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked
+with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and
+indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in
+your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion
+drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs.
+Thrale when the poor body married again."
+
+"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a
+substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."
+
+"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way
+they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And
+hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if
+they were blunt wise ones--that's not sense. And if it were, what's the
+good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on
+your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you
+dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it.
+One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There
+are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get
+romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on
+the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people--masked
+Touaregs--"
+
+"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a
+pairfect salad of foreign pairts."
+
+It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both
+sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and
+etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I
+should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal
+spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go
+there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and
+went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de
+Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house
+where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.
+"And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the
+big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens,
+and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats.
+I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?--if I would wear dead
+things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be
+nice, however rich I was--ways that don't affect me very much, so that
+they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I
+always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and
+jaguars. And--"
+
+"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your
+heart to a keeper at the Zoo."
+
+"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you
+needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he
+steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the
+crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was
+working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some
+other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He
+is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come
+natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said
+nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."
+
+"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling
+stones gather no moss, I've heard."
+
+Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of
+money. He can beat you even at your own game."
+
+Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking
+round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it
+contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And
+what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."
+
+"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.
+
+He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his
+stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not
+do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy.
+"He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."
+
+She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."
+
+Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched.
+The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the
+day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if
+they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned
+unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked
+sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away
+from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the
+prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any
+appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling
+intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a
+conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was
+morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain,
+that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For
+Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed
+possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion
+in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two
+establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so
+satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to
+take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things
+he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going
+to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their
+good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece
+of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him
+to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity
+of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness
+which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside
+the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives
+himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked
+back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the
+little helpless working-girl.
+
+He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and
+offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give
+you pleasure when I bought them."
+
+One would always get her that way.
+
+Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove.
+"Oh, Mr. James!"
+
+"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've
+been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"
+
+"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."
+
+"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am
+too free with my tongue."
+
+"Oh, Mr. James!"
+
+"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go
+your own way--"
+
+"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at
+the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as
+sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the
+spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you
+are very beautiful."
+
+She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"
+
+"Aye," he said, "beautiful."
+
+For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand
+on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were
+focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity
+that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a
+little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.
+
+"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.
+
+"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National
+Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing?
+I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an
+actress. Tell me, which am I like?"
+
+"You're like both. That's where you score."
+
+She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"
+
+"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."
+
+She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she
+were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if,
+indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.
+
+"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.
+
+"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on
+straight?"
+
+"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've
+never looked at yourself before."
+
+She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up
+and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.
+
+"Are you not beautiful?" he said.
+
+"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and
+stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done
+something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In
+evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux
+Camelias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan--a big fan of
+ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost
+gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that
+is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I
+suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the
+plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I
+not?"
+
+"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James,
+"and her you'd better with your tongue."
+
+"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't
+matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like
+Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's
+merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I
+am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure
+I'll do?"
+
+"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.
+
+She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual
+mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh
+dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay.
+"What nonsense we're talking! Do--for what? It's all pairfectly
+ridiculous--as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so
+physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too
+quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit,
+abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but
+abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the
+mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit
+buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She
+stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she
+were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than
+they had ever been before, because she was holding them with
+consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her
+frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in
+silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with
+a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that
+there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat
+of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and
+then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding
+herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were
+clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.
+
+"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half
+from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to
+this interesting suffering of hers.
+
+Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on
+her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's
+very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"
+
+Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're
+talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice
+sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"
+
+She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief.
+"Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell
+back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking,
+shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head
+fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she
+pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this
+office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had
+November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She
+pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if
+she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"
+
+"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.
+
+She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had
+boasted about something that could not come true, that would be
+horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only
+the young can feel.
+
+Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had
+to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating
+silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."
+
+At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot
+at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy,
+and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her
+chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her
+hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression.
+She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a
+schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had
+married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her
+manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was
+trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her
+mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She
+caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this
+pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the
+window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if
+the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a
+negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the
+bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of
+wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what
+it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid
+on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she
+must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark.
+Surely it's time I was away home?"
+
+There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past
+four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James
+cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a
+bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so
+terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing
+his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella
+Kingan suffered thus?
+
+"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the
+hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and
+tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried,
+she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things
+always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as
+she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not
+alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.
+Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the
+blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in
+this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac
+words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their
+brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose,
+that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting
+strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the
+bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.
+At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed
+with hate. He had brought all this upon her.
+
+And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring
+endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as
+to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the _tempo
+rubato_ and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no
+more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the
+wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....
+
+She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his
+presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent
+accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie?
+Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."
+
+"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the
+doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all
+right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was
+not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well
+be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and
+forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!"
+she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm
+doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"
+
+He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"
+
+"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into
+the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door
+of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran
+down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.
+
+
+III
+
+More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been
+crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she
+had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights
+in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a
+cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture
+does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and
+called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called
+that her mother had that morning said something about spending the
+afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again,
+"Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out
+angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at
+the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was
+perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to
+her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the
+caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff
+tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking
+queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she
+had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to
+the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the
+breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and
+carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in
+digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her
+heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible
+derider.
+
+"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped.
+"Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up
+the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human
+beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get
+myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the
+Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a
+time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk
+and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing
+at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she
+had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the
+larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam
+her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had
+always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being
+chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it
+liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being
+glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an
+exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that
+flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a
+violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was
+silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common
+and precious too.
+
+She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken
+with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the
+touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that
+she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not
+grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully,
+putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my
+strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what
+they've lost...."
+
+The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her
+buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she
+knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only
+because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to
+leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures
+of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp
+brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no
+more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and
+moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the
+plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of
+departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was
+the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could
+imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name
+were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.
+
+Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather
+than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she
+meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare
+plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when
+they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running
+up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River
+Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark
+glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green
+fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss
+that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep
+river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory
+tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat
+and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river,
+overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel,
+weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached
+ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff
+movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired
+merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of
+its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows
+leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were
+somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to
+notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one
+need! Ah, but it was now.
+
+If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be
+impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall
+across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers
+because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of
+the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought
+of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so
+rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled
+with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart.
+She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight,
+that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world
+and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this
+moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster
+the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put
+on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and
+greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks.
+She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....
+
+Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it
+was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived
+there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate
+opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and
+apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed
+deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door
+and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet;
+her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if
+there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.
+
+His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was,
+and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither
+greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down
+into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her
+eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels
+standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver
+rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as
+they had always looked on any night.
+
+"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand
+closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of
+the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.
+
+"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love
+you."
+
+Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.
+
+"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till,
+feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're
+getting wet! Darling, let us go in."
+
+When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark,
+and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze
+he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of
+escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But
+he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and
+drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his
+hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat
+across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call
+me little? I am not little!"
+
+He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his
+fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and
+yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and
+terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not
+know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have
+countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich
+colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going
+to be of some high kind of glory.
+
+He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love
+me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she
+listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he
+pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel
+of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of
+women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to
+make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists;
+they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills
+or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and
+pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face
+wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was
+beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his
+passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the
+sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me,"
+was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She
+held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find
+that she too was whispering.
+
+"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to
+love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle
+tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She
+loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to
+see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she
+loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts
+the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had
+confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep
+way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told
+you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without
+touching you. Please ... please...."
+
+Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on
+her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had
+ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never
+thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when,
+between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was
+going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her)
+as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit
+water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on
+marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer,
+soft as the south wind....
+
+But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard,
+interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her
+mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever
+after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more
+subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms
+still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the
+strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage,
+of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things.
+Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another
+on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would
+always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not
+quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it
+was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was
+so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of
+his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish
+that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a
+little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an
+ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.
+
+A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become
+linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed
+under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose
+convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and
+depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose
+unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was
+as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung
+herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her
+happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there
+little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had
+always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became
+more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became
+less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of
+lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of
+his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity:
+"Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."
+
+They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The
+clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little
+room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.
+
+Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.
+
+"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball
+of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've
+ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself
+about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he
+was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down
+through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you
+... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his
+fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily
+and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood
+between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking
+the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy cafe table; men bent forward on
+their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men
+who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their
+graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a
+horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the
+filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which
+it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely
+necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk
+at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous
+heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.
+
+"Ellen--you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that
+comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that
+doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed
+you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And
+yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to
+say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could
+beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to
+watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's
+all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved,
+that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped
+dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as
+your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I
+am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."
+
+He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first
+night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart
+pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.
+
+"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic.
+I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love
+God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them
+to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has
+no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear
+prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and
+women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like
+it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which
+he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But
+there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love
+changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves
+up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some
+woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary
+women. _Vin Ordinaire._ Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female
+stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the
+spell--you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are
+the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for
+just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."
+
+He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so
+great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that
+nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he
+feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity,
+since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this
+richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it
+made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for
+lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it
+had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to
+look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of
+his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his
+inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to
+make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against
+fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick
+sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more
+lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so
+little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself
+nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic
+change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his
+life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same
+revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though
+within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no
+reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover;
+but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of
+disloyalty to some fair standard.
+
+He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as
+an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been
+blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a
+severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an
+accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped
+unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth
+and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as
+if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to
+justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which
+showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of
+those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful
+interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely
+things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to
+him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a
+thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her
+again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me!
+I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested
+love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a
+lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the
+sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"
+
+She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her
+gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you
+think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're
+not miserable, are you?"
+
+"Sometimes. I have been lately."
+
+"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong--and
+victorious! But why?"
+
+"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."
+
+"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of
+organisation," she gravely told him.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken
+particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to
+the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there,
+and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you
+go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do,
+although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of
+having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what
+it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of
+one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes
+one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come
+again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on
+to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he
+had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were
+thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The
+sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers.
+You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that
+in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you
+that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a
+garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what
+you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their
+branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they
+grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very
+edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look
+past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you.
+Dearest, when can we get married?"
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a
+wife?"
+
+He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep
+two."
+
+She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't
+divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston
+say so."
+
+He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I
+could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of
+things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"
+
+"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...."
+She looked down, weighing grave things.
+
+"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I
+will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to
+make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let
+you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and
+whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."
+
+She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her
+lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.
+
+"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure
+about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got.
+Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole
+worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls,
+stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of
+disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect
+surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was
+not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with
+precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with
+the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of
+organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for
+his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman
+fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who
+had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before
+the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her
+quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at
+last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory
+that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were
+stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of
+her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he
+went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money.
+Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great
+commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one
+considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure
+science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied
+science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got
+her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that
+sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex
+at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."
+
+She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?"
+she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why
+isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"
+
+"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of
+being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money.
+I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the
+conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's
+game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge--the same kind
+of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a
+person by being with them all the time and loving them very much.
+Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the
+pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But,
+dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to
+marry me."
+
+"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am
+marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will
+know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if
+you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."
+
+"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't
+you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am!
+Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if
+he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were
+still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of
+which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any
+case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you,
+how little I deserve you."
+
+"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd
+been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself
+to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his
+eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer,
+living in a house with you, won't it?"
+
+He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling
+her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was
+outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had
+hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to
+him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the
+light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so
+real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as
+terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a
+helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again--for he knew she
+did not like him to say it!--such a little thing. He remembered, with a
+sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had
+sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the
+human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how
+he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated
+Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for
+the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men
+sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the
+way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some
+special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that
+lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.
+He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi'
+our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to
+see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was
+evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a
+world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest
+you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon
+day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed
+succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.
+
+Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality,
+felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met
+her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in
+the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old
+men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white.
+"What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow
+to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish
+James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry.
+"Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew
+well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll
+have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had
+thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on
+perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland
+sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the
+narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.
+
+It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its
+days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as
+some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had
+arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid
+fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks,
+Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house--he rolled his tongue round
+the loneliness repellently--had neither sent the cheque on to her nor
+asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called
+Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of
+property"--it was evident that he admired such--saw a prospect of
+getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing
+well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was,"
+and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and
+alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an
+eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.
+
+"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day,
+looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable
+unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find
+out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was
+abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and
+geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing
+standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what--she
+called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!--I kenned there was not her like
+under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her
+on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been
+amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing
+aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her
+mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court
+on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which
+she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that
+keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like
+to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?"
+Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her
+fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate
+about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here,
+as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable
+air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry
+laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a
+nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its
+troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."
+
+Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad
+concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie
+alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been
+overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man.
+Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion
+that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He
+had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it
+stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her
+disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could
+pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could
+step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he
+savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the
+sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must
+be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money?
+Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking
+of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had
+risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike
+because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've
+been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by
+the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching
+his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity.
+Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his
+back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the
+world.
+
+Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her
+delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought
+of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her
+live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its
+primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more
+experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine
+white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny
+had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to
+miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be
+played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a
+role. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very
+clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His
+heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have
+been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of
+concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this
+before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he
+wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of
+eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that
+his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life
+to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out
+loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow
+wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in
+gratitude, and found her looking at him.
+
+"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking
+that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking
+down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."
+
+The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to
+take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh
+goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him
+from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on
+her bosom. "I want--I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be
+good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a
+religion.
+
+They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee
+and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one
+foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then
+she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands
+behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr.
+Gladstone!
+
+Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird,
+appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen!
+And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr.
+Yaverland into the parlour!"
+
+"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a
+guilty little girl.
+
+Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an
+instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never
+do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to
+marry me."
+
+Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice
+at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at
+the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on
+the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he
+noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful
+to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her
+life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must
+live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent
+allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.
+
+Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far
+as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."
+
+Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet
+about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because
+now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!
+
+"Let me marry her soon," he said.
+
+She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had
+said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."
+
+"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.
+
+She became tragic.
+
+"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house
+at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you.
+Obviously you can't stand this climate."
+
+She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together
+having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well.
+I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into
+memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always
+practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man
+than anyone has allowed."
+
+They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its
+honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly,
+"Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went
+out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."
+
+"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland--maircy me, what shall I call
+you now?"
+
+"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."
+
+"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one
+would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing!
+Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I
+wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take
+Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."
+
+"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly.
+It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R--Richard, will you take her
+into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not
+hear?"
+
+"Ellen dear!"
+
+"Away now!"
+
+"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the
+best tablecloth after the mending--and there's nothing but cod-roes, and
+you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away,
+dear--you'll make Richard feel awkward--"
+
+Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she
+knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.
+
+
+IV
+
+He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to
+her three times.
+
+_"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute
+of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the
+sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red
+hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds,
+and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the
+most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every
+moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a
+waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now
+I do--that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima,
+you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you;
+we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd
+light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your
+beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my
+lovely red-haired Ellen...."_
+
+And she had written to him twice....
+
+_"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what
+you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the
+library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping
+her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as
+hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically
+nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Shelley and Byron. But
+their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please
+come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did
+you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling
+there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of
+life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not
+believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there
+must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one
+another. Do please come soon...."_
+
+Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and illustrated papers for
+the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.
+Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought
+Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three
+dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he
+saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind
+deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out
+to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw
+extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women
+living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the
+lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.
+Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that
+Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and
+unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the
+door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an
+amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant
+hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of
+the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a
+fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons
+convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase
+creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out
+at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her
+face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in
+lank, curved strands about her shoulders.
+
+She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a
+crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.
+They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."
+
+"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I
+knocked that it was diphtheria she had."
+
+"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with
+wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd
+again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to
+think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in
+her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed
+her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick
+away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the
+staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses.
+"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."
+
+"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."
+
+"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.
+Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."
+
+"That be damned."
+
+"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled
+into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered
+in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"
+Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than
+any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her
+so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked
+so wee!"
+
+"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her
+so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his
+maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him,
+and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of
+the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no
+sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family
+now. You might have let me do that!"
+
+"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you
+see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's
+no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have
+been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was
+her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme
+poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury
+but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the
+beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've
+told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six
+weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all
+the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful
+tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call
+on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her
+mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the
+slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and
+gathered her closely to him.
+
+"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.
+
+"You look very beautiful."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."
+
+"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck
+with a large horn button anything but decent."
+
+"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm
+past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother
+her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning
+for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for
+my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like,
+though doubtless it would do me good to know."
+
+"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back
+the first thing in the morning."
+
+"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness.
+("Ye've got--ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me
+feel all--all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me
+up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully
+before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appetite even when the
+Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work
+against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just
+Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you!
+There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that
+mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her
+terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was
+sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years
+ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot
+think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The
+doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry.
+She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You
+go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the
+kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have
+heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."
+
+"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of
+Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go
+off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."
+
+"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come
+with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like
+a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal
+Family."
+
+"But why must you go out?"
+
+"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they
+give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and
+every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health
+Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill,
+friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,'
+'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be
+amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for
+worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."
+
+"But, my God, can't you telephone?"
+
+"No, of course not. They can't do that in these institutions. They'd
+have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But
+it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I
+never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the
+old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful
+thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although
+she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!"
+She passed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging
+down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the
+table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with
+milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that
+was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great
+grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing
+and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress
+in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just
+wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she
+never got one. Illustrated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing
+intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a
+great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages,
+clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I
+expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."
+
+Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in
+her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't
+I go and look at this board?"
+
+"No. I want to go myself."
+
+"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some
+place in Princes Street."
+
+"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying
+good-night to Mother."
+
+They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on
+to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.
+She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and
+stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring
+noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just
+lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently
+she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must
+go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing
+in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird
+might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with
+gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose
+you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you
+can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to
+turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not
+handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped
+her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going
+to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there,
+shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.
+
+"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."
+
+"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's
+easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But
+mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his
+letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets
+old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be
+able to keep it up?"
+
+She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her
+parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh
+Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of
+deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the
+persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious
+gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It
+was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.
+
+He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things
+much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll
+be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet
+there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for
+you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I
+have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ...
+I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...
+something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it
+communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.
+
+They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.
+He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that
+to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she
+was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and
+trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found
+pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind
+region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth
+in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such
+fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.
+
+At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they
+made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it
+travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of
+Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of
+coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since
+there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their
+minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church
+like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is
+doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than
+precious stones.
+
+So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women
+are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern
+women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of
+languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North
+was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their
+bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such
+sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him
+for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so
+sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme
+passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would
+provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he
+had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen
+during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been,
+he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising
+things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen
+would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he
+realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and
+therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by
+telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for
+he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which
+pain surely could not live.
+
+"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it
+you were thinking of saying?"
+
+He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell
+you about myself."
+
+She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her
+heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will
+know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything
+disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted
+that till you met me you were a bad character."
+
+"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother
+and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it,
+and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor
+little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old
+story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with.
+We've got our own lives to lead, thank God!"
+
+She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted,
+and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something
+that you ought to tell me!"
+
+He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm
+illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, God,
+it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She
+probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his
+deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence
+there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him
+want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't
+married to each other...."
+
+"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's
+silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand
+gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the
+others twit you with it?"
+
+Oh, God, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when
+they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."
+
+"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is
+always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."
+
+He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage
+meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable
+they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman
+in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she
+herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to
+cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to
+have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that
+everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards
+it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If
+she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that
+solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred
+saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which
+was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking
+of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not
+married to my father...."
+
+But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch
+of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel
+of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of
+physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before
+hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either
+not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had
+reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers,
+and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a
+merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and
+undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might
+have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so
+wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There
+appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps
+the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which
+represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff
+and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a
+little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She
+wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth
+and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what
+is she like?"
+
+"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she
+was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity
+as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday
+papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that.
+Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as
+tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea
+of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was
+saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite
+uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might
+have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at
+once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of
+himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the
+Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell
+her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he
+could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned
+his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt
+himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar
+reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to
+his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not
+marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least,
+on her side it was love! On his ... on _his_...."
+
+"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was
+trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow
+it's making it happen all over again...."
+
+This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was
+using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when
+he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for
+the argument of phantom passions in her room, and she opened her eyes
+suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him
+grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand,
+but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly,
+I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the
+ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that
+stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was
+not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found
+fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of
+course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion
+became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel
+of his Ellen.
+
+"Forgive me," he murmured.
+
+"Of course I forgive you."
+
+"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"
+
+"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."
+
+"That's a brave undertaking!"
+
+They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've
+always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing
+I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest
+collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used
+to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her
+tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge.
+Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth
+when it is nearly all bookshops?"
+
+She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her
+breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she
+slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they
+were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with
+drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this
+street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed
+with windows broken or hung with rags.
+
+"Isn't this the High Street?"
+
+"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a
+fine Saturday morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the
+Highlanders drilling."
+
+"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"
+
+"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most
+likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only
+taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He
+said I would be just a fule to worry."
+
+He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops
+that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm.
+"You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this
+awful part."
+
+"Is this it?"
+
+"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her
+number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon
+in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"
+
+After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your
+mother's number was?"
+
+"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that
+white dog!"
+
+His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"
+
+
+V
+
+A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the
+sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and
+they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced
+over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her
+being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her
+mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone
+arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness
+through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel
+drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a
+piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the
+gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to
+Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the
+residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good
+omens.
+
+When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with
+ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told
+herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining
+their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one,
+that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of
+an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that
+her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had
+seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away
+from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen
+behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud
+consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the
+same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the
+danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for
+the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and
+of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that
+fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the
+words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was
+that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds
+employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a
+position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a
+nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she
+perceived that he was going to do something which he should have
+delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and
+his office to these two strangers.
+
+As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm
+in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that
+the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the
+little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was
+definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits
+made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth,
+were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that
+followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the
+pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on
+lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they
+passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass
+and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran
+into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind,
+private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone;
+down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of
+different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making
+among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.
+
+This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and
+some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people
+should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and
+the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who
+carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could
+be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:
+"You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on
+the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'
+happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty
+without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted
+itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more
+that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the
+speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in
+the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her
+mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably
+well and wearing the moire blouse that she had given her for her
+birthday.
+
+"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door
+that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place
+of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk,
+and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a
+prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not
+see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and
+turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she
+still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being
+rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the
+four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through
+the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind
+but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their
+appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking
+at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they
+saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout
+absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that
+displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now
+convinced her that mother was dying.
+
+There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose
+vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat
+and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall
+and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and
+looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there
+was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin
+body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door
+to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad,
+comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and
+gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly
+come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet
+struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from
+their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work
+if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to
+be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh
+to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to
+that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its
+being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and
+the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising
+doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the
+end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one
+moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which
+dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful
+light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour
+of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman
+parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.
+It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where
+mother was lying.
+
+She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the
+better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She
+wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary
+movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the
+extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.
+"Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."
+
+The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in
+a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence
+and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical
+terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary
+language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary
+dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run
+a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go
+into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see
+her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was
+hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large
+window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs,
+and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a
+richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several
+sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known
+neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather
+enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she
+would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her
+popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable
+but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and
+minimally furnished as this room.
+
+Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of
+stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the
+screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron
+bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen
+but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to
+have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of
+the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was
+for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two
+glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever
+been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and
+about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth,
+there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the
+slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked
+for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end
+of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that
+sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense
+glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some
+inmost branch of a large tree.
+
+"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"
+
+From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to
+make her lips meet, and speak.
+
+"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be
+with you. You needn't speak."
+
+But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so
+remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths
+commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She
+whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."
+
+Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes
+towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.
+At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his
+lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not,
+and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and
+knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He
+said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be
+poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and
+under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.
+Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she
+dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no
+attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be
+together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with
+Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon
+her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It
+struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and
+inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come
+to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the
+stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in
+fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose
+wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great
+glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.
+
+There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though
+attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the
+exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had
+greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy
+pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!"
+She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about
+life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning
+the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother
+dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they
+had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother
+dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made
+a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that
+she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's,
+patted it.
+
+All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and
+spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint
+pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using
+it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure
+would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want
+all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all
+yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed
+from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and
+thither at the call of speculation, told them consoling things. The
+mother's flesh, touching the daughter's, remembered a faint pulse felt
+long ago and marvelled at this splendid sequel, and lost fear. Since the
+past held such a miracle the future mattered nothing. Existence had
+justified itself. The watchers were surprised to hear her sigh of
+rapture. The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in
+the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to
+embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first
+best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.
+
+There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of
+giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup
+of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange
+because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that
+she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to
+first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had
+played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the
+_Student's Song Book_, and they had had several glasses of Stone's
+Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly
+berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a
+wonderful faculty for bursts of gaiety, pure in tone like a blackbird's
+song, which brought out whatever gladness might be latent in any person
+or occasion. As twelve chimed out they had stood in front of the
+chimneypiece mirror and raised their glasses above their heads, singing,
+"Auld Lang Syne" in time with the dancers on the other side of the wall,
+who were making such a night of it that several times the house had
+seemed likely to fall in.
+
+When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses,
+Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I
+was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at
+yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had
+held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome
+mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his
+honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got
+another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms
+like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered
+by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow,
+uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy
+with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been
+greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all
+have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember
+ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much
+admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing
+...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly
+twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of
+an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which,
+since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads
+if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the
+hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are
+about work that springs from aesthetic principles different from their
+own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of
+laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked
+at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was
+somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had
+been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the
+night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.
+
+She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's
+face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any
+gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little
+tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin
+time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling
+every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.
+It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth
+thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and
+on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if
+she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone
+yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into
+a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her
+lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow
+teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the
+tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and
+the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to
+kiss, even though one loved her so much.
+
+Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very
+beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom
+Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited
+girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women
+in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was
+sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl
+in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French
+artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at
+Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a
+portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New
+York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for
+though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more
+out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing
+at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt
+I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to
+his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing
+that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it
+down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed
+Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the
+tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink
+roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had
+often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and
+say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh
+at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."
+
+It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those
+strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred
+Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan
+collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working
+with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was
+intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius,
+and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred
+Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the
+shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a
+diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and
+her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her
+skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and
+setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how
+more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and
+confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile
+of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound
+strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way
+that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick
+silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of
+allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.
+
+Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring
+face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard
+again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but
+immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long
+grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had
+had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt
+was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some
+relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a
+professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred
+to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to
+New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman
+jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased,
+deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she
+had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed
+that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed
+that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She
+remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had
+gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror
+and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a
+woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice
+arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs
+singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").
+
+Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding
+the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done
+to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was
+unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the
+eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be
+tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed
+that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had
+simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that
+she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.
+This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature
+behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had
+thought there were three fixed species of people--the young, the
+middle-aged, and the old--and she had never before realised that young
+people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this
+arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this
+humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind
+passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer
+the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly
+when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as
+if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm
+against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping
+streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news
+that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her
+knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.
+
+She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in
+and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and
+staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen
+perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her
+mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with
+speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach
+into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that
+was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother,
+because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.
+
+Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is
+to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way
+the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never
+have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at
+her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the
+recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and
+had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had
+found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom,
+with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown
+her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she
+had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph
+Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your
+father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure
+Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her
+head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was
+horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the
+nurse proof of proper feelings.
+
+She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with
+her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her
+face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor
+and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that
+the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not
+look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by
+diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the
+mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she
+looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient
+performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like,
+all through life--a good child. She had always walked as if someone in
+authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her
+toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had
+become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she
+had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a
+road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been
+lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were
+innocent.
+
+"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and
+there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted
+feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared
+occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly
+at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny
+darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little
+rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial
+bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go anywhere for a
+good sunset!"
+
+There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had
+watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring
+torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that
+slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers
+that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers'
+weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation.
+The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in
+a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and
+above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had
+winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled
+about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key
+of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady
+awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had
+stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from
+their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and
+fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of
+bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a
+sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her
+own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"
+
+For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen
+remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night,
+though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green
+glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on
+its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not
+suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village
+that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no
+pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal
+with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was
+untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the
+way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of
+beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in
+Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed
+with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their
+quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that
+be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.
+
+But when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery
+ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is
+a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people
+smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and
+when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at
+the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of
+pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in
+pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been
+rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and
+could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any
+bright scrap of that beauty she adored.
+
+Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth
+with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her,
+and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle
+on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a
+handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into
+the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was
+not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops,
+trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very
+poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had
+stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love:
+indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have
+taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were
+harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder
+and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she
+felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from
+companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and
+pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to
+linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the
+free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of
+love.
+
+She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the
+Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin
+projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look
+wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By
+neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of
+negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to
+send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before
+lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of
+little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until
+they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last
+saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not
+quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in
+disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this
+neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said
+to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning
+them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.
+
+How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as
+anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to
+Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had
+broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the
+picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?
+Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical
+presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with
+concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow
+forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow,
+repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ...
+and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of
+telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which
+he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the
+sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious
+charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all
+other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation
+on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection
+of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke,
+too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which
+he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore
+uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with
+his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he
+looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always
+overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner
+for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her
+hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then
+bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly
+administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece
+of female imbecility.
+
+Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she
+guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she
+whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you
+quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and
+showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had
+burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands
+with a fierce, jubilant pressure.
+
+How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool.
+That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she
+could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish,
+but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast
+imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that
+was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give
+its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she
+take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real
+wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She
+had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than
+most professed romantics do.
+
+Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to
+Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses
+and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house.
+He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised
+him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at
+losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but
+I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella."
+At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are
+such a wee darling!"
+
+And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all
+Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things?
+It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though
+it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than
+them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she
+undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good--even divinely good. Life
+had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that
+it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant
+demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child,
+and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her
+hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love
+that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than
+that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a
+little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings
+arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often
+too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest
+possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking
+of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a
+miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!"
+she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother
+got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles?
+Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her.
+It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round
+hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman
+was being allowed to die without having been happy.
+
+"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the
+universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find
+that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she
+cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until
+the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed
+the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold
+hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and
+when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen,
+whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just
+enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.
+
+Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his
+eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.
+
+"Richard, she's going!"
+
+He could find no consolation to give her but a close, unvoluptuous
+embrace. They stood silent, looking at the fire. "Is it not strange,"
+she whispered, "that people really die?"
+
+Richard did not in the least participate in this feeling. He merely
+looked at her with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone
+should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer
+to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not
+tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him,
+though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might
+see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he
+merely bent to kiss her.
+
+"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had
+disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."
+
+But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister
+of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of
+anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he
+should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a
+spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen
+mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it
+was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never
+scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it?
+What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen,
+and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was
+so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."
+
+The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said
+gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."
+
+She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said
+wistfully.
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"May I kiss her?"
+
+"Please don't. It isn't safe."
+
+"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you
+ready?"
+
+As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to
+that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the
+upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all
+you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went
+to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"
+
+"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying
+place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of
+death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in
+electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a
+beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and
+dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.
+
+Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across
+the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in
+sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate
+the plot of the universe. This was a catchment area that drained the
+whole city of terror; and how small it was! Certainly terror was among
+the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking
+they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being
+children of this age, and conscious of humanity's grievance, they
+thought of Him without love. But it was one of the least frequent and
+the most impermanent of His moods. All the people one does not know seem
+to be quite happy. Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally
+closed the story of Mrs. Melville's life, and had to the end shown her
+no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future. It might
+well be that no other life would ever be so grievous. Therefore it was
+with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were
+provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out
+through the iron gates.
+
+The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation. Before
+them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded
+tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the
+hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs;
+and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse
+stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white
+overalls worked among bare trees. Through this grim landscape they
+stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived
+without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going
+to be so glorious.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK TWO
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Now that they had taken the tickets at Willesden, Ellen felt doubtful of
+the whole enterprise. It was very possible that Richard's mother would
+not want her. In fact, she had been sure that Richard's mother did not
+want her ever since they left Crewe. There a fat, pasty young man had
+got in and taken the seat opposite her, and had sat with his pale grey
+eyes dwelling on the flying landscape with a slightly sick, devotional
+expression, while his lips moved and his plump hands played with a small
+cross inscribed "All for Jesus" which hung from his watch-chain.
+Presently he had settled down to rest with his hands folded on his lap,
+but had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his
+waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the
+air. "Mother will laugh when I tell her about that," she said to
+herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead
+six weeks.
+
+This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the
+blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her
+stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers
+henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender
+intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her
+inflexibly honest aesthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's
+letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever,
+because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word
+written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white
+paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But
+their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come
+like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not
+wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject
+of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was
+really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who
+was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them
+merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were
+strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old
+people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running
+Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her
+as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise
+his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in
+favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it
+to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to
+have been economically independent all the days of her life.
+
+It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical
+ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way
+they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack
+and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that
+they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of
+Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career
+became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which
+had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with
+illegitimacy. She prefigured her swarthy and obese.
+
+She got out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told
+to do. The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through
+which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and
+tarnished darkness. She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed
+and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along
+the ground, and who seemed to be seeking so urgently for cabs and
+porters because their meagre lives had convinced them that here was
+never enough of anything to go round. If she and her mother had ever
+come to London on the trip they had always planned, she would have been
+swinging off now to look for a taxi, just like a man; and when she came
+back her mother would have said, "Why, Ellen, I never would have thought
+you could have got one so quickly." Well, that would not happen now.
+She would have grieved over it; but a train far down the line pulled out
+of the station and disclosed a knot of red and green signal lights that
+warmed the eye and thence the heart as jewels do, and at that she was as
+happy as if she were turning over private jewels that she could wear on
+her body and secrete in her own casket. She was absorbed in the sight
+when she heard a checked soft exclamation, and turning about had the
+illusion that she looked into Richard's eyes.
+
+"I am Richard's mother. You are Richard's wife?"
+
+Ellen repeated, "I am Richard's wife," feeling distressed that she had
+said it, since they were not yet married, but aware that to correct it
+would be trivial.
+
+It was strange to look down instead of up at those dark eyes, those
+brows which lay straight black bars save for that slight piratical
+twist, with no intervening arch between them and the dusky eyelids. It
+was strange to hear Richard's voice coming from a figure blurred with
+soft, rich, feminine clothes. It was strange to see her passing through
+just such a moment of impeded tenderness as Richard often underwent.
+Plainly she wanted to kiss Ellen, but was prevented by an intense
+physical reserve, and did not want to shake hands, since that was
+inadequate, and this conflict gave her for a minute a stiff queerness of
+attitude. She compromised by taking Ellen's left hand in her own left
+hand, and giving it what was evidently a sincere, but not spontaneous
+pressure. Then, turning away, she asked, "What about your luggage?"
+
+"I've just this suitcase. I sent the rest in advance. Do you not think
+that's the most sensible way?" said Ellen, in a tone intended to convey
+that she was not above taking advice from an older woman.
+
+Mrs. Yaverland made a vague, purring noise, which seemed to imply that
+she found material consideration too puzzling for discussion, and
+commanded the porter with one of those slow, imperative gestures that
+Richard made when he wanted people to do things. Walking down the
+platform, Ellen wondered why Richard always called her a little thing.
+His mother was far smaller than she was, and broad-shouldered too, which
+made her look dumpy. Her resemblance to Richard became marked again
+when they got into the taxi, and she dealt with the porter and the
+driver with just such quiet murmured commands and dippings into pockets
+of loose change as Richard on these occasions, but Ellen did not find it
+in the least endearing. She was angry that Richard was like that, not
+because he was himself, but because he was this woman's son. When Mrs.
+Yaverland asked in that beautiful voice which was annoyingly qualified
+by terseness as her letters had been, "And how's Richard?" she replied
+consequentially, with the air of a person describing his garden to a
+person who has not one. But Mrs. Yaverland was too distracting to allow
+her to pursue this line with any satisfaction. For she listened with
+murmurs that were surely contented; and, having drawn off her very
+thick, very soft leather gloves, she began to polish her nails, which
+were already brighter than any Ellen had ever seen, against the palms of
+her hands, staring meanwhile out of absent eyes at the sapphire London
+night about them, which Ellen was feeling far too upset to enjoy.
+
+There was a tormenting incongruity about this woman: those lacquered
+nails shown on hands that were broad and strong like a man's; and the
+head that rose from the specifically dark fur was massive and vigilant
+and serene, like the head of a great man. Moreover, she was not in the
+least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up
+the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest
+to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry
+them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where
+one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had
+felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever
+happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from
+the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs
+which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running
+slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which
+makes people perform dramas. And everything about her threatened that
+her performances would be too strange.
+
+She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a
+brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her
+in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not
+Edinburgh. The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the
+yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into
+shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.
+They had stopped outside a florist's, in whose dismantled window a girl
+in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of
+chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls
+almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a
+Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open
+street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding
+herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of
+being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an
+occasion of public rejoicing.
+
+Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind
+plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy _brise-bises_ that were as a
+ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a
+divine shamelessness. It couldn't happen up there. There were simply not
+the people to do it. It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged
+men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, "Catch me
+bringing you here again, Elspeth. It's a nice thing to have your dinner
+with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you
+take," and because young men would as constantly have turned to young
+women with the gasp, "I'm sure I saw father passing," it would have been
+a failure. But here it was a success. The sight was like loud, frivolous
+music. And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up
+to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white
+squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy
+and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of
+gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense
+than the North.
+
+She wanted to sit there quietly, savouring the scene. But Mrs. Yaverland
+said in her terse voice: "I've taken rooms at the Hapsburg for to-night.
+I thought you'd like it. I do myself, because it's near the river. You
+know, we're near the river at Roothing." Ellen could not longer turn her
+attention to the spectacle for wondering why Mrs. Yaverland should
+speak of the Thames as if it were an interesting and important relative.
+It could not possibly be that Mrs. Yaverland felt about the river as she
+felt about the Pentlands, for elderly people did not feel things like
+that. They liked a day's outing, but they always sat against the
+breakwater with the newspaper and the sandwich-basket while one went
+exploring; at least, mother always did. Trying to insert some sense into
+the conversation, she asked politely, "Do you do much boating?" and was
+again baffled by the mutter, "No, it's too far away." Well, if it was
+too far away it could not be near. She was tired by the long day's
+travel.
+
+But the hotel, when they alighted, pleased her. The vast entrance hall,
+with its prodigality of tender rosy light, the people belonging to the
+very best families who sat about in monstrously large armchairs set at
+vast intervals on the lawny carpets, were not in the least embarrassed
+by the publicity of their position and shone physically with well-being
+and the expectation of pleasure; the grandiose marble corridors, the
+splendid version of a lift, and the number of storeys that flashed past
+them, all very much the same, but justifying their monotony by their
+stateliness, like modern blank verse, made her remember solemnly her
+inner conviction that she would some day find herself amid surroundings
+of luxury.
+
+The necessity of looking as if she were used to and even wearied by this
+sort of thing weighed heavily on her, for she felt that it was almost
+dishonour not to express the solemn joy this magnificence was giving
+her. So she stood in the fine room to which Mrs. Yaverland took her, and
+after having resolved that the minute she was left alone she would touch
+the magnificent crimson velvet roses that stood out in high relief all
+over the wallpaper, she felt that she could not graciously withhold
+praise from this which was to be her own special share of the splendour.
+She moved shyly towards Mrs. Yaverland, who had gone to the window and
+was looking down in the night, and said shyly, "This is a very fine
+room," but, she knew, too softly to reach such markedly inattentive
+ears. She stood there awkwardly, feeling herself suspended till this
+woman should take notice of her. If her mother had been with her they
+would have had a room with two beds, and would have talked before they
+went to sleep of the day and its wonderful ending in this grand place.
+She sighed. Mrs. Yaverland turned round.
+
+"Come and look at your view," she said, and raised the sash so that they
+could lean out.
+
+Beneath there was a deep drop of the windless, scentless darkness that
+night brings to modern cities; then a narrow trench of unlit gardens
+obscured by the threadbare texture of leafless tree-tops, then a broad
+luminous channel of roadway, lined with trees whose natural substance
+was so changed by the unnatural light that they looked like toy trees
+made of some brittle composition, and traversed by tramcars glowing
+orange and twanging white sparks from invisible wires with their
+invisible arms; at its further edge a long procession of lights stood
+with a certain pomp along a dark margin, beyond which were black flowing
+waters. To the left, from behind tall cliffs of masonry pierced with
+innumerable windows that were not lit, yet gleamed like the eyes of a
+blind dog, there jutted out the last spans of a bridge, set thickly with
+large lights whose images bobbed on the current beneath like vast yellow
+water-flowers. On another bridge to the right a train was casting down
+on the stream a redness that was fire rather than light. On the opposite
+bank of the river, at the base of black towers, barges softly dark like
+melancholy lay on the different harsher darkness of the water, and
+showed, so sparsely that they looked the richer, a few ruby and emerald
+lights. Above, stars crackled frostily, close to earth, as stars do in
+winter.
+
+"That is the river," said Mrs. Yaverland.
+
+She said it as if she desired to be out of this warmth, standing over
+there by the dark parapet marked by the line of lamps close to the
+flowing waters; as if she would have liked all the beautiful bright
+lights to be extinguished, so that there would be nothing left but the
+dark waters.
+
+Ellen went and sat down on the bed. There was a standard lamp beside it,
+whose light, curbed to a small rosy cloud by a silken shade like a
+fairy's frock, seemed much the best thing for her eyes in the room. She
+was sad that in this new life in England, which had seemed so promising,
+one still had to turn for comfort from persons to things. She was aware
+that wildness such as this, such preferences for walking abroad in the
+chill night rather than sitting in warm rooms, for sterile swift water
+rather than the solid earth that bears the crops and supports the
+cities, are the processes of poetry working in the soul. But it did not
+please her in an older woman. She felt that Mrs. Melville, who would
+have been trotting about crying out at the magnificence of the room,
+would have been behaving not only more conveniently, but more decently,
+than this woman who was now crossing the room and not bringing peace
+with her. Her open coat slipped backwards on her shoulders so that it
+stood out on each side like a cloak worn by a romantic actor striding
+across the stage to the play's climax. The ultimate meaning of her
+expression could be no other than insolence, for it gave sign of some
+preoccupation so strong that the only force which could hold her back
+from speaking of it could be contempt for her hearer. Her face was
+shadowed with a suggestion of strong feeling, which was as unsuitable on
+cheeks so worn as paint would have been.
+
+Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down
+on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a
+movement towards intimacy, and said, "I hope you're not very tired."
+When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the
+words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful
+to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either
+affected or hypocritical. For if that wildness were sincere, and not
+some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English
+were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she
+was doing up Ellen's black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and
+condescension.
+
+It was a pity that she was so very like Richard. When they had gone
+downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the
+plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she
+crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way
+in her resentful recognition of that likeness. She was not, of course,
+so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call "very
+striking-looking." Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at
+once so appropriate and so common. She did not allow herself to
+translate it from commonness and admit that it is a phrase that common
+people use when they want to say a woman's face is the point of
+departure for a fair journey of the imagination. It was true that a
+certain rough imperfection was as definitely a part of her quality as
+perfection was of his, and that there ran from her nose to her mouth
+certain heavy lines that could never at any age befall his flesh with
+its bias towards beauty. But everything that so wonderfully made its
+appearance a reference to romance was here also: that dark skin in which
+it seemed as if the customary pigment had been blended with mystery;
+that extravagance of certain features, the largeness of the eye, the
+luxury of lashes; that manner at once languid and alert, which might
+have been acquired by residence in some country where molten excess of
+fine weather was corrected by gales of adventure. But though so close in
+blood and in seeming to the most beloved, this woman could not be loved.
+She could not possibly be liked. But this was an irrational emotion, and
+Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that
+would justify it.
+
+It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were
+brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders
+that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared
+not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift,
+automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a
+polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. It was evidently a
+habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose,
+for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it,
+although the brows were still sleek. She did it, Ellen told herself with
+a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the
+afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead
+and strums on her knee. It was the only expression the occasion allowed
+for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the
+inordinate beauty of her clothes. They were, she said to herself, using
+a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a
+woman of that age. They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental. The
+very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to
+the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the
+effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she
+was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that
+effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so
+conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to
+accept her middle age. And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her
+colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light
+like amber. Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the
+various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she
+wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever
+about clothes. They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase
+that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a
+pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last
+refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their
+own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat
+seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff
+of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and
+yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was
+sensually heavy with its own richness.
+
+And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows.
+Really, it was terrible that Richard's mother should be so deep in crime
+as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of
+public meetings. She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women
+are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power,
+content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing
+and adorning of it. She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to
+produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest,
+hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life.
+And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and
+saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate:
+
+"You won't like anchovies; those things they're helping you to now."
+
+Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion,
+and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had
+betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and
+then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp
+bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion
+did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes?
+When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she
+answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please."
+She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or
+white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip
+had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking
+almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners
+had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear
+travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her
+lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again
+till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door.
+Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes
+to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."
+
+The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been
+substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with
+observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was
+disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her
+eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought
+she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things
+with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a
+dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the
+darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant
+physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the
+palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when
+she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images
+seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in
+bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had
+always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her
+in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands;
+pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being
+carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed
+deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended
+over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered;
+bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy
+gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks
+and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights
+with the colour of romance. It would have roused her fatigued
+imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand.
+She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure,
+and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the
+expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear,
+though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.
+
+She coughed to attract attention, and then sighed. "It's terrible," she
+declared, taking good care that her voice should travel across the
+table, "to see all these people being happy like this when there are
+millions in want."
+
+Marion set down her wine-glass with a movement that, though her hands
+were clever, seemed clumsy, so indifferent was she to the thing she
+handled and the place she put it in, and looked round the restaurant
+with eyes that were very like Richard's, though they shone from
+bloodshot whites and were not so bright as his, nor so kind; nor so
+capable, Ellen felt sure, of losing all brilliance and becoming
+contemplative, passionate darkness. She said in her rapid, inarticulate
+murmur, "They don't strike me as being particularly happy."
+
+Ellen was taken aback, and said in the tones of a popular preacher,
+"Then what are they doing here--feasting?"
+
+"I suppose they're here because it's on the map and so are they," she
+answered almost querulously. "They'd go anywhere else if one told them
+it was where they ought to be. Good children, most people. Anxious to do
+the right thing. Don't you think?"
+
+Ellen was unprepared for anything but agreement or reactionary argument
+from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched
+in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her
+emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very
+horrid. Her young mouth was convulsed. And then she reminded herself
+that it could not be horrid, for all grown-up people like it, and that
+there had never been any occasion when it was more necessary for her to
+be grown-up, so she continued to drink. Even after several mouthfuls she
+did not like it, but she was then interrupted by a soft exclamation from
+Mrs. Yaverland.
+
+"My dear, this wine is abominable. Don't you find it terribly sour?"
+
+"Well, I was thinking so," said Ellen, "but I didn't like to say."
+
+"It's dreadful. It must be corked."
+
+"Yes, I think it must," said Ellen knowingly.
+
+She called a waiter. "Would you like to try some other wine? I don't
+think I will. This has put me off for the night. No? Good. Two lemon
+squashes, one very sweet."
+
+That was a good idea of Mrs. Yaverland's. The lemon squash was lovely
+when it came, and Ellen had time to drink it while they were eating the
+chicken, so that there was no competitive flavour to spoil the ice
+pudding. While they were waiting for that Mrs. Yaverland smoothed her
+eyebrows once again, and gave her nails one more perfunctory polish, and
+opened her mouth to speak, but caught her breath and shut it again; and
+said, after a moment's silence, "I hope I've ordered the right sort of
+pudding. It's so hard to remember all these irrelevant French names. I
+wanted you to have the one with crystallised cherries. Richard used to
+be very fond of it." She looked round the restaurant more lovingly. "He
+liked this place when he was a boy. We used to come here once or twice
+every holiday and go to a theatre afterwards."
+
+But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that: when he opened his
+mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly,
+"Darling, I do love you." He had done it the very night before, in
+Grand-Aunt Jeannie's parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to
+tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his
+father before he was born. "It was not her fault. My father didn't stand
+by her. He was all right about money. But when he heard about the child,
+he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the
+Colonies. And he didn't come back. So she lost her nerve"; and that he
+had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a
+success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland. She was dying
+to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to
+admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had
+probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but
+because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly,
+"Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?"
+
+The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full
+of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason
+delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered. "How you see through
+me, dear!" she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate,
+charged with an astringent form of love. "All that I wanted to say was
+simply that I am so very glad you have come. Perhaps for reasons that
+you'll consider tiresome of me. But Richard has been so much away, and
+even when he's at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the
+time, that I've often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house,
+who'd talk to me occasionally and be a companion. Perhaps you'll think
+it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much
+older. But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.
+You're eighteen, aren't you?"
+
+"Eighteen past," Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain
+compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen. But
+her birthday had been a fortnight ago.
+
+"And I was nineteen when Richard was born. So you see to me a girl of
+eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling
+everything. So I hope you won't mind if I treat you as an equal." She
+raised her wineglass and looked over its brim at the girl's proud,
+solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour,
+bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other
+woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the
+wineglass down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden
+tone. "I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it
+or not. I knew you'd like it. You see, you get very evasive if you've
+ever been in a position like mine. You have to make servants like you so
+that they won't give notice when they hear the village gossip, because
+you must have a well-run house for your child. You have to make people
+like you so that they will let the children play with yours. So one gets
+into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without
+particularly worrying whether it's sincere. But this I find I really
+mean."
+
+As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who
+had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to
+something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well,
+I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant,"
+she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as
+likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to
+say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one
+another."
+
+Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as
+queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the
+girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give
+Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty
+which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his
+unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether
+Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And
+for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a
+courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a
+present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their
+distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for
+her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced
+voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."
+
+"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about
+herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me
+when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was
+afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that
+I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"
+
+"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint
+of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her
+son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at:
+that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the
+table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think
+you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've
+been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been
+hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on
+Richard and you."
+
+The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!"
+she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that
+when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest
+directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my
+nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and
+stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to
+attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving
+badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"
+
+"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us
+cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're
+surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that
+he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"
+
+Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to
+fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid
+women."
+
+Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion
+that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her,
+and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other
+women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.
+"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"
+
+There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of
+archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves
+me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect,
+the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women
+who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he
+can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went
+to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who
+were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds
+with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the
+soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that
+their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I
+will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd
+infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was
+not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he
+takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But
+I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much
+against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the
+world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but
+they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there
+cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are
+hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and
+fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like
+a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any
+character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.
+Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she
+had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free
+speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in
+late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none
+of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason....
+I'll tell you some time...."
+
+The girl was hurt. Marion bit her lip while she watched her crossly pick
+up her spoon and eat her ice pudding as if it was a duty. "This is like
+old times," she essayed feebly. "I've so often watched Richard eat it.
+He went through various stages with this pudding. When he was quite
+small he used to leave the crystallised cherries to the very last,
+because they were nicest, arranged in a row along the rim of his plate,
+openly and shamelessly. When he went to school he began to be afraid
+that people would think that babyish if they noticed it, and he used to
+leave them among the ice, though somehow they always did get left to
+the last. Then later on he began to side with public opinion himself,
+and think that perhaps there was something soft and unmanly about caring
+so much for anything to eat, so he used to gobble them first of all,
+trying not to taste them very much. Then there came an awful holiday
+when he wouldn't have any at all. That was just before he insisted on
+going to sea. But then he came back--and ever since he's had it every
+time we come here, and now he always leaves the cherries to the last."
+She was now immersed in the story she told; she was seeing again the
+slow magical increase of the small thing she had brought into the world,
+and the variations through which it passed in the different seasons of
+its youth, changing from brown candid gracefulness to a time of sulky
+clumsiness and perpetually abraded knees, and back again to gracefulness
+and willingness to share all laughter, yet ever remaining the small
+thing she had brought into the world. With eyes cast down, trying to
+dissemble her pride, lest the gods should envy, she added harshly, "He
+was quite interesting ... but I suppose all boys go through these
+phases.... I've had no other experiences...."
+
+Ellen was longing to hear what Richard was like when he was a boy, but
+she had been stung by that insolent, smiling murmur, and she could do
+nothing with any statement made by this woman but snarl at her. "No
+other experience?" she questioned peevishly. "I thought Richard said he
+had a half-brother."
+
+There was no longer any pride in Marion's eyes to dissemble. She stared
+at Ellen, and said heavily, as one who speaks concerning the violation
+of a secret, "Did Richard tell you that?" Before the girl had time to
+answer cruelly, "Yes, he tells me everything," she had remembered
+certain things which made her stiffen in her chair and keep her chin up
+and use her eyes as if there still flashed in them the pride which had
+utterly vanished. "Oh, yes," she asserted, in that forced voice, but
+very loudly and deliberately. "I have another son. He's a good boy. His
+name is Roger Peacey. You must meet him one day. I hope you will like
+him." She paused and recollected why they were speaking of this other
+son, and continued, "But, you see, I had nothing to do with him when he
+was a boy."
+
+This struck Ellen as very strange. She went on eating her ice pudding,
+but she cogitated on this matter. Why had this second son been brought
+up away from his mother? Surely that hardly ever happened except when
+there had been a divorce, and a husband whose wife had run away with
+another man was awarded by the courts "the custody of the child." Had
+she not talked of this son in the over-bluff tone in which people talk
+of those to whom they have done a wrong? She was possessed of the fierce
+monogamous passion which accompanies first and unachieved love, that
+loathing of all who are not content with the single sacramental draught
+which is the blood of God, but go heating the body with unblessed
+fermented wines; and she glared sharply under her brows at this woman,
+who after losing Richard's father married another man and then, as it
+appeared, had loved yet another man, as she might at someone whom she
+suspected of being drunk. It was true that Richard adored her, but then
+no doubt this kind of woman knew well how to deceive men. Softly she
+made to herself the Scottish manifestation of incredulity, "Mhm...." And
+Marion, for thirty years vigilant for sounds of scorn, heard and
+perfectly understood.
+
+She remained, however, massively and unattractively immobile. There came
+to her neither word nor expression to remove the girl's dubiety. Since
+she had heard such sounds of scorn over so lengthy a period they no
+longer came to her as trumpet calls to action, but rather as imperatives
+to silence, for above all things she desired that evil things should
+come to an end, and she had learned that an ugly speech ricochetting
+from the hard wall of a just answer may fly further and do worse. She
+knew it was necessary that she should dispel Ellen's suspicion, because
+they must work together to make a serene home for Richard, and she
+desired to do so for her son's sake, because she herself was possessed
+by the far fiercer monogamous passion of achieved and final love, which
+is disillusioned concerning mystical draughts, but knows that to take
+the bread of the beloved and cast it to the dogs is sin. She had
+acquired that knowledge, which is the only valuable kind of chastity
+worth having, that night when she had been forced to commit that
+profanation. Shading her eyes while there rushed over her the
+recollection of a pallid face looking yellow as it bent over the lamp,
+she reflected that even if she conquered this life-long indisposition to
+reply, the story was too monstrous to be told. It would not be believed.
+This girl would look at her under her brows and make that Scotch noise
+again and think her a liar as well as loose. So she sat silent, letting
+Ellen dislike her.
+
+She said at length, "Let's go and have coffee in the lounge."
+
+"I'm sure we don't need it," murmured Ellen, as a tribute to the
+magnificence of the meal.
+
+Crossing the room was a terrible business. She hoped people were not
+staring at her because she was with a woman whom they could perhaps see
+had once been bad. No doubt there were signs by which experienced people
+could tell. Richard's presence seemed all at once to have set behind the
+rim of the earth.
+
+They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked
+down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people,
+none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their
+fray with appetite. They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like
+Richard. She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that
+there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze
+of Richard's eyes, set in Richard's mother's face. Doubt left her. Here
+was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance. Here was the
+quality of life she loved. She found herself saying eagerly, that she
+might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such
+strong words as he used: "Yes, Marion?"
+
+"Ellen, when will you marry Richard?"
+
+"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We
+think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."
+
+"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being
+kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."
+
+Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an
+altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I
+feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.
+
+The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied,
+one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing
+at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which
+sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale
+clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a
+lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will
+not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon,
+so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her
+white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had
+stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across
+the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she
+could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like
+doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his
+towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely,
+"No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.
+Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves
+that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by
+the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but
+her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to
+desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she
+exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"
+
+Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would
+not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my
+life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you
+willed with. Let me have mine."
+
+But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy
+people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay
+hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she
+said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced
+herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her
+that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering
+vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to
+be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.
+I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I
+die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of
+me--quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I
+still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.
+You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you
+what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to
+shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my
+throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years
+that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But
+the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He
+lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I
+want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will
+give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for
+him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you
+see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the
+restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast
+mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these
+appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips,
+to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her
+reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and
+stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent
+and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are
+for their sons."
+
+She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that
+Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand
+across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so
+evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl
+was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.
+"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much
+more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I
+knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so
+very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take
+him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew
+he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us
+both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So
+I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's
+twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see
+to it that now he is here he is happy."
+
+Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared
+into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some
+practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered
+about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does
+having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when
+Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading,
+for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it
+always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre
+and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the
+Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life,
+since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever
+beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that
+she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now
+she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now
+she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman
+who had given her Richard.
+
+Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her
+mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under
+the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with
+sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd
+of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving
+by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had
+relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have
+rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of
+Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death
+she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering
+suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by
+anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for
+the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest
+recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had
+occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her
+sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.
+It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving
+her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and
+gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her
+till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with
+his long first kiss.
+
+She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and
+Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar,
+instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look
+at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and
+give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you
+mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at
+Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,"
+and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was
+never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember
+that Hendry escaped the family misfortune--mind you, I know it's no a
+fault--of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the
+dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane
+where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of
+lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the
+pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding
+of a theory.
+
+But those were the fair-weather uses of love. It was in the foul weather
+she would have missed him most. If this woman had not given her Richard
+she would have walked home from the hospital alone and wept by the
+unmade bed whose pillow was still dented by mother's head; she would
+have had to go to the cemetery with only Mr. Mactavish James and Uncle
+John Watson from Glasgow, who would have said "Hush!" when she waved her
+hand at the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and cried,
+"Good-bye, my wee lamb!" Life was so terrible it would not be
+supportable without love. She laid her hand on Marion's where it lay on
+the table, and stuttered, "Oh, it was brave of you!"
+
+The intimate contact was faintly disgusting to the other. She answered
+impatiently, "Not brave at all; I loved him so much that I would have
+done anything rather than lose him."
+
+"You loved him--even then?"
+
+"In a sense they are as much to one then as they ever are."
+
+"Ah...." Ellen continued to pat the other woman's hand and looked up
+wonderingly into her eyes, and was dismayed to see there that this
+fondling meant nothing to her. She was not ungrateful, but for such
+things her austerity had no use. All that she wanted was that assurance
+for which she had already asked. Ellen was proud, and she was a little
+hurt that the way in which she had proposed to pay the debt of gratitude
+was not acceptable, so she held up her hand and said coolly, "I'll marry
+your son when you like, Mrs. Yaverland."
+
+The other said nothing more than "Thank you." Realising that she had
+said it even more than usually indifferently, she put out her hand
+towards Ellen in imitation of the girl's own movement, but did it with
+so marked a lack of spontaneity that it must, as she instantly
+perceived, give an impression of insincerity. "How I fail!" she thought,
+but not too sadly, for at any rate she had got her son what he wanted. A
+man came and stood a little way behind her, looking here and there for
+someone whom he expected to find in the assembly, and she turned sharply
+to see if it were Richard; for always when he was away, if the shadows
+fell across her path or there came a knock at the door, she hoped that
+it was him.
+
+"I am stupid about him," she admitted, settling down in her chair, "but
+if he had come it would have been lovely. What would he think if he came
+now and found us two whom he loves most sitting here silent, almost
+sulky, because we have fixed the time of his marriage? He would not
+understand, of course. When a man is in love marriage loses all
+importance. He thinks that he could wait for ever. He never realises, as
+women do, that it is not love that matters but what we do with it. Why
+do I say as women do? Only women like me who have through making all
+possible mistakes found out the truth by the process of elimination.
+This girl is as unprovident as Richard is. So unprovident that I am
+afraid she is angry with me for insisting that she should put her
+capital of passion to good uses." And indeed Ellen was sitting there
+very stiffly, turning her hands together and looking down on them as if
+she despised them for their cantrips. She wished her marriage had not
+been decided quite like this. Of course she wanted to be married,
+because, whatever the marriage-laws were like, there was no other way by
+which she and Richard could tell everybody what they were to each other.
+But she had wanted the ceremony as secret as possible, as little
+overlooked by any other human being, and she fancifully desired it to
+take place in some high mountain chapel where there was no congregation
+but casqued marble men and the faith professed was so mystical that the
+priest was as inhuman as a prayer. Thus their vows would, though
+recorded, have had the sweet quality of unwritten melodies that are sung
+only for the beloved who has inspired them. But now this marriage was to
+be performed with the extremest publicity before a crowd of issues, if
+not of persons. It was to be a subordinate episode in a pageant the plot
+of which she did not know.
+
+Marion, watching her face, saw the faint twitches of resentment playing
+about her mouth and felt some remorse. "She would be so happy just being
+Richard's sweetheart, if I did not interfere," she thought. "Ah, how the
+old tyrannise over the young...." And there came on her a sudden chill
+as she remembered of what character that tyranny could be. She
+remembered one day, when she was nineteen, waking from sleep to find old
+people round her. She had been having such a lovely dream. On her
+lover's arm, she had been walking across the fields in innocent sunshiny
+weather, and he had been laughing and full of a far greater joy in
+impersonal things than she had ever known him. When he saw gorse in life
+he would repeat the country catch, "When the gorse is out of bloom then
+kissing's out of fashion," but in her dream he laughed to see fire and
+water meet where the gorse grew on the sheep-pond's broken lip. He had
+liked the white cloths bleaching on the grass, and the song the lark in
+the sky twirled like a lad throwing and catching a coin, and the spinney
+on the field's slope's heights, where the tide of spring broke in a
+green surf of budding undergrowth at the feet of black bare trees.
+
+During all the months her child was moving in her body she was visited
+by dreams of spring. This was the best of dreams: it was real. The
+lark's song and Harry's happy laughter were loud in her ears; and she
+rolled over in her bed and opened her eyes on Grandmother and Aunt
+Alphonsine. She looked away from them, but saw only things that reminded
+her how ill she was; the tumbler of milk she had not been able to drink,
+set in a circle of its own wetness on a plate among fingers of
+bread-and-butter left from the morning; they had been told to tempt her
+appetite, but they were betraying that they felt she had had more than
+enough temptation lately; the bottles of medicine ranged along the
+mantelpiece, high-shouldered like the facades of chapels and pasted with
+labels that one desired to read as little as chapel notice-boards, and
+with contents just as ineffectual at their business of establishing the
+right; the jug filled with a bunch of flowers left by some kindly
+neighbour who did not know what was the matter with her.
+
+That raised difficult issues. She turned her eyes back to the old
+people. They looked terrible: Grandmother sitting among her spreading
+skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands
+clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was
+not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering
+her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and
+rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and
+fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were
+an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign.
+Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget
+that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she
+had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons,
+the velvet homes of elfs--reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in
+sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that
+colours have commonly only in twilight.
+
+But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power
+over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry
+her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared,
+and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his
+own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow,
+"Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And
+Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core
+of her soul a _dame de compagnie_; and Grandmother had said, with that
+use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of
+truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come
+back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."
+
+That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true
+that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his
+career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous
+compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to
+have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still
+that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the
+linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her
+agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and
+shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that
+such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been
+sacred to her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that
+it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people
+would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.
+
+Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years,
+inexplicable. Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of
+Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she
+had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild
+she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed
+the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing
+prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink
+apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider. It is not in the nature
+of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and
+since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years
+with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good
+purpose which that tedious companionship had served. The theory of the
+sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by
+merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and
+necessary to the existence of society. But she had so often been
+assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life
+had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those
+doubts. To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been
+to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have
+been better if she had not been born. "Lord have mercy on us all!"
+thought Marion, and forgave her.
+
+It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as
+sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead
+of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which
+the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally. She was the most responsible
+for the defeat of Marion's life. And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not
+malignant of intent. The worst of illicit relationships is the
+provocation they give to the minds that hear of them. When it is said of
+a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public
+ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the
+sober external results of marriage; but when it is said of a man and
+woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact
+of their love. The thought of her niece night after night shut up with
+love in the white belvedere all the long time the moon required to rise
+from the open sea, fill all the creeks with silver, and drain them dry
+again as she sunk westwards, must have been torment to one whose left
+cheek, from the long pale ear to the inhibited mouth, was one scar. That
+scar was an epitome of all that was pathetic and mischievous about the
+poor faint woman, this being formed to be a nun who had not been blessed
+with any religion and so had to dedicate herself to the ridiculous god
+of decorum. "Your aunt," Marion's mother had said to her, "burned her
+face cleaning a pair of white shoes with benzine for me to wear at my
+first Communion. It was a pity she did it. And a pity for me too, since
+I have had to obey her ever since in everything, though I wanted
+neither the white shoes nor the Communion." In that speech were all the
+elements of Alphonsine's tragedy, and therefore most of the causes of
+Marion's. The French thrift that had made her clean the shoes at home,
+and thereby maim herself into something that desired to assassinate love
+whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the possibility that
+the family might have to support a fatherless baby. The affection for
+her sister Pamela which had made her perform these services had enabled
+her to bring up that lovely child through all the dangers of a
+poverty-stricken childhood in Paris, in spite of a certain wildness in
+her beauty which might, if unchecked, have been a summons to disorder;
+and her triumph in that respect had made it the most heartbreaking
+disappointment when the temptations she thought she had baulked for ever
+in Paris twenty years before returned and claimed so easily Pamela's
+child, whom she thought quite safe, since to her French eyes Marion's
+dark brows, perpetually knit in preoccupation with the movements of her
+nature, were not likely to be attractive to men.
+
+That must have added to her bitterness. It must have seemed very cruel
+to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed
+perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its
+hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all
+grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this
+black untidy girl. That would account for the passion with which she
+forced Marion to do the thing she did not want to; and any suspicion
+that she was actuated by a desire to punish the girl for her happiness
+she would be able to dismiss by recollecting that certainly she had
+served her little sister's welfare by crossing her will. Oh, there was
+much to be said for Alphonsine. But all the same, it was a pity that the
+old people had interfered. She had loved Richard so much that it would
+not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from
+the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far
+more than other children receive from both parents. They might have been
+so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.
+
+"But this is different," she said to herself. "They compelled me to
+unhappiness. I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen. It is quite
+different."
+
+But she looked anxiously at the girl. They smiled at each other with
+their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity. But their lips smiled
+guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be
+almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a
+creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted
+with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white
+under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched
+illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey
+houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round
+steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did
+not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only
+as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky,
+stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the
+marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of
+the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue
+of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its
+humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and
+on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.
+
+This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the
+Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow
+or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the
+curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised
+clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at
+their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had
+exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this
+plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and
+effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be
+visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon;
+and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling
+on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything
+happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation
+of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed
+people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the
+present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she
+was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred
+to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she
+smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This
+is Kerith Island."
+
+"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat."
+And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I
+must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's
+fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should
+everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where
+Richard's going to work, though."
+
+"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works
+from our windows."
+
+"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I
+couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the
+works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished
+in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the
+house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about
+him. I suppose I will soon get over it."
+
+"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."
+
+The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now
+across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to
+the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little
+hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse
+turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse
+gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green
+escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose
+again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the
+purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a
+brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform
+of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill
+grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by
+four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the
+fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink
+corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was
+built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a
+footing.
+
+Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an
+elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with
+a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white
+like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and
+receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken
+hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of
+the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there
+fell an orchard.
+
+"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and
+look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could
+see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the
+sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion
+indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the
+things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I
+can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from
+here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of
+coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always
+where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which
+fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller
+boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled
+island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a
+farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.
+
+Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been
+driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for
+to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of
+cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked
+bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine
+rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a
+fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with
+their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped
+behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened
+cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares
+set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its
+furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky
+that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which
+dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look
+brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be
+imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to
+lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to
+suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie
+at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud
+galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company
+beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen
+saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as
+Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there
+was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed
+scepticism concerning the value of all activities.
+
+To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from
+delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had
+up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday
+evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able
+to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of,
+and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with
+pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even
+when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they
+stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from
+her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an
+argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly,
+as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly.
+She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There
+had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down
+platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back,
+facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its
+landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high
+ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding,
+where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath
+esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.
+
+It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet
+the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of
+nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that
+was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the
+great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged
+in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the
+light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its
+brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own
+strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between
+deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the
+stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to
+the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark
+line of the Kentish hills.
+
+It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some
+large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like
+flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now
+flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but
+bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were
+back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it
+were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the
+wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion
+surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed
+out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and,
+walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud,
+followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and
+fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the
+quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a
+solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze
+from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make
+this a memorable star.
+
+Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been
+that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and
+breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy
+impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she
+partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain
+and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as
+uncompromising as mud.
+
+She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea,
+saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I
+could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard
+could still."
+
+Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the
+sky?"
+
+"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings
+living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of
+extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism,
+an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked
+appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her
+impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill
+luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike
+for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the
+station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on
+which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was
+saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard
+was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of
+him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to
+conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than
+the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than
+a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not
+offended.
+
+She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which
+Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level
+crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the
+fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the
+barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant
+posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up
+the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken
+prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the
+direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But
+surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in
+Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was
+written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the
+jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too
+slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the
+housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines,
+there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with
+white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because
+of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want
+to recognise its beauty.
+
+When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest
+of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that
+this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of
+white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the
+other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's
+proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap
+in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of
+those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far
+older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to
+Canfleet--that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland--but it's all
+gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a
+disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between
+low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen
+a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be
+measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike
+her.
+
+Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges
+gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which
+grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively
+deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the
+air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the
+broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places
+of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its
+windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that
+one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by
+pressing their faces close against the glass.
+
+"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her.
+"I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But
+it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the
+house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time,
+so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways
+at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you
+know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did
+them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of
+life, you become most carefully conservative!"
+
+But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch,
+and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said
+hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this
+Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to
+please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion
+greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning,
+Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to
+this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things
+just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to
+replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they
+stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark
+room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak
+settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and
+samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this
+English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The
+Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and
+they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any
+particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it
+was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's
+ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look!
+It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and
+they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide
+windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your
+room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it.
+It's a room I'm fond of...."
+
+They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched
+door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on
+cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted
+green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she
+said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when
+I was a girl; but all the things are new--I got them down from London;
+and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the
+chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window
+that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a
+farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a
+story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was
+as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle
+life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.
+He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very
+capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him
+that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without
+losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie
+in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see
+who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on
+you."
+
+She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched
+the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little
+white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate
+grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and
+looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had
+pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because
+to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been
+sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out
+into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring
+cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the
+yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its
+further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the
+billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained,
+bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of
+purple twigs at each end.
+
+But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when
+it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at
+all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of
+tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the
+Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to
+have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken
+bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the
+puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish
+affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near
+with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?--and them not born at four
+o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and
+yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the
+roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as
+usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran
+forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among
+the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow,
+but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the
+sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow,
+turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that
+the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his
+long upper lip was twitching from side to side.
+
+She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus!
+Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen
+and Grandmother was reading the _Prittlebay Gazette_ in the parlour, and
+she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing.
+Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon
+her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs,
+and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the
+farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing
+the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to
+him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent
+collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not
+point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was
+immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he
+wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with
+the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to
+point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate
+into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his
+face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What
+could it be that he wanted?
+
+She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it,
+pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass.
+Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness
+as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he
+said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when
+she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his
+eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom
+turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It
+was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent
+head followed by his forgotten dogs.
+
+Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited
+by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege
+upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that
+prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she
+liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a
+moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and
+sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey
+flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them
+treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then
+she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a
+bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen
+boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs,
+the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that
+night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come
+home.
+
+It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like
+this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it
+was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid
+that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone
+had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who
+was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite
+extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment.
+The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power
+than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him.
+She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the
+same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice
+everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions
+when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white
+room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each
+with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep,
+bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the
+long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with
+their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in
+sherry.
+
+The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she
+could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white
+cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little
+dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their
+images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very
+cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was
+being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that
+if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke
+disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by
+throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation
+would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm"
+to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement
+exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon."
+Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice
+for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her
+dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his
+notice.
+
+She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary,
+letting our whole lives revolve round a man."
+
+"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint
+that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have
+her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for
+some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who
+was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I
+don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that
+any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"
+
+Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the
+Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said
+stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."
+
+"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent
+things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal
+relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And
+then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the
+world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women
+don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we
+love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful
+with."
+
+Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had
+failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by
+Richard just as much as she loved him.
+
+"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the
+end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up
+petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big
+sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would
+not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak
+about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for
+a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as
+all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.
+She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned
+the meaning of life as one lived it.
+
+So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked
+discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with
+drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great
+armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but
+was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of
+that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression
+was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial,
+though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails
+and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was
+wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles
+of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled
+her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the
+windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly
+happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing
+to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch,
+and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining
+all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all
+this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in
+the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland,
+is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired
+with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in
+John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can
+look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer
+and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your
+first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the
+ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'"
+"Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she
+objected.
+
+But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found
+it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because
+she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in
+the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately
+answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.
+Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too
+poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.
+All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no
+cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and
+unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge
+of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be
+enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns
+or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She
+did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been
+able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories
+of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies
+had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up
+people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to
+till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed
+quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where
+feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing
+seas.
+
+Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised
+that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For
+indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat
+within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth
+spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows
+trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were
+almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning
+below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so
+that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their
+shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried
+to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at
+the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine
+in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see
+him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the
+garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too
+the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified
+green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of
+clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate
+curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills
+beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the
+right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the
+marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple
+statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the
+west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if
+the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.
+
+She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and
+yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite
+intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the
+immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man
+dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with
+a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh
+became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill
+of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one
+wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of
+the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the
+inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the
+public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with
+concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the
+margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of
+the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries
+made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot
+of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more
+necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue
+her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the
+small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it
+was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own
+ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world
+presented by this woman's face.
+
+Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic
+point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his
+own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what
+extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble
+atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind
+associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she
+would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be
+trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able
+to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to
+the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if
+they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem
+heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight
+lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who
+had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more
+agonising than a common tear.
+
+"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic
+tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was
+appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish
+about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in
+an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist
+of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say
+and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her
+repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman
+should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that
+her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible
+in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother
+died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire
+would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent
+and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would
+then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical
+patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins,
+she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as
+inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and
+would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and
+complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of
+excessive living.
+
+Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order
+characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly
+that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the
+aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.
+
+"You look tired," said Marion timidly.
+
+"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just
+tiredness."
+
+"You'd better go and lie down."
+
+"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."
+
+"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at
+the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.
+
+They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily.
+Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all
+was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains
+do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in
+the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting
+on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like
+that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in
+front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her
+looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her,
+and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself
+out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back
+for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser
+of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with
+peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror.
+The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail
+of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing
+Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to
+the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see
+why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of
+her own life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+They went out of the house by the French window of the dining-room, and
+crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in
+which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out
+to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild
+orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an
+orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This
+is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is
+let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was
+always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."
+
+"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following
+was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not
+answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not
+spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was
+so keen on science?"
+
+But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were
+patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need
+adventure...."
+
+"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved
+half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire
+to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard,
+and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that
+Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be
+miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the
+leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the
+leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel
+there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been
+any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"
+
+"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.
+
+"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.
+
+"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she
+paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She
+knew quite well.
+
+It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet
+at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea,
+which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was
+lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened
+pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of
+the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough
+darkness without quality. Yet as they walked down the field-path to the
+floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands,
+was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a
+country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more
+intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt
+as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than
+it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had
+come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though
+he does no more than tell children tales of storms.
+
+And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the
+wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave
+cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious
+food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when
+they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate
+to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the
+sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and
+watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and
+time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound
+of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the
+running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved
+culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and
+the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.
+Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous
+disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.
+
+Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over
+the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.
+Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she
+made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable
+later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the
+marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge,
+buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the
+lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it
+was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.
+Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live
+there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to
+travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.
+
+"Who lives in that little house on the island?" she called out to
+Marion.
+
+"The one on the Saltings? No one. It has been empty for forty years. But
+when I was a child George Luck still lived there. George Luck, the last
+great wizard in England."
+
+"A wizard forty years ago! Well, I suppose parts of England are very
+backward. You've got such a miserable system of education. What sort of
+magic did he do?"
+
+"Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors' wives used to come
+to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look
+in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the
+men were doing at the time." She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen.
+"You see, other women before us have been reactionary."
+
+"Reactionary?" repeated Ellen.
+
+"They have let their lives revolve round men," said Marion teasingly,
+and Ellen returned her laughter. They were both in high spirits because
+of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing
+bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and
+air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in
+love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current
+participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that
+makes man the most ridiculous of animals.
+
+They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line,
+again in the great green platter of the marshes. The sea-wall, which ran
+in wide crimps a field's width away on the other side of the line, might
+have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts
+showing above it. The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the
+sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they
+moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which
+it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually
+that leisurely, wet cry.
+
+"What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing.
+
+"Those are the redshanks. They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he
+will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little
+streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet
+there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks
+queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes
+here now except the men to see to the cattle. Even though the railway
+runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and
+shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New
+Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the
+morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired
+to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
+During the week the children are all at school or too young to go
+further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these
+people here, and they never come."
+
+She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between
+these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically
+night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever
+visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should
+continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like
+lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the
+Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you
+really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to
+be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life
+of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had
+erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless
+for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone
+waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery
+army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and
+white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters
+from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in
+his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.
+
+But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that
+nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as
+unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks
+would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a
+knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in
+which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees
+lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would
+have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as
+possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to
+hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and
+excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys'
+doffing of their caps. There was something at once absurd and menacing
+about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's
+greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to
+have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich
+expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.
+
+To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that
+church up there?"
+
+"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."
+
+"But what's that white thing beside it?"
+
+"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of
+Richard's father."
+
+"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined
+not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in
+the neighbourhood."
+
+"Why?" asked Marion.
+
+"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it
+not?"
+
+"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public
+subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung
+back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard
+had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that
+white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much
+to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who
+seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been
+able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its
+architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement
+and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality
+should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That
+secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from
+remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she
+had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time
+when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for
+the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell
+on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror
+that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than
+hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than
+to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and
+smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not
+to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the
+hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had
+been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and
+found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the
+situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion
+asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the
+unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks
+it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh."
+There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she
+tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable
+with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a
+bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out!
+They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or
+don't they grow up North?..."
+
+They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the
+neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely
+inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a
+geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and
+even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like
+orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard.
+Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours
+which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an
+osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange
+hair of the young plants.
+
+"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult
+to them."
+
+Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a
+look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of
+letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should
+go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah
+Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and
+made it squalid with tin huts.
+
+"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to
+laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and
+had things thrown at them.
+
+It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own
+Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to
+it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the
+Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable
+people...."
+
+"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."
+
+But to that Marion replied, grumblingly and indistinctly, that style was
+the only test of value, and that the fools who put up that notice could
+never do any good to anybody, and then her eyes roved to the path that
+ran down the green shoulder of the escarpment on the other side of the
+valley's neck. "Ah, here's Mrs. Winter. Ellen, you are going to come in
+contact with the social life of Roothing. This is the vicar's wife."
+
+"Is she our sort of pairson?" asked Ellen doubtfully.
+
+"For the purpose of social intercourse we pretend that she is," answered
+Marion without enthusiasm.
+
+They met her on the plank bridge that crossed the stream by which the
+osier beds were nourished, and Ellen liked her before they had come
+within hailing distance because she was such a little nosegay of an old
+lady. Though her colours were those of age they were bright as flowers.
+Her hair was white, but it shone like travellers' joy, and her peering
+old eyes were blue as speedwell, and her shrivelled cheeks were pink as
+apple-blossom. She bobbed when she walked like a ripe apple on its stem,
+and her voice when she called out to them was such a happy fluting as
+might come from some bird with a safe nest. "Why, it's Mrs. Yaverland. I
+heard that you'd gone up to town."
+
+"I came back this morning. This is Miss Melville, whom I went to meet.
+She is going to marry Richard very soon." Marion did not, Ellen noticed
+with exasperation, make any adequate response to this generous little
+trill of greeting. The best she seemed able to do was to speak slowly,
+as if to disclaim any desire to hurry on.
+
+"Oh, how do you do? I am pleased I met you on the very first day." The
+old lady smiled into Ellen's eyes and shook her hand as if she meant to
+lay at her disposal all this amiability that had been reared by tranquil
+years on the leeward side of life. "This will be a surprise for
+Roothing. We all thought Mr. Yaverland would never look at any woman but
+his mother. Such a son he is!" Ellen was annoyed that Marion smiled only
+vaguely in answer to this mention of her astonishing good fortune in
+being Richard's mother. "I hope Mr. Winter will have the pleasure of
+marrying you."
+
+"I'm afraid not," said Ellen with concern. "I'm Presbyterian, and
+Episcopalianism does not attract me."
+
+"Oh dear! Oh dear! That's a pity," said the old lady, with a pretty
+flight of hilarity. "Still, I hope you'll ask us to the wedding. I've
+known Richard since he was a week old. Haven't I, Mrs. Yaverland? He
+was the loveliest baby I've ever seen, and later on I think the
+handsomest boy. Nobody ever looked at my Billy or George when Richard
+was about. And now--well, I needn't tell you, young lady, what he's like
+now. I'm glad I've met you. I've just been up at Mrs. More's."
+
+"Who is Mrs. More?" asked Marion heavily.
+
+"The new people who have the small-holding at Coltsfoot the Brights had
+before. I think he used to be a clerk, and came into a little money and
+bought the holding, and now they're finding it very difficult to get
+along."
+
+"This small-holding business ought to be stopped."
+
+"Why?" asked Ellen peevishly. Marion seemed to reject everything, and
+she was sure that she had seen small-holdings recommended in Labour
+Party literature. "I thought it was sound."
+
+"Not here. Speculators buy up big farms and cut them into small-holdings
+and sell them to townspeople, who starve on them or sell them at a loss.
+The land's wasted for good, and all because it can't be farmed again
+once it's been cut up. To all intents and purposes it's wiped off the
+map. It's a scandal."
+
+"It is a shame," agreed the old lady. "I often say that something ought
+to be done. Well, the poor woman's lost her baby."
+
+"Bad business," said Marion.
+
+"Such a pretty little girl. Six months. I've been up seeing them putting
+her in the coffin. The mother was so upset. I was with her all day
+yesterday."
+
+"I've seen the place," said Marion. "As ugly as one of the Hallelujah
+Army shanties. What this bit of country's coming to! And Coltsfoot was a
+good farm when I was a girl."
+
+"It isn't very nice now certainly. You see, now that the other people
+have failed and gone away, it's difficult for them to get loads taken
+down as there isn't a proper road. Before, they did it co-operatively
+among themselves. But this winter they say they've been without coal
+quite often, and the baby's been ill all the time. I think Mrs. More's
+been terribly lonely. Poor little woman, she's got no friends here. All
+her people live in the Midlands, she tells me. I don't think they can
+afford a holiday, so the next few months will be hard for her, I'm
+afraid."
+
+"Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the
+garden. Annoying to think that that used to be good wheat-land."
+
+"They've never liked the place. They were terrified of losing the child
+because of the damp from the moment it came. She's quite broken by it
+all, poor thing."
+
+Marion began to draw on the ground with the point of her stick.
+
+"Ah, well, you'll be wanting to get on," said the old lady. "Now, do
+bring your future daughter-in-law to tea with us some day. I've got a
+daughter-in-law staying with me now. I should like you to meet Rose. She
+plays the violin very nicely. And we have a garden we're rather proud
+of, though of course this is the wrong time of the year to see it. Yet
+I'm sure things are looking very nice just now. Just look at it! Could
+anything," she asked, looking round with happy eyes, "be prettier than
+this? Look at the sunlight travelling over that hill!" She cast a shy
+glance at Marion, who was continuing to watch the point of her stick,
+and bravery came into her soft gay glance. "It's passing over the
+earth," she said tremulously but distinctly, "like the kindness of God."
+
+A silence fell. "The wee thing has courage," thought Ellen to herself.
+"It's plain to see what's happened. Marion's often sneered at her
+religion, and she's just letting her see that she doesn't mind. I like
+people who believe in something. Of course it might Le something more
+useful than Christianity, but if she believes it...."
+
+Marion lifted her head, stared at the hillside, and said, "Yes. And
+look. It is followed by the shadow, like His indifference."
+
+Tears came into the old lady's eyes. "Good-bye. We must settle on an
+afternoon for tea. I'll send somebody round with a note. Good-bye." She
+pushed past them, a grieved and ruffled little figure, a peony-spot of
+shock on each cheek, and then she looked back at Ellen. "We'll all look
+forward to seeing you, my dear," she called kindly; but feared, Ellen
+saw, to meet the hard eyes of this terrible woman, who was staring
+after her with a look of hostility that, directed on this little
+affirmation of love and amiability, was as barbarous as some ponderous
+snare laid for a small, precious bird.
+
+"Let's get on," said Marion.
+
+They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of
+the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice.
+To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing. It
+should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds,
+and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher
+level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green
+pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a
+crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle. But the
+quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in
+fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick
+dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an
+angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.
+
+They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran
+askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes,
+rusted and prohibitive and futile.
+
+"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of
+fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of
+raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence
+to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End
+trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go
+straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and
+lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as
+Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the
+day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the
+enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter,
+Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the
+thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land
+going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings
+and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I
+wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead
+leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the
+manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she
+pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said
+apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the
+two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose
+bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the
+others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had
+not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair
+exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there
+between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I
+won't come. I'm tired...."
+
+She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself,
+"She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half
+because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by
+losing my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly
+blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking
+of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had
+parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought,
+be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there
+could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having
+to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in
+a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike
+any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be
+tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A
+woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that
+work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and
+so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened
+and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really
+dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this
+Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it
+would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now
+this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a
+living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman
+who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a
+baby's coffin.
+
+And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and
+undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for
+an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy
+wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained
+timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last
+fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long
+succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire
+system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was
+never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the
+gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was
+always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day
+there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything
+but weak-eyed, plain people.
+
+The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it
+had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which
+is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the
+tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window
+at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls
+and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would
+not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.
+Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are
+bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the
+end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.
+The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had
+frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement,
+would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of
+pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's
+lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there
+would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"
+She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before
+she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to
+remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she
+wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean
+living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out,
+leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass
+bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation,
+while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth
+grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a
+meal.
+
+Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor
+souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that
+all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by
+passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was
+feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud
+at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an
+errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting
+strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the
+woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming
+up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to
+speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and
+they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded
+without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore
+having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed
+with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She
+could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom
+she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for
+Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to
+be happy.
+
+Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.
+Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not
+be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with
+Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had
+seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed
+in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there had always been
+something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a
+sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by
+sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as
+dignified as befitted one who came as an ambassador from life itself,
+and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair
+outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of
+courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarrassment. She
+was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck
+through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be
+his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and
+Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.
+
+There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by
+the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had
+left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees
+that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge
+that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone
+far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had
+felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly
+and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she
+had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to
+the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a
+queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of
+the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said,
+"Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an
+inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she
+followed him down the hillside that nobody since the world began had
+ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner,
+and she became scarlet with shame.
+
+When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared
+nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like
+air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen
+it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had
+pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to
+up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to
+him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he
+answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk
+to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could
+come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that
+seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how
+the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I
+suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who
+does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on
+in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now.
+Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."
+
+At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in
+which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away,
+wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about
+to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its
+cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over
+her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked
+at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting
+along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an
+inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a
+disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year
+later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he
+had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He
+murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had
+looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey
+eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It
+was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of
+passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.
+
+With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a
+courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days
+with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed
+it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of
+seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair
+dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time
+that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action.
+She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion
+would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had
+looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they
+would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But
+they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good
+with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow
+the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would
+pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all
+his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black....
+She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all
+other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt
+about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that
+there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him
+that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite
+well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more
+beautifully than she had ever been.
+
+She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if
+Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself
+to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she
+could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.
+Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base
+passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational
+hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It
+would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and
+besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as
+little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now
+nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping
+broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"
+
+She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the
+flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower
+towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the
+hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl
+was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the
+tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had
+formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations
+by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion
+had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first
+moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the
+bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down
+on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of
+the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among
+such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it
+was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that
+she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird,
+and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's
+spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind
+became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh
+and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had
+been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary
+importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible
+presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it
+could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself
+loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had
+fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she
+must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act
+of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that
+made her cry out with joy.
+
+Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was
+intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should
+intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with
+being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The
+girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower
+as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under
+faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about
+the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added
+to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for
+the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course
+the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of
+Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer
+mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She
+took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was
+sinister.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The
+white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains
+of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at
+each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue
+which the night assumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the
+gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses
+in a bowl had the air of brooding and passionate captives. Different
+from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of
+the wood fire danced again in the glass doors of one of the bookcases:
+and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep,
+stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at
+odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker.
+She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that
+there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent
+schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which
+seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author
+whose work she studied. In the swinging glass door beside her there was
+a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she
+herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in
+the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by
+night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and,
+orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard
+would find such an interior on his return.
+
+"Have you found a book you like?"
+
+"No. There's lots of lovely ones. But none I just fancy. I'm inclined to
+be disagreeable and far too particular this evening. Are these your
+books or Richard's?"
+
+"Nearly all mine."
+
+"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could
+have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point
+if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at
+all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a
+bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.
+I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."
+
+"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you
+awake."
+
+"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all
+right as soon as Richard comes."
+
+Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till
+then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted
+intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift
+dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching
+with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate
+matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its
+midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.
+Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through
+the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on
+the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of
+irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high
+polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived
+that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation
+into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the
+most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.
+It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the
+evening in making Ellen like her.
+
+"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.
+
+"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."
+
+But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She passed into the room of bright
+new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction
+in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for
+I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."
+
+"Let me brush your hair."
+
+As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because
+Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she
+brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been
+gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in
+whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to
+be understood and conciliated. Her wish that it were so reminded her how
+much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl's
+shoulder at her reflection in the glass. "It is a face that believes
+there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out," she
+thought. "Well, that is probably true for her. I, with my foes who are a
+part of myself, am unusually cursed. If these young people have ordinary
+luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy
+standing by and watching them. Oh, I must make friends with her. We have
+many things in common. I will talk to her about the Suffragettes. What
+shall I say about them? I do honestly think that they are splendid
+women. I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out
+into the streets knowing they will be stoned...." A memory overcame her.
+"Ah!" she cried out, and laid down the brush.
+
+"What's the matter?" exclaimed Ellen, standing up. There was a certain
+desperation in her tone, as if she thought the tragic life of a
+household ought to have a definite closing-time every night, after which
+people could go to bed in peace.
+
+"I forgot--I forgot to take some medicine. I must go and take it now.
+And I don't think I'd better come back. I'm sure you'll brush your hair
+better yourself. I'm sure I tugged. You're so tired, you ought to go to
+bed at once. Good-night. Good-night." By the slow shutting of the door
+she tried to correct the queer impression of her sudden flight, but knew
+as she did so that it sounded merely furtive.
+
+In her own room she undressed with frantic haste so that she could turn
+out the light and retreat into the darkness as into a burrow. But
+everywhere in the blackness, even on the inside of the sheet she drew
+over her face as she lay in bed, were pictures of the aspects of evil
+the world had turned to her that day: thirty years before, when she was
+stoned down the High Street of Roothing. She was in the grip of one of
+her recurrent madnesses of memory. There was no Richard to sit by her
+side and comfort her, not by what he said, for she had kept so much from
+him that he could say nothing that was really relevant, but by his
+beauty and his dearness, which convinced her that all was well since she
+had given birth to him; so her agony must go on until the dawn.
+
+She must get used to that, because when he was married to Ellen she
+would no longer be able to sit up in her bed and call "Richard,
+Richard!" and strike the bell that rang in his room--that rang, as it
+seemed, in his mind, since no other sound but it ever wakened him in the
+night. Not again would he stand at the door, his dark hair damp and
+rumpled, his eyes blinking at the strong light, while his voice spoke
+hoarsely out of undispersed sleep. "Mother, darling mother, are you
+having bad dreams?" Not again would she answer moaningly, "Oh, Richard,
+yes!" and tremble with delight in the midst of her agony to see how,
+when this big man was dazed and half awake, he held his arms upwards to
+her as if he were still a little boy and she a tall overshadowing
+presence. In the future he must be left undisturbed to sleep in Ellen's
+arms. That thought caused her inexplicable desolation. Rather than think
+it she gave up the struggle and allowed herself to be possessed by
+memory, and to smart again under the humiliation of that afternoon when
+life had made a fool of her. For what had hurt her most was that she had
+gone out into the world, the afternoon it stoned her, in a mood of the
+tenderest love towards it.
+
+She had risen late, she remembered, that day. All night long she had
+been ill, and had not slept until the first wrangling of the birds. Then
+suddenly she had opened her eyes, and after remembering, as she always
+did when she woke, that she was going to have a child, she had looked
+out of her wide window into the mature and undoubtful sunshine of a fine
+afternoon. She had felt wonderfully well and terribly hungry, and had
+hastened at her washing and dressing so that she could run downstairs
+and get something to eat. When she went into the kitchen she saw that
+dinner was over, for the plates were drying in the rack and Peggy, the
+maid, was not there. It was incredible that she had not known why Peggy
+had gone out, that she should fatuously have told herself that the girl
+was probably working in the dairy; but in those days her mind was often
+half asleep with love for the unborn.
+
+She rejoiced that she had missed the family meal, for it was not easy to
+sit at the table with Grandmother and Cousin Tom and Aunt Alphonsine,
+unspoken comments on her position hanging from each face like
+stalactites. In the larder she found the cold roast beef, magnificently
+marbled with veins of fat, and the cherry pie, with its globes of
+imperial purple and its dark juice streaked on the surface with richness
+exuded from the broken vault-of the pastry, and she ate largely, with
+the solemn greed of pregnancy. Afterwards she washed the dishes, in that
+state of bland, featureless contentment that comes to one whose being
+knows that it is perfectly fulfilling its function and that it is
+earning its keep in the universe without having to attempt any
+performance on that vexing instrument, the mind.
+
+When she had finished, she wandered out of the kitchen aimlessly,
+benevolently wishing that her baby was born so that she could spend the
+afternoon playing with it.
+
+The parlour door was ajar, and she peeped in and saw Grandmother sitting
+asleep in the high-backed chair, a shaft of sunlight blessing her bent
+head to silver and stretching a corridor for dancing motes to the bowl
+of mignonette. She saw the scene with the eye of an oleographer. In
+defiance of experience she considered her grandmother as a dear old
+lady, and the hum of a bee circling about the mignonette sounded like
+the peace that was in the room becoming articulate and praising God.
+Enjoyable tears stood in her eyes. Drying them and looking round the
+dear scene, so that she might remember it, she saw that the grandfather
+clock marked it as half-past two. Now was the time that she must go for
+her walk. The children would be back at school, the men would be at
+work, and the women still busy cleaning up after their midday meal. She
+was afraid now to walk on the Yaverland lands for fear of finding
+Goodtart, the cattleman, standing quite still in some shadowed place
+where she would not see him till it was too late to avoid touching him
+as she passed, and turning on her those dung-brown eyes in which
+thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a canal; and
+though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with
+Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had
+stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the
+belvedere. The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go
+so far. But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran
+from the glebe land opposite Yaverland's End and stretched towards the
+village High Street. No one ever went there at this time of day.
+
+Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and
+she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though
+she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown. Stealing out
+very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down
+the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She
+had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish
+cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and
+reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The
+Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson
+Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine
+it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married,
+and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not
+receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to
+the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant
+oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by
+some wise, far-sighted person.
+
+It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had
+slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon,
+to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will
+to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that
+it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before
+the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his
+pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone
+would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of
+her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come
+to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was
+twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the
+spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a
+woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With
+aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that
+showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had
+happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and
+seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy
+figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.
+
+It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances
+these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive
+greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being
+without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that,
+and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in
+love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she
+knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing
+his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that
+must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the
+exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then
+perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to
+have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive
+eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held
+to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day
+in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel
+in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him
+like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their
+beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of
+acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that,
+for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.
+
+At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a
+tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down
+her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again
+and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and
+daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly,
+swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the
+trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch
+scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of
+the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For
+the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the
+most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously
+for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the
+unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their
+mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home
+litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they
+could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds,
+and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared
+excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts
+in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her
+and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young
+doctor who had been _locum tenens_ here in February, and that they had
+seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the
+Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in
+order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family,
+and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill
+these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.
+She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little
+wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as
+happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to
+venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when
+men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.
+
+The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of
+an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to
+earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked
+leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it
+dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit
+half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up
+a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly,
+the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of
+crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of
+Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by
+going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into
+the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be
+Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the
+village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and
+would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the
+unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from
+all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their
+ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite
+close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under
+the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.
+
+Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed
+at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the
+society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of
+thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that
+his great horny fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was
+drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so
+disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of
+another expulsion. "Oh, ter dash with the thing!" he exclaimed
+mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue
+sky above and snuffled. Marion's heart dissolved. She could not let this
+poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving
+only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.
+"George!" she called softly, staying among the branches. He gaped about
+him. "George!" she called a little louder. "The ball's in the pit, among
+the leaves." But he was transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice
+and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to
+gape. She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after
+only half a moment's reluctance she stepped forward. She did not really
+mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention
+that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby. For there was
+now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been
+before and her body was like a vase. It was only when they had awful
+thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not
+have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn. So she went
+over to him, pointing to the pit. "I saw it roll down there, George.
+Look! There it is."
+
+But he did not pick up the ball. He appeared to be petrified by the
+sight of her. "Make haste," she said, "they'll be waiting for you." At
+that he dropped his lids, and his lips thickened, and his face grew red.
+Then he raised his head again and looked at her with eyes that were not
+dull, as she had always seen them before, but hot and bright, and he
+began to shift his weight slowly backwards and forwards from one foot to
+the other. Her heart grew sick, because all the world was like this, and
+she turned again to the path home. But through the tree-trunks in that
+direction there came two other boys in search of the ball--Ned Turk, who
+to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes;
+and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had
+done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd
+faces. A horror came on her. It was as if they had assumed masks to warn
+her that they had some secret and sinister business with her. Then one
+pointed his hand at her and made an animal noise, and the other laughed
+with his mouth wide open. Neither said anything. Their minds were
+evidently engaged in processes beneath those which find expression in
+language. She stiffened herself to face them, though she felt frightened
+that these two boys, whom she had known all her life, with whom she had
+ridden on the hay-wains in summer and caught stickle-backs in the marsh
+dykes, should change to these speechless beings with red leering masks
+who meant her ill.
+
+For the first time she felt herself too young for her destiny. "I am
+only nineteen," she cried silently. Tears might have disgraced her but
+that the child moved in her as if it had looked out at the frightening
+figures through her eyes, and she suddenly hated Harry for leaving her
+and his son unprotected from such brutes as people seemed to be, and was
+vivified by the hatred. She made to walk past the boys back towards
+Yaverland's End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to
+their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately
+answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads
+whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being
+consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that
+would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing
+for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and
+walk down Roothing High Street and go back to Yaverland's End by the
+lane. Her mood of forgiving love for the village, which the cricket-ball
+had interrupted, had been so real that she felt as if a pact had been
+established between it and her, and she was quite sure that she would be
+safe from the boys there. If they were tiresome and followed her, no
+doubt somebody like Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general stores, would take
+her in and let her rest till it was dark, and then see her home. She
+turned round and walked out of the wood, and because she could not, in
+her heavy-footed state, trample through the undergrowth, she had to
+follow the path that led her to within a yard or two of George Postgate.
+She could see from the workings of his large face that he was forming
+some plan of action. And sure enough, when she passed him, he cried out
+"Dirty Marion!" and twitched the sun-bonnet from her head. The sudden
+movement made her start violently, for though she had not known what
+fear was until she conceived, she now knew a panic-terror at anything
+that threatened her body. That made the boys shout with laughter and
+call to their friends to hurry up and see the fun.
+
+The sunshine that beat down on the unshaded field was hot on her bare
+head. It would be awkward too, going into the village hatless and with
+ruffled hair. But she must not be angry with George Postgate, for indeed
+the incident had been to him only a means of gaining that popularity
+with the fellows that his poor stupid soul so longed for and had so
+often been refused, and he could not know that the fright would make her
+feel so ill. Since the first agonising months of her pregnancy, when
+nausea and faintness had pervaded her days, she had never felt as ill as
+this. A sweat had broken out on her face and her hands; she had to
+pant for breath and her limbs staggered under her. But she would be all
+right if she could sit down for one moment. There was a hawthorn stump a
+little way off, and to this she made her way, but as she sunk down on it
+a clod of earth struck her in the shoulder. She spun round, and another
+broke on her face. Grit filled her mouth, which was open with amazement.
+She had been deaf with physical distress, so she had not heard that the
+boys had gathered together on the wood's edge and were now marching
+after her in a shouting crowd. Something in her attitude when she turned
+on them made them fall dumb and stock-still for a moment. But as a gust
+of wind ruffled her hair and blew her skirts about her body a roar of
+laughter went up from them, and earth and dry dung flew through the air
+at her.
+
+As she set her face towards the High Street again, which still seemed
+very far away, she sobbed with relief to see that old Mr. Goode, the
+carrier, had come down to the end of his garden to see what the noise
+meant, and that he had almost at once gone back into his house. Of
+course he would come out and save her. In the meantime she pushed on
+towards the houses, that because of her sickness and her fear rocked and
+wavered towards her flimsily like a breaking wave. A heavy clod struck
+her in the back, and she shrieked silently with terror. If they hurt her
+she might give birth to her baby and it would not live. She had not had
+it quite seven months yet, so it would not live. At that thought anguish
+pierced her like a jagged steel and she began to try to run, muttering
+little loving names to her adored and threatened child. She looked
+towards the road to see if old Mr. Goode was coming, and was surprised
+to see that he was standing at the gate of the field with two other men
+and a boy. And though they were all looking towards her, they made no
+movement to come to her help. Perhaps they did not see what was
+happening to her. It did not matter. She would be there in a few
+moments. One of the boys had found a tin can and was beating on it, and
+the sounds made her head feel bad. She staggered on, looking on the
+ground because of the sun's strong glare.
+
+When she found that her feet had reached the patch of rutted ground that
+was around the gate, she sobbed with thankfulness. She threw out her
+hands to the multitude of people who had suddenly gathered there, and
+cried out imploringly, for if someone would only take her to a place
+where she could lie down she would be all right and she would keep her
+child. But none of them came to her, and her deafened ears caught a
+sound of roaring. She could not see who they were and what they were
+doing, for all things looked as if she saw them through flowing water.
+But she knew the tall figure by the gatepost must be Mr. Goode, so she
+stumbled to him and raised her head and tried to find his kind face.
+But, like the boys, he wore a mask. Veins that she had never noticed
+before stood out red on his forehead and his beard twitched, and the
+funny lines that darted about his eyes, which had become small and
+winking, made his face a palimpsest in which an affected disgust
+overlaid some deep enjoyment. He did not seem to be looking at her;
+indeed, he averted his eyes from her, but thoughts about her made him
+laugh and send out a jeering cry--wordless like the call of the boys.
+She realised that he and these people whom she could not see, but who
+must be people who had known her all her life, had come out not to save
+but to see her ill-treated and to rejoice. She stood stock-still and
+groaned. Her head felt wet, and she put up her hand and found that a
+stone had drawn blood behind her ear. The boys pressed close about her
+and beat the tin can in her ears, and one stretched out a stick and
+touched her, which made Mr. Goode and the unseen enemies laugh. But at
+that she shrieked. She shrieked with such terrible anger at those who
+insulted the mother of her child, that all their jaws fell and they
+shrank back and let her pass.
+
+But when she had gone a few paces up the road someone shouted something
+after her, and there was a noise of laughter and then of the shuffling
+of many feet behind her, and jeers and cat-calls and the beating of the
+tin can. She went on, looking to the right and the left for some old
+friend to come out and take her to shelter, but now she knew that there
+would be none. These people would drive her on and on. And when she got
+home to Yaverland's End, if they would let her go there, and did not
+trample her down on the roadside first, she would lose her child. The
+core of her body and soul would be torn out from her, and all promise
+of pleasure and all occasion of pride. For there was no pleasure in the
+world save that to which she had looked forward these seven months, of
+seeing that perfect little body that she knew so well and kissing its
+smooth skin and waiting for it to open those eyes--those black eyes; and
+there could be no greater degradation than to bring forth death, when
+for months the sole sustenance against the world's contempt had been
+that she was going to give birth to a king of life. There danced before
+her eyes all the sons of whom she was to be bereft in the person of this
+son. The staggering child, the lean, rough-headed boy of ten with his
+bat, the glorious man.
+
+Now her loss was certain. All the people were running out into the
+gardens of the little houses on the right and throwing up the windows
+over the shuttered shops on the left, and all wore the flushed and
+amused masks that meant they were determined that she should lose her
+child. Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general store, the kind old woman whom
+she had thought would take her in, and Mrs. Welch, the village drunkard,
+were leaning over adjacent garden walls, holding back the tall, divine
+sunflowers that they might hobnob over this delight, and their faces
+were indistinguishable because of those masks. Even Lily Barnes,
+standing on the doorstep of the nice new Lily Villa her husband, Job
+Barnes the builder, had built for their marriage, with her six months
+old baby in her arms, was thus disguised, and seeming, like Mr. Goode,
+to look through her old friend at some obscene and delicious fact, sent
+up that hooting wordless cry.
+
+Marion was so appalled that a woman carrying her baby should connive at
+the death of another's that she stood quite still and stared at her,
+until the boys behind her thrust her with sticks. When she passed the
+alley between the post-office and the carrier's she saw the cattle-man,
+Goodtart, looking out at her from its shadows; he did not move, but his
+dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger
+stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his
+neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with
+earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with
+nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every
+time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.
+
+"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated
+it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it
+up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished
+that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his
+child to this.
+
+Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and
+the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with
+his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back
+into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she
+had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no
+solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself
+like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this
+thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.
+But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her
+and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was
+approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light
+feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face
+obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some
+invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality
+which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried
+to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some
+remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that
+she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.
+
+She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and
+pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and
+behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt
+and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying
+standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively,
+Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it
+said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of
+butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her. He was asking
+the village people what would happen when the squire came home and
+heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire's
+tenants. A silence fell on her pursuers. From the rear old Mr. Goode's
+kind voice said something about "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey"; Ned
+Turk piped, "We don't mean no 'arm," and the crowd dispersed. It
+shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated
+and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin
+cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect
+by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of
+their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.
+
+She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey. She
+realised that she was safe. If she could rest now she would keep her
+child. She knew relief but not exultation. It was as if life had been
+handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed
+with the cup. There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon:
+the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she
+had been rescued. When Peacey's voice had boomed out above her it had
+expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it
+had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful
+than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and
+he begged them to have similar prudence. He had risked nothing of his
+reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her. To this loathsome
+world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her
+divine child. She looked up at Peacey and laughed.
+
+His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness. "You'd best
+come into Cliffe's cottage," he said, and went before her. It struck
+her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street
+it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or
+without his knowledge. Well, she must lie down, and this was the only
+door that was open to her. She must follow him.
+
+Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and
+through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur: "Poor little
+girl!" Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in
+his heart spoken to itself? Was he really a kind man? She looked at him
+searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes,
+which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing. In any case
+she must take his arm, or she would fall. She even found herself
+shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she
+was afraid the people inside might not welcome her. She did not know the
+Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five
+years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make
+friends with a young married woman. But its trim garden, where on golden
+summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his
+clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while
+his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own
+loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion
+wishing that Harry and she were properly married. Because she had
+received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for
+of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy. But the
+shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was
+as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into
+some vacated house given over to decay. There was dust everywhere, and
+the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the vase on the
+table had died yesterday; and the woman who stood in the middle of the
+room, looking down at her hands and turning her wedding ring on her
+finger, was not pretty or joyous. Her face was a smudge of sullenness
+under hair that was elaborately dressed yet was dull for lack of
+brushing, and her body drooped within the stiff tower of her
+thickly-boned Sunday-best dress. She looked at Marion without curiosity
+from an immense distance of preoccupation. There came from a room at the
+back of the house the strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee," played on
+the harmonium, and at that she made a weak, abstracted gesture of
+irritation.
+
+"Go and get a basin of water and a bit o' rag. The girl's head's
+bleeding," said Peacey, and she went out of the room obediently. He
+collected all the cushions in the room and piled them on the horsehair
+sofa, and helped her to lie comfortably down on them. Then he walked to
+the window, and stood there looking out until Mrs. Cliffe came back into
+the room. He took the basin without thanks, and set it down on a chair
+and began to bathe Marion's head, while Mrs. Cliffe stood by watching
+incuriously.
+
+"Now then, Trixy," he said, not unpleasantly, "you'd best go into the
+back parlour and listen to your beloved husband playing hymns so
+trustfully."
+
+She went away, still without speaking, and Marion, no longer feeling
+defensive before a stranger, closed her eyes. Really his fat hands were
+very gentle, very clever and quick. After a few moments he had finished,
+and she was able to turn her face to the wall and talk to her baby that
+had been saved to her, and to exult that after all she would see those
+eyes. She shivered to think how nearly she had lost him, and was
+transfixed by her hatred of Harry. She turned hastily and faced the
+room.
+
+Peacey was watching her with his quiet eyes. He said in a silken voice,
+"This sort of thing wouldn't happen to you if you were married to me."
+
+She lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. She knew that what he said
+was true.
+
+"You've looked at me as if I were a pickpocket, you have," he went on,
+"just because I want to marry you. I don't hold it against you. You're
+young. That young, that it's a shame this has happened to you. But after
+to-day perhaps you'll judge me a bit fairer. You see, I'm older than
+you, and I've seen a bit of the world, and I know how things are. And I
+knew you'd have a nasty jar like you had to-day before you were through
+with it. And I don't doubt you'll have a few more before you're done. It
+ain't too good for the little one, if you'll excuse me mentioning it.
+You can't expect a man of any feelings to look on without trying to do
+what he can."
+
+She looked up to scan his face for some sign of sincerity, and found
+herself for the first time wishing that she might find it and have
+reason to distrust her own dislike of him. But he was sitting sideways,
+with his head turned away from her, and she could see nothing of him but
+his hot black clothes and his fat hand slowly stroking the thigh of his
+crossed leg in its tight trouser. A sigh shook the dark bulk of his
+back.
+
+"Me of all men," he said softly, "who had such a mother."
+
+There was a long pause. She grew curious.
+
+"Is she dead?" she asked.
+
+"Died when I was ten. Not a soul's ever cared for me since then. I'm not
+sorry. It's made me remember her all the better. And she was one of
+God's saints."
+
+His voice was husky. She muttered, "I am sorry," and was annoyed to find
+that she really was.
+
+"Why need you be?" he asked. "There's those that haven't that much to
+look back on. All I want from you, Miss Marion, is to let me help you.
+Or at least not to think ill of me for wanting to help you."
+
+He sat still for a moment and continued to stroke his thigh.
+
+"Marion," he began abruptly, and then paused as if to brace himself.
+"Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you
+to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never wouldn't bother you for
+that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise
+with some chance of keeping it. And besides, there's more than that to
+it. How," he asked, lifting his head and speaking mincingly, "should I
+presume to go where Sir Harry's been? I would never ask you to be a wife
+to me. Just to accept the protection of my name, that's all I ask of
+you."
+
+They sat for a while in the embrowned sunshine of the dusty room.
+
+He rose and stood over her, drooping his sleek head benevolently. "Ah,
+well," he said, "I'd best leave you alone. God knows I never meant to
+intrude on you. Perhaps you would take a little doze now, and after tea
+I'll take you home." He looked on her moistly, tenderly. "Think kindly
+of me if you dream." Some emotion coagulated his voice to a thick, slow
+flow. "You'll be the only woman who ever has thought of me in her dreams
+if you do. I've never had anything to do with women all my life. You
+see, I know I've got an ugly mug. I wouldn't dare to make love to any
+woman in case I saw--what I've seen in your face--what I saw in your
+face that night I came out on you from the belvedere. Oh, I don't blame
+you, Miss Marion. You're young--you're beautiful. You've had a real
+gentleman for your sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you.
+Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands
+together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her
+matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate
+that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her.
+"Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled
+about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body
+neckless and sloping like a seal's, and said softly, "And don't think it
+was me who put Lady Teresa up to coming down to Yaverland's End
+to-morrow morning. It is her ladyship's own idea. I said to her, 'Leave
+the poor girl alone.' I have always said to her, 'Leave the poor girl
+alone.'" His voice faded. He moved vaporously out of the room.
+
+One is too harsh to one's dead self. One regards it as the executor and
+residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate
+regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty
+years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the
+closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her
+life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was
+conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present
+should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting
+up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The
+tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost
+as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black
+fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all
+the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he
+has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the
+end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my
+Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely
+Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him
+unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There
+are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She
+groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like
+cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot
+thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this
+dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it
+was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had
+remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear
+it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage
+to live.
+
+Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about
+what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should
+sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or
+Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on
+that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to
+abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her
+consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was
+within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn
+baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she
+had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of
+her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves
+had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had
+been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly
+nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo
+knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical
+adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment
+dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to
+live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and
+have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill
+and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the
+shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it
+and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next
+day it would forsake her.
+
+She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer
+from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose
+at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was
+necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look
+up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the
+expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been,
+it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she
+dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that
+Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the
+church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl
+who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope
+that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy
+head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of
+paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of
+Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not
+really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and
+tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.
+
+Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking
+personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm
+black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of
+Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a
+profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that
+Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its
+bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or
+of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no
+reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at
+Torque House. By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry. The child
+would doubt again.... Since these things would have happened she could
+not do other than she did. Her surrender was the price she had to pay
+for Richard's life.
+
+How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to
+pay any real price! She looked back through the past at Peacey's conduct
+of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at
+some perfect and obscene work of art. He had laid his hand so
+wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so
+that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the
+renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he
+turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to
+one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme
+mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante
+love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and,
+knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as
+their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship,
+she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his
+melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had
+failed utterly.
+
+Mrs. Cliffe had come in with a cup of tea and some cake on a tray.
+"You'll feel better for this," she said, and while Marion had ate and
+drunk she had stood by the window and looked at her. It seemed to Marion
+that she had greatly changed of late. Before, she had belonged very
+definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from
+the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even
+after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any
+cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw
+and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative
+of a change from her pristine gentility.
+
+"Funny I never heard of you being like this," she said at last.
+
+"It is. I thought everyone was talking about it."
+
+"They may be. But there's times when one doesn't listen to what people
+are saying." For a time she was silent. "Ah, well," she meditated
+bitterly, "it doesn't pay to do wrong, does it?"
+
+"I haven't done wrong," said Marion.
+
+"So you say now," Mrs. Cliffe told her, "but there'll come a day when
+you see you have." She drew in her breath with a little gasp as Peacey
+put his head in at the door.
+
+He looked sharply from one to the other, and then advanced to Marion's
+couch, rubbing his hands genially. "Now then, Trixy," he said teasingly,
+"you don't want me to talk too long to your beloved husband, do you? I
+might go telling him things about you, mightn't I? You run along and
+look after him." Mrs. Cliffe retired quite taciturnly, nothing in her
+face responding to this rallying, and he bent quickly over Marion. "I
+hope she hasn't been worrying you?" he asked. Concern for her?--it
+sounded just like concern for her--made his voice tremble. "That's why I
+hurried back. Women are so narrow-minded to their poor sisters who
+haven't been so fortunate. I thought she might have been making you feel
+a bit uncomfortable."
+
+"Oh no," said Marion.
+
+The mask of his poor ugly face, which had been grotesque with pitying
+lines, became smooth. He sighed with relief, and sat down by her side,
+very humbly.
+
+"But she was beginning to talk rather strangely," the poor fool Marion
+had continued. "I think she's altered very much lately."
+
+"Do you know, I was thinking so myself," Peacey had answered
+reflectively. "I wonder if she's got anything on her mind. I wish I
+could find out. One doesn't like a 'ome of friends not to share its
+worries with you, without giving you a fair chance to 'elp. I must see
+whether I can get it out of 'er."
+
+Oh, he was a kind man. He was certainly very kind. She put down her cup
+and braced her body and her soul, and said, "Mr. Peacey...."
+
+The world had deceived her utterly that day; and yet there was one in
+that cottage who had suffered more than she, for by her suffering she
+had bought no Richard. Poor Mrs. Cliffe! She was a woman of sixty now,
+white-haired, and fine-featured with the anxious fineness of one who has
+for long lived out of favour with herself and has laboured hard for
+re-establishment; but the fear still dwelt in her. Most times that
+Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting
+knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here
+and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly. But
+every now and then, perhaps once a year, she would put down her knitting
+so soon as Marion came in sight and come into the road to meet her and
+would give her nervous, absent-minded greetings. Then she would draw her
+into the furthest edge of the pavement, because the blind have such
+sharp hearing, and she would whisper:
+
+"Have you heard from _him_ lately?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He's still at Dawlish?"
+
+"They say so."
+
+"Do you think he will ever come back?"
+
+"No. He will never come back."
+
+"Ah." She would stand looking past Marion with her face cat's-pawed by
+memory and her fingers teasing the fringe of her shawl, till from the
+garden the blind old man would cry lovingly and querulously, "Trixy,
+where are you?" and she would answer, "Coming, dearie." As she turned
+away she would murmur: "I shouldn't like him to come back...."
+
+Poor Trixy Cliffe! She should have known only the sorrow of pure
+femalehood, such sorrow as makes the eyes of heifers soft. Women like
+her should be harvested like corn in their time of ripening, stored in
+good homes as in sound barns, and ground in the mill of wifehood and
+motherhood into the flour that makes the bread by which the people live.
+But there must have been some beauty working in her soul, for Peacey
+went only where he saw some opportunity to cancel some movement towards
+the divine, being a missionary spirit. So she had been delivered over to
+that terror which survived for ever. Even in the exorcised blue
+territory of a good old woman's eyes. "Oh, poor Trixy, poor Trixy!"
+moaned Marion, weeping. But it struck her that she was enjoying herself,
+and she sat up rigidly and searched her soul for the smuggled
+insincerity. "I must be lying," she said aloud with loathing. "I really
+cannot be pitying Trixy Cliffe because in my heart of hearts I care for
+no one but Richard. I would knead the flesh of anyone on earth and bake
+it in the oven if that were the only food I could give him. What am I
+doing this for? Ah, I see. I am hanging about this fictitious emotion
+simply because I do not wish to go on and remember Roger." She held out
+her hands into the blackness and cried out, "Oh, Roger, forgive me for
+shutting you out of my memory as I have shut you out of everything else.
+I will remember everything, I will!" She lay down and let all pictures
+reappear before her eyes, but her mouth was drawn down at the corners.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It was no use wondering now whether or not Peacey had really murmured
+"Good day, ma'am," as they parted at the door of the church after their
+furtive marriage. She had certainly thought she had heard this ironic
+respectfulness, and she had stared after him with a sudden dread that
+under the cream of benignity there might after all be a ferment of
+malign intention. But that gait, which was so light and brisk for such a
+heavy man, had already taken him some distance from her, and he was now
+entering the yew alley that was the private way from Torque Hall to the
+churchyard. The sunlight falling through the interstices of the dark
+mossy trees cast liver-coloured patches on his black coat. She had
+turned and looked down, as she always did when human complexities made
+her seek reassurance as to the worth of this world, on the shiny
+mud-flats, blue-veined with the running tides, and green marshes where
+the redshanks choired. Her misgiving had weakened at that beauty, for
+with the logic of the young she thought that if the universe was
+infinitely good it could not also be infinitely evil, and it had been
+utterly dispelled by his considerate conduct during the following weeks.
+
+He did not try to see her at all until a day or two before the birth of
+her child was expected. Then he came at twilight. He would not let
+Grandmother put a match to the lamp in the parlour, and Marion knew from
+his quiet urgency that he was doing this so that she might continue to
+wear the dusk as a cloak. He sat down by the window, his shoulders black
+against the sunset, and his fat hands, with their appealing air of shame
+at their own fatness, laid on the little table beside him an old; carved
+coral rattle and a baby's dress precious with embroideries. These he had
+bought, he said, up in London, where he had had to go for a day to do
+business with the wine merchants. He had not seemed to listen to her
+thanks. But his hunched shape against the primrose light and the
+gleaming of his thick white fingers playing nervously with the fragile
+gifts spoke of a passionate concern for her. No doubt that concern was
+sincere. They told her after her confinement that during the day and
+night through which her child was slowly torn from her he had not left
+the house, and at her cries a sweat had run down his face. That was not
+unnatural. An incomplete villainy would vex its designer as any
+unfinished work of art vexes the artist. But she interpreted it in the
+sense that he, knowing what delusions youth has regarding the human
+capacity for love, had foreseen that she would.
+
+She let him see her before anyone else, and he had made the most of that
+ideal occasion when her being was so sensitive that it responded to
+everything, and so well pleased at having safely borne her son that she
+saw everything as evidence of creation's virtue. He had added stroke to
+stroke with the modest confused smile with which he entered the room, as
+if he felt his vast bulk ridiculous in this room of small rosebud
+patterns; the uneasy laughter with which he disguised his embarrassment
+when they could find no chair big enough for him; the shy wonder with
+which he put out his hand and hooded the tiny black head with it, and
+uncurled the little hand with his obese forefinger; the reticence with
+which he checked his remark that he had always wanted to have a child of
+his own. And he perfected the picture that he desired her to see by the
+assurance he gave murmurously from the darkness of the open door. "Get
+well soon.... You needn't be afraid of me. We made a bargain. I mean to
+stick to it." He had caught the very tune that dogged sincerity plays on
+the voice's chords. She lay happy after he had gone because she and her
+child had so true a friend.
+
+It was, of course, from no malice against her that he set out to deceive
+her, but from the natural desire to protect his being from alterations
+hostile to its quality. Long after, sitting with Richard in a cafe in
+Rio de Janeiro, she had looked at the men who were taking the lovely
+painted women to themselves, and she detected behind the gross mask that
+the prospect of physical enjoyment set on the faces an expression of
+harsh spiritual defensiveness; and thenceforward she had understood why
+Peacey had practised this fraud on her. He had known, as all men know,
+that there is a beneficent magic in the relationship between men and
+women; the evil man, at war with all but himself, cannot but admit that
+for his supremest pleasure he depends on one other than himself, and by
+his gratitude to her is tainted with altruism and is no longer
+single-minded in his war on others. Such men uphold prostitution because
+it exorcises sex of that magic. It is not a device to save sensuality,
+for love with a stranger is like gulping new spirit, and love with a
+friend is drinking old wine. Its purpose is indeed this very
+imperfection of the embraces that it offers, for they leave the soul as
+it was.
+
+Peacey, she understood in the light of this discovery, had desired her
+with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and
+a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would
+have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to
+create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her
+and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.
+She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler's
+pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as
+old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of
+craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as
+unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked
+down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top
+shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver: thinking his
+solution out to its perfect issue.
+
+It had been quite perfect. By that visit, and by his abstention from any
+later visit, he had induced in her just that mood of serenity and
+confidence which would be most shocked by the irruption of his passion.
+The evening when it all happened she had been so utterly given up to
+happiness. She had taken the most preposterously long time to put
+Richard to bed. He had had a restless day, and had been so drowsy when
+she went to feed him in the evening that she had put him back in his
+cradle in his day clothes, but about half-past eight he had awakened and
+called her, and she found him very lively and roguish. She had stripped
+him and then could not bear to put his night-clothes on, he looked so
+lovely lying naked in her lap. He was not one of those babies who are
+pieces of flesh that slowly acquire animation by feeding and sleeping;
+from his birth he had seemed to be charged with the whole vitality of a
+man. He was minute as a baby of three months is, he was helpless, he had
+not yet made the amazing discovery that his hand belonged to him, but
+she knew that when she held him she held a strong man. This babyhood was
+the playful disguise in which he came into the world in order that they
+might get on easy terms with one another and be perfect companions.
+Never would he be able to feel tyrannous because of his greater
+strength, for he would remember the time when she had lifted him in her
+weak arms, and that same memory would prevent her from ever being
+depressed into a sense of inferiority, so that they would ever move in
+the happy climate of a sense of equality. And every moment of this
+journey towards that perfect relationship was going to be a delight.
+
+She bent over him, enravished by the brilliant bloom of his creamy skin
+and the black blaze of his eyes, which had been black from birth, as
+hardly any children's are; turned him over and kissed the delicate crook
+of his knees and the straight column of his spine and the little square
+wings of his shoulder-blades, and then she turned him back again and
+jeered at him because he wore the phlegmatic, pasha-like smile of an
+adored baby. She became vexed with love for him, and longed to clasp
+him, to crush him as she knew she must not. She put on his
+night-clothes, kissing him extravagantly and unsatedly, and when she
+finished he wailed and nuzzled to her breast. "Oh, no, you greedy little
+thing," she cried, for it was a quarter of an hour before he should have
+been fed again, but a wave of love passed through her and she took him
+to her. They were fused, they were utterly content with one another. He
+finished, smacking his lips like an old epicure. "Oh, my darling love!"
+she cried, and put him back into the cot and ran downstairs. If she
+stayed longer she would keep him awake with her kisses and play. She was
+brightened and full of silent laughter, like a girl who escapes from her
+sweetheart.
+
+Grandmother sat very quietly at her sewing and soon went upstairs.
+Grandmother was getting very old. When she said "Good-night" she seemed
+to be speaking out of the cavern of some preoccupation, and when she
+went upstairs her shawl fell from her shoulders and trailed its corner
+on the ground. Marion hoped that the old lady had not worn herself out
+by worrying about her, and she pulled out the sewing that had been shut
+up in the work-basket and meditated finishing it, but she was too tired.
+Nowadays she knew a fatigue which she could yield to frankly, as it was
+honourable to her organism, and meant that her strength was going into
+her milk and not into her blood. She folded her arms on the table and
+laid her head on them and thought of Richard. It was his monthly
+birthday to-day. He was three months old. She grieved to think that she
+could feed him for only six months more. How could she endure to be
+quite separate from him? Sometimes even now she regretted that the time
+had gone when he was within her, so that each of her heartbeats was a
+caress to him, to which his little heart replied, and she would feel
+utterly desolate and hungry when she could no longer join him to her
+bosom. But she would always be able to kiss him. She imagined herself a
+few years ahead, calling him back when he was running off to play,
+holding his resistant sturdiness in her arms while he gave her hasty,
+smudged kisses and hugged his ball for more loving. But she reflected
+that, while the character of those kisses would amuse her, they would
+not satisfy her craving for contact so close that it was unity with his
+warm young body, and she must set herself to be the most alluring mother
+that ever lived, so that he would not struggle in her arms but would
+give her back kiss for kiss. She flung her head back, sighing
+triumphantly because she knew she could do it, but as her eyes met her
+image in the mirror over the mantelpiece she was horrified to see how
+little like a mother she was looking. Lips pursed with these long
+imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child's mouth; she had lost
+utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a
+child may sleep: on a child's path her emanations were beginning to cast
+not light but lightning.
+
+She called out to herself: "You fool! If you really love Richard you
+will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow
+strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him
+an orange and not a kiss!" But it seemed to her that this would be a
+sacrifice until, staring into the glass, she noticed that she was now
+more beautiful than she had ever been, and then she saw the way by which
+she could be satisfied. Harry must come back; she knew he was coming
+back, for they had intercepted his letter to her, and they would not
+have done that if it had been unloving. After she had weaned Richard she
+must conceive again and let another child lift from him the excessive
+burden of her love: then her mind and soul could go on in his company
+without vexing him with these demands that only the unborn or the
+nursling could satisfy. Then this second child would become separate
+from her, and she must conceive again and again until this intense life
+of the body failed in her and her flesh ceased to be a powerful artist
+exulting in the creation of masterpieces. It must be so. For Richard's
+sake it must be so. Her love would be too heavy a cloak for one child,
+for it was meant to be a tent under which many should dwell. Again as in
+the wood she laid her hand on her body and felt it as an inexhaustible
+treasure. Again she was instantly mocked.
+
+There had come, then, a knock at the door. She had felt a little
+frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt
+fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is
+endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not
+be bitten by a frothing mouth. But it was not late, and it was as likely
+as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian
+calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.
+
+Peacey stood there. He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his
+body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll. There
+was an appearance of ceremony about him. His skin shone with the white
+lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly
+in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which
+she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like
+varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.
+
+He did not speak. He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he
+should enter. She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that
+clung about him been so definitely that of soap. From the garden behind
+him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds
+disturbed. His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids,
+with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or
+twice. When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish
+and he stepped within. He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to
+strip off his gloves. His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction,
+terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out: "Why have
+you come?"
+
+But he answered nothing. Speech is human, and words might have fomented
+some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should
+know each other only as animals and enemies. He continued to take off
+his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him
+hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the
+lamp. She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and
+moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood. Then in the blackness his
+weight threshed down on her. Even his form was a deceit, for his vast
+bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength. All consciousness soon left
+her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.
+Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her. She saw it as a lovely
+naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side,
+where it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body,
+sitting by with its haunches in a spring. She cried out to herself: "You
+can rise above this! This is only a physical thing," but her own answer
+came: "Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing. Yet it was a
+sacrament and gave you life. There is white magic and black magic. This
+is a black sacrament, and it will give you death." Her soul fainted into
+utter nothingness.
+
+She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself
+up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.
+But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and
+made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over
+her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish
+early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow
+of the lamp the night before. It was evident that Peacey had set it in
+order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing
+she had left crumpled on the table. At this manifestation of his
+peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son's
+room. But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was
+ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first
+to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty
+had through all previous agonies reassured her. But the eastern sky was
+inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before,
+and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the
+barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch
+wounds. Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had
+happened to her one of earth's ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking
+on could make good. But turning to her child to still his crying, she
+saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on
+the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty
+and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and
+she ran to him. She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the
+criminal face of the morning.
+
+From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest
+isolation. She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing
+what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but
+she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now
+why Grandmother had been so preoccupied that she let the tail of her
+shawl trail on the ground as she went upstairs that night, and why
+Cousin Tom Stallybrass had not come in to tell how the calf had gone at
+Prittlebay market. When one afternoon she came to the head of the stairs
+and saw Aunt Alphonsine gesticulating in her tight _dame de compagnie_
+black in the parlour below, stretching out her long lean neck like the
+spout of a coffee-pot to Grandmothers' ear, she stood quite still,
+staring at the two women and hating them till they saw her and fell
+silent. She did not take her gaze from them until Aunt Alphonsine put up
+her hand to cover her scar. Then she knew that this wretched woman was
+at last afraid of her and would let her alone, and she turned
+contentedly to the room where Richard was.
+
+But later on a misgiving seized her lest her aunt might have come as
+envoy from Peacey, and since she perceived that, her rage against the
+world was so visibly written on her that she inspired fear; she thought
+it best to give her boy into the charge of Peggy and to go over to
+Torque Hall herself. She waited in the courtyard outside the servants'
+quarters while they fetched him, and stood with her head high, so that
+the faces peering at her from the windows should see nothing of her
+torment, at the corner of the gardens that was visible through the
+gracious Tudor archway. There was nothing showing save a few pale mauve
+clots of Michaelmas daisies standing flank-high in the slanting dusty
+shafts of evening sunshine, and the marble Triton, glowing gold in
+answer to the sunset, with gold autumn leaves scattered on his pedestal.
+But she knew very well how fair it all must be beyond, where she could
+not see--the broad grass walk stretching between the wide, formal
+flowerbeds, well tended but disordered with the lateness of the year, to
+the sundial and the chestnut grove. How could Harry, who had loved her,
+possess all this and not want to share it with her? She could have
+sobbed like a child whose playmate is not kind, had not Peacey stood at
+her elbow. "I want to give you warning that if ever you come near me
+again I will kill you," she said. He looked sharply at her and she saw
+that he was convinced and discomfited. But suddenly he smiled. She went
+home, wondering uneasily why he should have smiled, but came to the
+conclusion that this was simply one of his mystifications and that he
+had simply been trying to cover his defeat. It was an extraordinary fact
+that there never once occurred to her that possibility, the thought of
+which, she afterwards realised, had made Peacey smile. The truth was
+that she never thought directly of that night's horror, but, perhaps
+because of that fantasy about the wounded youth which had vexed her
+delirium, she always disguised it in her mind as an encounter with a
+wild beast, and the expectation of human issue no more troubled her than
+it would a woman who had been gored by a boar.
+
+It was partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous
+peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some
+months that she was going to have Peacey's child. It was indeed a rainy
+December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was
+little Jack Harken, because he was whistling "Good King Wenceslas," as
+he always did, and would not go to answer him, although she knew
+Grandmother and Peggy were both in the dairy, because she was distraught
+with her own degradation. Her encounter with Peacey had been like being
+shown some picture from a foul book and being obliged to stare at it
+till it was branded on her mind, so that whenever she looked at it she
+saw it also, stamped on the real image like the superscription on a
+palimpsest. But now she felt as if she herself had become a picture in a
+foul book. And she was quite insane with a sense of guilt towards
+Richard. This discovery had, of necessity, meant that she must wean him,
+and her obsession interpreted their conflict between them that had
+naturally followed as a wrangle between them as to her responsibility
+for this evil. Now he was lying in his cot screaming with rage, his
+clean frock and the sheets running with the rivulets of milk that he had
+spat out and struck from the teat of the bottle she was forcing on him,
+and she was sobbing, for this sort of thing had been going on for days,
+"I can't help it, darling, I can't help it."
+
+Then Jackie began to thump rhythmically on the door below, and she ran
+down, maddened with so much noise, and snatched the letter he held out
+to her. At the writing on the envelope her heart stood still. She
+recanted all she had lately thought of Harry. Hatred and resentment fell
+from her. The promise of her lover's near presence came on her like a
+south wind blowing over flowers. At his message that he was waiting for
+her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is--a
+shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its
+mate's hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that
+changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable
+gold. In her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her
+shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly
+so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the
+thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell,
+because her lover's arms would so soon be round her.
+
+She was amazed, for she had not yet had leisure or the heart to look out
+of the window, that beneath her the marshes crackled white with sunlit
+snow, and a blue sea stretched to the rosy horizon that girdles bright
+frosty days. Even as this beauty had lain unseen under her windows, so
+had her happiness waited unsuspected. She did not see him till she was
+close upon him, for he was striding up and down between the last two
+trees of the elm hedge. Her heart ached when she saw him standing,
+brilliantly lovely as the glistening snow-laden branches above him, for
+it was plain from the confident set of his shoulders and the loose grip
+of his hand on his stick that he was unaware that any situation existed
+which was not easily negotiable. They had evidently told him nothing at
+Torque Hall to destroy the impression she must have created by her last
+letter to him in which she had described her acceptance of Peacey's
+offer of a formal marriage. They had not dared, for they knew how
+terrible he would be when he moved to avenge her. But he lifted his eyes
+and ran to her and took her in his arms, and did not cease to kiss her
+till she sobbed out what they had done to her. Then it was as if a wind
+had blown and the snow had fallen from the branches, leaving them but
+dark, gnarled wood.
+
+"But why did you marry him?"
+
+"The people stoned me in the street and I could get no peace at home."
+
+"Couldn't you have tried to stand it?"
+
+"I was afraid for the boy."
+
+"Then why couldn't you have gone away?"
+
+"How could I when I was so ill? Why did not you come back?"
+
+"How could I leave the prince and princess?"
+
+She was aghast to find them quarrelling, and while he drew a shuddering
+breath between his teeth, she interrupted: "Oh, Richard is so lovely!
+You must see him soon. Oh, such a boy!"
+
+But he had paid no heed and shakingly poured out words since it was so
+like the harmless spite of a child that beats young to old, her blood
+from that of a loved girl to a hating woman. He found the situation, she
+had thought at the time, and still thought after thirty years, far less
+negotiable than a high love would have done. It did not occur to him
+that he might take her away. He took it for granted that thereafter
+they must be lost to each other. But save for his desire to blame her
+for these mischances, which did not offend her, since it was so like the
+harmless spite of a child that beats his racquet because it has sent his
+ball into the next garden, he seemed not to be thinking of her part in
+that loss at all. It was his extreme sense of his own loss that was
+making him choke with tears. It appeared that love was not always a
+shelter, a wing, a witty clemency, a tender alchemy. She stood half
+asleep with shock until a sentence, said passionately in his delightful
+voice which made one see green water running swiftly, and at first
+refused admission to her mind by her incredulous love, confirmed itself
+by reiteration. "Damn it all," he was saying, "you were unique!" At that
+she cried out, "Oh, you are Peacey too! I will go back to Richard," and
+turned and stumbled up the wet hillside.
+
+It is true that Harry's desertion nearly killed her--that there was a
+moment, as she breasted the hill-top and found herself facing the
+malevolent red house where they had always told her that he did not
+really love her, when she thought she was about to fall dead from excess
+of experience and would have chosen to die so, if Richard had not waited
+for her. Yet it was also true that for long she hardly ever thought of
+Harry. Such fierce and unimagined passions and perplexities now filled
+her, that the simple and normal emotions she felt for him became
+imperceptible, like tapers in strong sunlight.
+
+The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry
+frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in
+the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had
+left Torque Hall that morning. She had shaken her head and given a
+dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had
+had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because
+the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she
+was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to
+speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her
+or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey. Nor, when a few weeks later
+it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had
+been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next
+twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must
+be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved. She thought of it,
+indeed, but negligently. She could imagine well how he had walked with
+his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a
+tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very
+virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped
+and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest
+in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the
+shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, "I must get out of
+this." No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to
+the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies. It was not like her
+agony. Nothing was simple there. Destiny had struck her being a blow
+that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was
+confusion, and the best things were bad.
+
+Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
+beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
+his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
+would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
+and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
+so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
+forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
+constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
+a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
+that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
+her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
+that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
+with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
+knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
+to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
+was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
+matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
+her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
+with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
+was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
+dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
+motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
+to judge her and bring this matter to an end.
+
+It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
+that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
+he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
+he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
+money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
+thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
+yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
+that day of which she had told nobody.
+
+But she had cheered herself in all those nights that she would make up
+for her body's defection by loving the child very much when it was born.
+She knew she would have no passion for it as she had for Richard, but
+she foresaw herself being consciously and slantingly tender over it,
+like a primitive Madonna over the Holy Child. There was, of course, no
+such solution of the problem. It became plain that there was not going
+to be in that hour when she knew the unnatural horror of a painless
+parturition. She had not been at all shocked by the violence she had
+endured at Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with
+the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a
+persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating
+herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like
+looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that
+here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which
+have no meaning and realising that here is madness.
+
+She was going through a process that should have produced life: but
+because of the lack of some essence which works through pain, but
+nevertheless is to the breeding womb what sight is to the eye or sanity
+to the brain, it was producing something that was as much at variance
+with life as death. The old women at her bedside chuckled and rubbed
+their hands because she was having such an easy time, but that was
+because they were old and had forgotten. If a young woman had been
+there she would have stood at the other side of the room between the
+windows, as far away from the bed as she could, and her lips would have
+pursed, as if she felt the presence of uncleanness. So were her own,
+when they showed her the pale child. She had indeed done an unclean and
+unnatural thing when she had brought forth a child that lived yet was
+unloved; who was born of a mother that survived and looked at it, and
+who yet had no mother, since she felt no motion towards it, but a deep
+shiver of her blood away from it; who aroused no interest in the whole
+universe save her own abhorrence; who was, as was inevitable in one so
+begotten and so born, intrinsically disgusting in substance.
+
+"Well, I have Richard to help me bear this," she said to herself, but
+her heart reminded her that though she had Richard, this child had no
+one. Pitifully she put out her arms and drew it to her breast, but
+detected for herself the fundamentally insincere kindness that a
+stranger will show to a child, confident that before long it will be
+claimed by its own kin.
+
+She always remembered how good the little thing had been as it lay in
+her arms, and how distasteful. Those were always to remain its silent
+characteristics. It was so good. "As good," the nurses used to say, "as
+if he were a little girl." It hardly ever cried, and when it did it
+curiously showed its difference from Richard. He hated being a baby and
+subject to other people's wills, and would lie in a cot and roar with
+resentment; but this child, when it felt a need that was not satisfied,
+did not rebel, but turned its face to the pillow and whined softly. That
+was a strange and disquieting thing to watch. She would stand in the
+shadow looking at the back of its little head, so repellently covered
+with hair that was like fluff off the floor, and listening to the cry
+that trailed from its lips like a dirty piece of string; and she would
+wonder why it did this, partly because she really wanted to know, and
+partly because it fended off the moment when she had to take it in her
+arms. Perhaps, she reflected, it muted its rage because it knew that it
+was unlovable and must curry favour by not troubling people. Indeed, it
+was as unlovable as a child could be. It was not pleasant naked, for its
+bones looked at once fragile and coarse, and its flesh was lax, and in
+its clothes it was squalid, for it was always being sick or dribbling.
+Then her heart reproached her, and she admitted that it cried softly
+because it had a gentle spirit, and she would move forward quickly and
+do what it desired, using, by an effort of will, those loving words that
+fluttered to her lips when she was tending Richard. Time went on, but
+her attitude to it never developed beyond this alternate recognition of
+its hatefulness and its goodness.
+
+She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to
+bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed
+infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant
+in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out
+of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when
+her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly
+to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for
+knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty
+knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food
+round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a
+railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would
+speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered
+him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does
+when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But
+Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk
+perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that
+passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got
+tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked
+playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with
+trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of
+foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine
+and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a
+pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over
+again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and
+Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!"
+When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both
+his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so
+that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly
+noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would
+take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not
+share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the
+best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to
+a servant. He was of the substance of his mother, and he knew all that
+she knew, and he knew that this child was an intruder.
+
+They clenched themselves against him. They were kind to him, but they
+would silently scheme to be alone together. If they were all three in
+the garden, she sitting with her needlework, Richard playing with his
+engine and Roger making daisy-chains, there would come a time when she
+would arise and go into the house. She would not look at Richard before
+she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When
+she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious
+operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale,
+or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to
+look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him,
+knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door and stand for a
+moment, twiddling the handle round and round, as if he had not really
+been so very keen to come to her, and she would go on indifferently with
+her occupation. But presently she would feel that she must steal a
+glance at the face that she knew would be looking so adorable now,
+peering obliquely round the edge of the door, the lips bright with
+vitality as with wet paint and the eyes roguish as if he felt she were
+teasing life by enjoying it so, and the dear square head, browny-gold
+like the top of a bun, and the little bronze body standing so fresh and
+straight in the linen suit. So her glance would slide and slide, and
+their eyes would meet and he would run to her. If he had anything on his
+conscience he would choose this moment for confession. "Mother, I told a
+lie yesterday. But it wasn't about anything really important, so we
+won't talk about it, will we?"
+
+Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk,
+until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so
+boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love
+for him as in long meadow-grass. Even as she imagined that night before
+Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss.
+They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other
+child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle,
+surveying them with wild eyes. There would be a moment of dislocation.
+Then she would cry, "Come along, Roger!" and Richard would slip from her
+knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms
+round her neck and kiss her. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as
+if it needed reassurance.
+
+But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very
+difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of
+him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never
+felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving
+nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in
+order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage
+which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was
+eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel
+either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in
+different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the
+immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the
+other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when
+she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great
+distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she
+marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for
+love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would
+never mature.
+
+The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another
+eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque
+Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed
+between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she
+was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but
+she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so
+after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past
+each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift
+her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she
+would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful,
+and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was
+as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a
+band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were
+contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be
+pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's
+breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the
+other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it
+would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its
+features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any
+expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the
+mud. They would pass on--their hearts sunk deeper into dingy
+acquiescence in their separation.
+
+Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as
+externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.
+Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house
+into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers
+to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though
+his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of
+naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when
+Roger ailed--which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a
+weak digestion--she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse
+him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary
+intensity on the minutiae of his treatment and diet as if she were
+attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on
+presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter
+evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often
+to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start
+one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent,
+concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal
+existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the
+park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames
+mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave
+any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him
+as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing
+did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.
+
+As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare
+that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman
+living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the
+other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes
+at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers
+rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into
+it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and
+she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger,
+but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there had
+arrived--as there did every six months--parcels of toys, addressed to
+him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of
+paper scrawled "With love from father."
+
+She would be troubled by such moments when they came, for she was
+growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this
+pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and
+struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had
+smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love
+itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and
+breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent
+that it did not detect that nobody had really given it anything, and
+went on rejoicing, thus redeeming her from guilt. He would come and
+stand at the door of any room in which she was sitting, and she would
+pretend not to know he was there, so that she need caress him or say the
+forced loving word; but when at length, irritated by his repeated
+sniffs, she turned towards him, she would find the grey marbles of his
+eyes bright with happiness, and he would cry out in his dreadful
+whistling voice, "Ah, you didn't know I was watching you!" and run
+across undoubtingly to her arms. There would be real gratitude in the
+embrace she gave him. His trust in her had so changed the moment that
+she need not feel remorse for it.
+
+It had seemed quite possible that they could go on like this for ever,
+until the very instant that all was betrayed. She had had a terrible
+time with Richard, who was now seven years old. After their midday meal
+he had asked permission to go and spend the afternoon playing with some
+other boys on the marshes, and she had given it to him with a kiss,
+under which she had thought he seemed a little sullen. When Roger and
+she had nearly finished their tea he had appeared at the door, had stood
+there for a minute, and then, throwing up his head, had said doggedly:
+"I've had a lovely time at the circus." She had left the bread-knife
+sticking in midloaf and sat looking at him in silence. This was real
+drama, for she had refused to take them to the circus and forbidden him
+to go by himself because there was a measles epidemic in the
+neighbourhood. It flashed across her that by asking for permission to
+play with the boys on the marshes when he meant to go to the circus he
+had told her a lie. The foolish primitive maternal part of her was
+convulsed with horror at his fault. Because he was more important than
+anybody else, it seemed the most tremendous fault that anybody had ever
+committed, and because he was her son it seemed quite unlike any other
+fault and far more excusable. Her detached wisdom warned her that she
+must check all such tendencies in him, since what would in other
+children be judged a shortcoming natural to their age, would in him be
+ascribed to the evil blood of his lawless begetting, and he would start
+life under the powerful suggestion of a bad reputation. She resolved to
+punish him. The core of her that was nothing but love for Richard, that
+would have loved him utterly if they had not been mother and son, but
+man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, cried out with
+anguish that she should have to hurt him to guard against the destiny
+which she herself had thrust upon him.
+
+She said in a strained voice: "How dare you tell a lie to me and pretend
+that you were going to the marshes?" He answered, his eyebrows meeting
+and lying in straight, sullen bars: "I had to do that so's you wouldn't
+worry about me not coming home. And I paid for myself with the sixpence
+that was over from the five shillings Cousin Tom gave me at Christmas.
+And you know it doesn't really matter about the measles, because I'm
+strong and don't always go catching things like Roger does."
+
+He made as if he were going to sit down at the table, but she said: "No,
+you mustn't have any tea. Go to your room and undress. You've lied and
+you've disobeyed. I'll have to whip you." Her heart was thumping so that
+she thought she was going to faint. He lifted his chin a little higher
+and said: "Very well, the circus was very good. It was quite worf this."
+He marched out of the room and left her sick and quivering at her duty.
+After she had heard him bang his door, she realised that Roger was
+asking her again and again if he might have some more cherry jam, and
+she answered, sighing deeply, "No, dear, it's too rich. If you have any
+more you'll be ill," and she rose from the table and took the jar into
+the larder. She decided to clear away tea first, but that only meant
+carrying the tray backwards and forwards twice, and after a few moments
+she found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, shaking with
+terror, while the other child whined about her skirts and stretched up
+its abhorrent little arms. She pushed it aside, qualifying the harsh
+movement with some insincere endearment, and went to Richard's room and
+walked in blindly, saying: "I must whip you--you've broken the law, and
+if you do that you must be punished." Out of the darkness before her
+came the voice of the tiny desperado: "Very well. It was quite worf
+this. Mother, I'm ready. Come on and whip me." She pulled down the
+blinds and set herself to the horrid task, and kept at it hardly,
+unsparingly, until she felt she had really hurt him. Then she said, with
+what seemed to be the last breath in her heart-shattered body: "There,
+you see, whenever you break the law people will hurt you like this. So
+take notice." She moved about the room, leaving it as it should be left
+for the night, opening the windows and folding up the counterpane, while
+he lay face downwards on his pillow. Just as she was closing the door he
+called softly:
+
+"Mummie!"
+
+She continued to close it, and he cried:
+
+"Mummie!"
+
+But she remained quite quiet so that he thought she had gone. After a
+minute she heard him throw himself over in the bed and kick the clothes
+and sob fiercely, "Gah! Why can't she come when I call her?"
+
+She was back by his bedside in a second, and his arms were round her
+neck and he was sobbing:
+
+"Mummie, mummie, I know I've been naughty!" And as he felt the wetness
+of her face he cried out, "Oh, mummie, have I made you cry? I will be
+good! I will be good! I'll never make you cry again! I know I was a
+beast to go 'cos you really were frightened of us getting measles, but
+oh, mummie, I did so want to see a tiger!"
+
+They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that
+were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost
+melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.
+
+"You were quite right to whip me," he told her. "I wouldn't have
+believed you were really cross if you hadn't hurt me." Presently, when
+he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he
+sighed, "Oh, darling, the circus was lovely! There were such clever
+people. There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the
+ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful
+lady in pink satin. Mummie, you'd look lovely in pink satin!--and she'd
+bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.
+That was lovely, but I liked the animals best. Oh, darling, the lions!"
+
+She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that
+ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he
+protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
+surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
+up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
+of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
+could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
+do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
+parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
+They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
+suddenly as children do.
+
+She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
+nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
+little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
+than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
+waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
+rose and left him.
+
+Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily
+through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart
+wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew
+that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had
+been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going
+to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that
+she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve
+this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the
+open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by
+some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all
+poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate
+for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.
+
+She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and
+humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of
+nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the
+woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way
+touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her
+eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went
+round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop
+on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was
+pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark doors and
+windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their
+thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they
+were consciously preserving their occupants from the night's magic. As
+she walked to the garden's edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass
+and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks. The
+round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were
+hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and
+changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within
+the house was Richard. All was beauty.
+
+Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother? She stood
+there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew
+cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went
+back to the house.
+
+She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door
+was open and giving out a faint ray of light. She pulled it open and saw
+the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the
+jar into his mouth. A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it,
+threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull.
+It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that
+gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair,
+the floor. She lifted the child down and struck it. It gave her the most
+extraordinary pleasure to strike it. She struck it three times, and each
+time it was as good as drinking wine. Then she fell forward on her knees
+and covered her face with her hands. The child ceased to howl and put
+its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only
+reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it. Still, she submitted
+to its embrace, and muttered in abasement: "Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn't
+have done that!"
+
+The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam,
+and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that
+anybody had behaved badly to it. There was nothing to do but to give it
+a kiss and take it off to bed. When she saw its horrid little body
+stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered
+again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether
+very much force would be needed to kill it. All the time it knelt at her
+knee saying its prayers she was wondering whether, when he was a little
+older, he would not get caught by the tide out on the flats. "You vile
+woman!" she exclaimed in amazement. "You murderess!" But that was merely
+conversation which did not alter the established fact that her
+profounder self still hated the child it had brought forth, as it had
+done before he was born, and now, as then, was plotting to kill it, and
+that some check which her consciousness had always exerted on that
+hatred had for some reason been damaged, and that he was in active
+danger from her.
+
+All night she lay awake, and in the morning she went up to the bailiff's
+office at Torque Hall and asked them to send for Harry. She waited in an
+inner room, her heart quite calm with misery, and when Harry appeared in
+the doorway she did not care one way or another that he was white and
+shaken. Without delaying to greet him, she told him that she loathed
+Peacey's child so much that it must be taken away from her, at least for
+some time, and that she had wondered if she ought to give him a chance
+of finding affection with his father, who had, after all, never stopped
+sending him presents.
+
+There was a silence, and she turned her eyes on him and found him
+looking disapproving. Plainly he thought it very unnatural of her to
+dislike her own child, and was daring to doubt if his own son was safe
+with her. He--he of all men--who by his disloyalty had brought on her
+this monstrous birth that had deformed her fate! She clenched her fists
+and drew in a sharp breath and her eyes blazed. He moved forward
+suddenly in his chair, and she saw that this display of her quality had
+drawn him to her, as always the moon of her being had drawn the fluid
+tides of his, and that he wanted to touch her. Nearly he desired her.
+That also was insolence. Her acute hating glance recorded that whereas
+desire had used to make his face hard and splendid like a diamond, like
+a flashing sword, it now made it lax, and she realised with agony,
+though, of course, without surprise, that he had been unfaithful to
+their love times without number. But she looked into his eyes and found
+them bereaved as her heart was. She turned aside and sobbed once, drily.
+After that, they spoke softly, as if one they had both loved lay dead
+somewhere close at hand. He told her that Peacey had set up for himself
+in an inn, and that a widowed sister of his, named Susan Rodney, who
+also had been in the Torques' service, was keeping house for him. She
+was a really good sort, he declared, although she was Peacey's sister,
+and very motherly; indeed, she had been terribly upset by the loss of
+her only child, a little boy of nine, so she would doubtless welcome the
+charge of Roger. At any rate, there would be no harm in letting the
+child go to her for a three months' visit.
+
+"I'll settle the whole thing," he said. "You'd better not write; he may
+want to meet you."
+
+With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything
+useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she
+abruptly rose to go. But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity
+that had vexed her for years.
+
+"Tell me," she asked. "How did you get rid of Peacey? Was it money?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "Not altogether. You see, I found out
+something about him...."
+
+She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had
+perpetuated.
+
+So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation.
+She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her
+brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper
+lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow
+floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And
+because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was
+sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at
+Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance
+at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she
+found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been
+in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which
+was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as
+to how he was getting on at Dawlish.
+
+"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would
+begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer,
+and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious
+man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that
+which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated
+her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.
+
+Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by
+explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had
+suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she
+could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to
+win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and
+be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly
+in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely
+she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had
+gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the
+other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been
+subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read
+book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to
+this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not
+bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood
+had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows
+brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her
+bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the
+Ten Commandments.
+
+Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the
+eyeballs were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose
+and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much,
+and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms
+round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly
+difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her,
+and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her.
+But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that
+because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more
+impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the
+child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in
+this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her
+heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she
+had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being
+slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was
+necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment
+Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his
+poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other
+love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them
+off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly,
+and with an air of refusing to participate in the spoils of vice,
+declined to let Marion buy her a firstclass ticket, so the parting had
+to take place in a crowded thirdclass compartment. Roger shrieked and
+kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion
+said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now
+she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the
+eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And
+there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."
+
+All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this
+plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who
+stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters
+wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he
+never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream
+out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been
+sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother
+hates him!"
+
+She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with
+grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus
+about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child
+might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She
+watched the diminishing train with a criminally light heart. Richard
+began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely--just us two!"
+
+It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran
+into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep,
+into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did
+not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the
+head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he
+went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the
+garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a
+foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not
+been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he
+returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter,
+for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick
+suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him
+out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have
+stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not
+struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed
+her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a
+picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put
+them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted
+candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her
+pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which
+these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and
+Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and
+sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost
+nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better
+than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he
+would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her
+about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would
+settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would
+tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.
+
+On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together,
+and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found
+the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine.
+They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried
+horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see
+Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it
+were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there
+met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings,
+and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the
+sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels
+thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled
+and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its
+flames.
+
+Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness
+and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and
+lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it
+was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his
+body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and
+unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings
+as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride
+ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his
+behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable
+conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his
+spirit were poured out into his passion for her. She had always known
+these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the
+knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For
+now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man
+to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she
+was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud
+by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother
+of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according
+to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be
+enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses
+in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so
+much less splendid than his son.
+
+She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour
+on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with
+the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew
+that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to
+keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite
+safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to
+speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to
+say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard
+would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she
+would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to
+speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she
+tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might
+try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be
+nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger
+will always be nice to me--you needn't worry about that."
+
+As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural
+slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village
+school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact,
+disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered
+judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of
+his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which
+his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure,
+whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute
+illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically
+than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or
+need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so
+were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly,
+or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or
+workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely
+than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together
+men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to
+rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged
+to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure,
+their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be
+adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.
+
+Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
+passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest
+after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind
+like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and
+even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
+goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would
+disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose
+begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him
+take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her
+the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that
+stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith
+Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought
+beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any
+man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to
+everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long
+would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she
+cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard
+looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The
+surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical
+kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very
+well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute,
+with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to
+burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest
+of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity,
+and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way,
+"You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll
+be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.
+If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger,
+she would succeed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking
+and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay
+in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone
+from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by
+nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and
+love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning
+for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later
+years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the
+afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever
+rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as
+one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own
+thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that
+the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle
+of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it
+specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two,
+and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last
+Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds
+about the dark edges of the room.
+
+"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.
+She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began
+to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning
+their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.
+"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys
+say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because
+always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down
+and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to
+infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.
+But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile,
+as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly,
+"Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his
+brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as
+children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some
+important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant
+resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow,
+acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has
+to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.
+But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an
+off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the
+best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"
+She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had
+been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about;
+it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups
+were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....
+
+As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and
+rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment
+so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the
+benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that
+her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no
+longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she
+wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week
+before Christmas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on
+the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it
+threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the
+pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.
+There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to
+remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her
+brainpan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he
+would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.
+It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so
+many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she
+took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six
+months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by
+reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to
+be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was
+declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that
+love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy
+than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not
+have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the
+house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then
+penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant
+presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat
+with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she
+could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor
+little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that
+Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in
+subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his
+cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they
+would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished
+she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and
+not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from
+looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey
+and he knew it.
+
+Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to
+heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She
+picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and
+struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients
+would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was
+being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter
+to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not
+know, and then, because the grandfather clock twanged out three and she
+knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the
+windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High
+Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found
+Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped.
+The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously,
+and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all
+the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation
+of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at
+once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days
+after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey,
+the village people would go through her story all over again to try to
+find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a
+tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which
+the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer
+distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming,
+_please_, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the
+favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much
+imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.
+
+"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say
+afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the
+extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy
+with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed.
+For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was
+nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the
+game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote
+her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back
+within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an
+infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back,
+pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be
+taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger,
+she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped
+them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame
+died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and
+cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"
+
+What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels
+with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than
+a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can
+hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.
+She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the
+blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air
+with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him
+suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and
+abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her
+no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every
+hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in
+some way that would hurt her.
+
+One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when
+she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up
+and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had
+forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able
+to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to
+write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not
+coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She
+took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown
+getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard
+and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away
+she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and
+wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of
+blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or
+of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper;
+and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said
+wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into
+February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and
+the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.
+
+That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn
+she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men
+looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her
+hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.
+Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.
+Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In
+the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to
+herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God
+I may never spend another like it."
+
+But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul
+walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously,
+struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was
+no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not
+long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture
+so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in
+an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get
+something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a
+bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few
+hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now
+undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They
+were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that
+there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put
+into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and
+at games.
+
+Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance
+which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead
+from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a
+school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a
+player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure
+was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know
+as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail
+of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were
+both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his
+superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader
+might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.
+When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this
+suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth
+limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he
+pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it
+was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this
+sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.
+She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that
+she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to
+her.
+
+But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down
+Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown sunshine of the
+dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his
+dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of
+the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the
+other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep,
+for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of
+memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given
+her with its first prick, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that
+those things would go on and on, until in the end a little figure in a
+nightshirt beat the dark with its fists.
+
+For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating
+her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her
+that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart
+which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little
+more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she
+coveted more than any pleasure. But that process, if it ever had begun,
+was stopped when Richard was fifteen.
+
+It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays,
+that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that
+she had started up, crying out, "Harry! Harry!" She heard the latch of
+the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.
+Half asleep, she mumbled, "Harry, it can't be you?..." A voice answered
+haltingly, "No," and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and
+lit the candle by her bedside. She could not see him, for the light was
+too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her
+dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, "Go to
+bed, I'm all right, all right." But he sat down on her bed and took her
+hand in his, and said sullenly, "You've been calling out for my father.
+Why are you doing that?" She whimpered, "Nothing. I was only dreaming."
+But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep. "I know all
+about it, mother. The other boys told me about it. And Goodtart said
+something once." His hand tightened on hers. "You used to meet him up at
+that temple." For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and
+then persisted, "What is it? Why do you cry almost every night? I've
+heard you ever so often. You've got to tell me what's the matter."
+
+She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid
+for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that
+the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but
+because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin
+cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she
+desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her
+long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the
+shore by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him
+so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips
+dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the
+boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"
+
+"What boy did that?"
+
+"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."
+
+"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."
+
+She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually
+became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair
+across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she
+wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had
+happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight
+of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself,
+"Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"
+
+But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face
+against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and
+sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at
+him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking,
+"Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I
+love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for
+one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears,
+slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with
+kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with
+relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back
+to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He
+did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped
+softly into dreamless sleep.
+
+Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced
+by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of
+guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes
+against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it
+is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by
+calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest
+dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and
+she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was
+binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his
+childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from
+a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand
+what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these
+nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her
+destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she
+could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly
+concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a
+profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She
+did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory
+quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little
+figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt
+nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As
+much as ever Roger was an orphan.
+
+But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this
+matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed
+it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How
+proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to
+sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to
+that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from
+boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen
+so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when
+he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids
+and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent
+clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her
+until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She
+had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul
+when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship,
+he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"
+She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather
+roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting,
+did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned
+away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had
+distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would
+imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for
+going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was
+not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that
+travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his
+magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had
+found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and
+the farm-men, for she had grown very sly about her fellow-men, and knew
+that it was best to hide happiness lest someone jealous should put out
+their hand to destroy it. So she had gone down to the orchard and sat in
+the crook of a tree, looking out at an opal estuary where a frail
+rainstorm spun like a top in the sunshine before the variable April
+gusts. She wondered how his dear brown face would look now he had
+outfaced danger and had been burned by strange suns. She had heard
+suddenly the sound of steps coming down the path, and she had turned in
+ecstasy; but there was nobody there but a pale young man who looked like
+one of the East-End trippers who all through the summer months
+persistently trespassed on the farm lands. As he saw her he stopped, and
+she was about to order him to leave the orchard by the nearest gate when
+he flapped his very large hands and cried out, "Mummie! Mummie!" There
+was a whistling quality in the cry that instantly convinced her. She
+drew herself taut and prepared to deal with him as a spirited woman
+deals with a blackmailer, but as he ran towards her, piping exultantly,
+"Now I'm sixteen I can say who I want to live with--the vicar says so,"
+she remembered that he was her son, and suffered herself to be folded in
+his arms, which embraced her closely but without suggestion of strength.
+
+That day, at least, she had played her part according to her duty: she
+had corrected so far as possible the sin of her inner being. It had not
+been so very difficult, for Roger had shown himself just as
+goldenhearted as he had been as a child. He would not speak of the years
+of ill-treatment from which he had emerged, save to say tediously, over
+and over again, with a revolting, grateful whine in his voice, how hard
+Aunt Susan had worked to keep the peace when father had one of his bad
+turns. It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice
+in a draper's shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and
+overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained
+of was that the "talk was bad." Tears came into his light eyes when he
+said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save
+sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for
+her. There would never be any end to that. All through the midday meal
+he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and
+would say whistlingly: "Ooh, mummie, d'you know, I used to think it must
+be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think
+I've ever seen such another head of hair."
+
+But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they
+walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of
+which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when
+I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said
+that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you
+didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."
+
+Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a
+kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try
+his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and
+that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you
+knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past
+eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she
+had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they
+ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into
+the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly
+excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here,
+Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who
+defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not
+like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But
+Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened
+with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It
+evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a
+third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself
+felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other
+people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have
+come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see
+it's Roger!"
+
+Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for
+him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure,
+she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome
+having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But
+her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it
+was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of
+a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his
+coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he
+had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one
+chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell
+the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer
+and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and
+immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of
+waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are
+you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her
+chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when
+suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's
+shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to
+run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to
+carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not
+look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice,
+"Hello, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not
+bear to look at his warty hands any longer, and then asked: "Roger,
+dear, is there anything the matter?" She spoke to him always without any
+character in her phrases, like a mother in books. He mumbled, "Nothing,
+mummie," but would not lift his head; and after a gulping minute
+whimpered: "I want to go back to the shop." "Back to the shop, dear? But
+I thought you hated it. Darling, what is the matter?" He remained
+silent, so she took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
+Perhaps that had not been a very wise thing to do.
+
+Marion had dropped her hands and gone back to Richard, and said with
+simulated fierceness: "You haven't done anything to Roger that would
+make him think that we don't like having him here?" He glanced sharply
+at her and recognised that their destiny was turning ugly in their
+hands, and he answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to a chap
+who's been through such a rotten time." She thought, with shame, that if
+his face had become cruel at her question, and he had answered that he
+thought it was time the other went, she would have bowed to his
+decision, because he was her king, and she realised that it was no
+wonder that Roger had found out. That moment of which she was so proud
+because she had said heartily, "Richard, don't you see it's Roger?"
+without showing by any wild yearning of the eye that she would have
+given anything to be alone with him, had been instantly followed by a
+betrayal. For when he had lifted his lips from her cheek and had turned
+to greet Roger with courtesy that was at once kind and insincere, he had
+left one hand resting on her shoulder as it had been when they embraced,
+and his thumb stretched out to press on the pulse that beat at the base
+of her throat. If she had been completely loyal she would have moved;
+but she had stood quite still, letting him mark how she was not calm and
+rejoicing at all, but shaken as by a storm with her disgust at this
+loathsome presence. His hand had relaxed and he had passed it
+caressingly up her neck. She had let herself sigh deeply; she might as
+well have said, "I am so glad you understand I hate him." That was the
+first of a thousand such betrayals. The words said between souls are not
+heard by the eavesdropping ear, but the soul also can eavesdrop, and
+tells in its time. That morning there must have come a moment to the
+poor pale boy, as he worked at his silly present in the little shed,
+when it was plain to him that the mother and the brother whom he had
+thought so kind were vulpine with love of each other, vulpine with hate
+of him.
+
+There was no disputing his discovery, since it was true. The only thing
+to do was to try to arrange some way of life for him in which he would
+have a chance to become an independent person who could form new and
+unspoiled relationships. It was, of course, out of the question to send
+him back to the shop, but the problem of disposing of him was one that
+raised innumerable difficulties which Marion was the less able to face
+because her bad dreams had begun again. He had so little schooling that
+it was impossible to send him in for any profession. He, himself, who
+was touchingly grateful because they were not sending him back to the
+shop, chose to be trained as a veterinary surgeon, and he was
+apprenticed to old Mr. Taylor at Canewdon. But it turned out that though
+he had a passionate love for animals he had no power over them. After he
+had been chased round a field three times and severely bitten by a
+stallion with whom he had sat up for two nights, Mr. Taylor pronounced
+that it was hopeless and sent him home. They tried him as a chemist's
+assistant next, and he did well for ten months, until there was that
+awful trouble about the prescription. There had been nothing to do after
+that save to put him to work as a clerk and give him an allowance that
+with his wages would enable him to live in comfort and try to seem glad
+when he came home for his holidays.
+
+For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not
+love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made
+him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and
+half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not
+take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for
+his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at
+his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were
+so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank
+Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get
+there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep
+things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less
+misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window
+than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was
+concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end
+of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes
+following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her
+heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was
+responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to
+ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as
+everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which
+confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving
+from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city,
+because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.
+
+From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she
+was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he
+would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say
+bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And
+she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as
+you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be
+sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling
+and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the
+inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it
+would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.
+And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there
+flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing
+would happen. But what thing? She would put her hand to her head, but
+she was never able to remember.
+
+And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen;
+though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing. She herself had
+never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it,
+but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had
+always done its duty by Roger. It told, of course, the most moving story
+of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he
+should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been
+walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a
+flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller's in Watford
+and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his
+allowance, he could not possibly pay.
+
+The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at
+first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger. It had been
+unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had
+been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation
+of the note of love. It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in
+the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense
+rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur,
+"Oh, but he was speaking the truth. I'm quite comfortably off. I've come
+to pay the jeweller," and watch the look of amazement on the hot,
+high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated
+into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man,
+and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no
+longer. Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger. Marion
+felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to
+feel.
+
+She liked, too, going into the jeweller's shop and sitting there under
+the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely
+voice that she had learned from her lover: "Yes, but I don't want you to
+take them back. I want to pay for them. There seems to have been some
+misunderstanding. There is no difficulty about the money at all. My son
+only wanted you to wait till his quarter's allowance came. I have the
+money here in notes. If you would count it...." She was playing a
+mother's part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller's eyes were
+examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she
+had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because
+it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from
+within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly
+because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served
+Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried
+back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him
+as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have
+done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious
+woman...."
+
+But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up
+suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with
+pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took
+it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into
+a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the
+oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.
+She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay
+two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other
+hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her
+train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you,
+mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of
+his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll
+of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For
+since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not
+love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space,
+there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had
+always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....
+
+But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had
+written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his
+allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must
+try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a
+situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they
+heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his
+holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an
+increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at
+first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then
+in Rio de Janeiro. There she was happy. She was one of those Northerners
+to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its
+natives. For over those the sun has had power since their birth,
+consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became
+pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the
+Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth. But
+with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of
+the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons. She could walk
+across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the
+heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent
+pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the
+thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she
+was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had
+always impotently desired to do.
+
+And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched
+his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had
+established it over her being from the moment of his conception. There
+was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in
+hesitancy, but in simultaneous snatchings at life by both of the warring
+forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation. He loved
+riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he
+did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him
+in his pleasure. But he gave the core of his passion to his work and
+disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he
+was always cool and remote like a priest. It gave him pleasure to be
+insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of
+fineness and humility. He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality
+of his work that he rejected half the world's offers to him. And always
+he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if
+they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country
+that had banished them and were earning great honours. She wished this
+life could go on for ever.
+
+But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the
+flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap. She did not
+open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.
+His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an
+Indian's in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and
+satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.
+That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think
+of Richard's actions as being good or bad, but only as being different
+in colour and lustre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are
+pearls, and there are emeralds. But it made her feel lonely, and she
+turned soberly to opening her letter. It was from Roger. He was in
+trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were
+gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help. At
+first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising
+that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly:
+"Richard, how can I cable money to Roger? He wants it quickly. And,
+Richard, I think I should go home and look after him." Richard had set
+his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment's quivering
+silence, had broken into curses. "Oh, don't speak of poor Roger like
+that!" she had cried out, and he had answered terribly: "I'm not
+speaking of him; I'm speaking of my father, who let you in for all
+this." She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his
+face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace
+with his father before he died. Not even for Harry's sake would she
+imperil the love between her and her son.
+
+She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been
+useless. Roger would never come back to live with her. All she could do
+was to sit at Yaverland's End, ready to receive him when he turned up,
+as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was
+going to do in the future. Usually on these occasions he brought her a
+present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the
+humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a glass jar of
+preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking
+magnificent when he saw it in the grocer's shop. She would kiss him
+gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the
+grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in
+cities.
+
+A regular routine followed these visits. First he wrote happy letters
+home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was
+silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job
+and owed money to the landlady. Then she would seek him out, wherever he
+was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards
+Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the
+house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an
+irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home
+with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.
+At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.
+For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become
+so if he went back and lived with her. As things were, he could
+interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.
+Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible
+quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so
+sorry for his landladies. To admit that he could not earn a bare living
+when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would
+have broken his spirit.
+
+Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her,
+but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend
+together on these occasions. There fell increasingly moments of silence
+when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good
+little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his
+unpleasantness. For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.
+As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning
+to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was
+something else about his appearance, something tarnished and
+disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at
+Leicester said to her: "I do think it's such a pity that a nice young
+man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don't take more care of himself like he
+ought to." Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world,
+because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her
+son a murderer than a drunkard. She had wondered if the truth need ever
+reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind's eye a newspaper
+paragraph: "Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings
+for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course
+of their duty...." She had asked quickly, "What is he like? Does he get
+violent?" The woman had answered: "Oh no, mum; just silly-like," and had
+laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.
+
+Oh God, oh God! When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to
+something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear,
+but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had
+always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was
+conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was
+somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention
+to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for
+daring to be Richard--an intention that was vindictive against beauty
+and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not
+strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit
+for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's
+drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would
+side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.
+They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness
+would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped
+out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that
+lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness
+that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.
+Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and
+excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she
+cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been
+so different...."
+
+If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great
+house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there
+slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry
+would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of
+her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born
+child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have
+gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a
+boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of
+immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his
+face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she
+longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have
+turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men
+and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them
+threatened, not one of them doomed....
+
+Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.
+The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming
+tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her
+house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would
+not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.
+Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it
+had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her
+eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...."
+
+There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric
+bell.
+
+She looked at the clock by her bedside. It was three o'clock. She said
+to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange
+things have happened assume when they fear that yet another is
+approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation,
+"It's late for anyone to call."
+
+But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.
+
+She cried out, "Ah, yes!" She knew who it was. It was Roger, come in
+rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and
+squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself. She hurried over to her
+wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into
+slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, "Roger, Roger,
+Roger! ... Why, it's you, Roger!... Come in. Come in, my boy.... What is
+it, my poor lad?..."
+
+She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle
+of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and
+smoothed from it certain lines of loathing. Bowing her head, she
+murmured a remonstrance to some power.
+
+But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the
+door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare,
+lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,"
+so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared
+to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more
+hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard
+line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the
+threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and
+hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor
+darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight
+coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it
+seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the
+white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous
+stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but
+their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.
+
+She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed
+nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor
+she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had
+looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked
+like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern
+countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where
+she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles
+away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat
+outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their
+relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without
+warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.
+
+She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the
+shed?" she asked indifferently.
+
+"No. It's outside the gate."
+
+"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."
+
+He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of
+dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.
+
+She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the
+illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the
+phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange
+night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were
+co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears
+she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge
+electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous
+son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he
+passed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It
+was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores
+lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit
+to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and
+kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.
+
+She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search
+of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of
+light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been
+anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have
+gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from
+him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her,
+that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.
+
+When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."
+
+Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance
+of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had
+not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his
+cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The
+queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet
+somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity
+for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....
+
+He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and
+murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her
+that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in
+an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely
+name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way
+it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly
+as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.
+It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his
+favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to
+school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow
+of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the
+flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."
+
+She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but
+she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm
+plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption.
+These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that
+the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's
+hot!" she said, holding out the plate.
+
+He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.
+
+"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.
+
+"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in
+Scotland."
+
+"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"
+
+"As well as well can be."
+
+"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."
+
+"No, I've had none, none at all."
+
+"That means not too many. Does it?"
+
+They kissed, and he said tenderly yet harshly: "Roger hasn't been
+bothering you?"
+
+"Ah, the poor thing, don't speak of him like that," she said. "No, but
+I've not heard from him for six weeks. Not even at Christmas. I'm a
+little anxious. But it may be all right. You remember last Christmas
+there was a time when he didn't write. I expect it'll be all right." But
+with her eyes she abandoned herself to fear, so that he should soothe
+her and stroke her hands with his, which were trembling in spite of
+their strength because he was so glad to see her.
+
+"Mother, darling, I have hated leaving you alone. But it was necessary.
+I've done good work this winter." He made with one hand a stiff and
+sweeping movement that expressed his peculiar kind of arrogance, which
+stated that his was the victory, now and for ever, and yet took
+therefrom no pride for himself. "I've pulled it off," he said jeeringly,
+and smiled at her derisively but with tight lips, as if they must take
+this thing lightly or some danger would spring. "Where I get my brains
+from I don't know," he muttered teasingly, and put out his hand and
+traced the interweaving strands in one of her plaits. "What hair you've
+got!" he said. "I've never seen a woman with ..." He started violently
+and was silent.
+
+She cried out, "What is it?" But he answered, speaking clippedly, "Oh,
+nothing, nothing...."
+
+So evidently was he overcoming a moment of utter confusion that she
+turned away and busied herself with the coffee.
+
+Behind her his voice spoke falsely, uplifted in a feint of the surprised
+recollection which at its first coming had struck him dumb the previous
+moment. "And Ellen! I'm a nice sort of lover to be five minutes in the
+house without asking for my Ellen! How is she? How have you been getting
+on together?"
+
+"Oh, your dear Ellen!" she cried fervently. But her heart went cold
+within her. He was right. It was against nature that he should have
+forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was
+sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman
+he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of
+destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make
+time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he
+had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head,
+thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable
+look of a man who is truly in love. Well, if that were so, why could it
+not be pure and easy joy for them both, as it was for other sons and
+mothers when there were happy marriage afoot? Why must their life, even
+in such parts of it as escaped the shadow of Peacey or Roger, be so
+queer in climate? This time it was Richard's fault. She had been
+willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people. Her
+spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, "Go and eat your
+eggs before they're cold." As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and
+trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of
+his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and,
+cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?" she
+demanded.
+
+He answered mildly, "Didn't I?"
+
+"No, you didn't," she told him curtly. "You said you thought her pretty.
+Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch
+little face!..."
+
+She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the
+uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the
+smile on his lips. Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air
+as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to
+follow their diverse musics? But she could not quarrel with him for
+long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was
+given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame
+her heart like the advance of an army. His flesh and hair seemed to
+reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with
+water. Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into
+some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his
+mouth vigilant. Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver.
+Utterly melted, she cried out, "I am so glad you have come home."
+
+He started, and came smiling out of his dream. "I am so glad to be
+here," he said. They laughed across the table; the strong light showed
+them the dear lines they knew on one another's faces. "That's why," he
+cried brilliantly, "I've come at this ungodly hour. I had to be here. I
+got into London at nine o'clock and I went and had some dinner at the
+Station Hotel. But I felt wretched. Mother, I'm getting," he announced
+with a naive triumph, "awfully domestic. I got the hump the minute Ellen
+left Edinburgh. I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and
+got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here
+by midnight if I hadn't had a smash at Upminster. No, I wasn't hurt. Not
+a scrap. It was at the beginning of that garden suburb. God, it must be
+beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe. I'm
+glad we live in this old place. Well, a chap who'd bought some timber at
+an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a
+log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half
+a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a
+garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up.
+The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown
+and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down
+because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his
+business, I ask you?' he kept on saying. Mustn't it be queer to have
+womenfolk with whom one doesn't feel identical?" They exchanged a
+boastful look of happiness, the intensity of which, however, seemed the
+last effort he found possible. For his lids drooped, and he supported
+his head on his hand and took a deep drink, and said drowsily, "I'm glad
+to be here."
+
+She went and stood beside him and stroked his hair. "I should have come
+to you at Aberfay," she grieved. "But I knew I couldn't stand the
+winter, and I would only have been a nuisance to you if I had been ill
+all the time. Did the woman feed you properly, dear?"
+
+He said, without looking up, "I wouldn't have let you come. It was a
+God-forsaken hole. I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for"--he
+gave it out with an odd hesitancy, almost as if he were boyishly
+shy--"Ellen. And I had to stand it, so that I could pull this thing
+off."
+
+She asked, "What thing, my dear?" though she was not so very greatly
+interested. By daylight her ambition for him was fanatic and without
+limit. But in this stolen hour, when no one knew that they were
+together, she let herself feel something like levity about his doings.
+It seemed enough, considering how glorious he was, that he should merely
+be.
+
+He began to eat again and told the story tersely between mouthfuls. "You
+know the reason that I stayed up in Edinburgh after I'd sent off Ellen
+was that I thought I had to show the directors what I'd been doing at
+Aberfay next Thursday. They were to come on to me after they'd paid
+their visit to the Clyde works. Well, they came yesterday instead. Sir
+Vincent has to go to America sooner than he expected, so he wanted to
+get it over. When they saw what I'd been trying for during the last six
+months they got excited. As a matter of fact it is pretty good. I wish I
+could tell you about it, but you know I can't. Also I had told McDermott
+that Dynevors, the Birmingham people, had heard my contract was up in
+March, and wanted to buy me. So they got frightened, and offered me a
+new contract that they thought would keep me." He had finished his meal,
+and he pushed away his plate and stretched himself, looking up at her
+and smiling sleepily.
+
+"Have you taken it?"
+
+"Rather. It couldn't have been better."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."
+
+"How?"
+
+He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm
+too woolly-headed to tell you now."
+
+"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a
+rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are
+you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared
+nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest
+he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.
+
+He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to
+reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm
+glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been
+working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my
+footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest
+director. I've got"--again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of
+arrogance that was not vanity--"the best brain of them all. In ten years
+I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly
+everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the
+next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being
+fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind,
+who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any
+class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I
+meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific
+man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."
+
+"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.
+
+"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where
+it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you.
+You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the
+example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself.
+Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady
+enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be
+done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to
+impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes--there's a
+kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work,
+when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what
+one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have
+kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have
+pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.
+
+"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into
+British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking
+so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one
+go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's
+important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world.
+It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only
+look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study
+matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that
+when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's
+not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool
+that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself
+with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will
+die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything
+on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself,
+such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.
+
+"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification
+for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose
+that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was
+to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as
+little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it,
+considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were
+beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so
+easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just
+kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women
+that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here
+and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the
+reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is
+that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your
+life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me,
+and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember
+licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself
+teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married
+woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by
+your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of
+her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been
+magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such
+thing as justice in heaven or earth--I tell you, mother, it's kept me
+going to think of the sacrifice you made for me--"
+
+"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with
+you."
+
+"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case
+against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of
+him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being
+cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband--for some man to
+adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all
+been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist
+more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything
+about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this
+while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done
+for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful
+you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"
+
+Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with
+grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I
+never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I
+mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance
+music...."
+
+"Oh, you poor darling!--and you would have danced so beautifully!" he
+cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself
+free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she
+might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were
+only moods. I never really wanted anything except to be with you!" But
+her bliss in him had been too tightly strung by his sudden coming and by
+his open speech of that concerning which they spoke as seldom as the
+passionately religious speak of God, so for a little time she had to
+weep. But presently she stretched out her hand and pressed back his
+seeking mouth.
+
+"Hush!" she said with a grave wildness. "We must not talk like this."
+
+He lifted his face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found
+her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly
+he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on
+his hand and staring at a blank wall.
+
+She saw that she had hurt him. She drew close to him again, and murmured
+lovingly, though still with defensive majesty: "Why should we talk of
+it, my boy? It's all over now, and you're a made man. This contract
+really does mean that, doesn't it?"
+
+He answered, patting her hand to show that he submitted to her in
+everything, "Oh, in the end it means illimitable power."
+
+To give him pleasure she exchanged with him a brilliant and triumphant
+glance, though at this moment she felt that her love for him concerned
+itself less with ambition than she had ever supposed. Incredulously she
+whispered to her harsh, sceptical mind that it almost seemed as if its
+sphere were not among temporal things. But it gave her a real rapture to
+perceive in his eyes the elder brother of the expression that had always
+dwelt there in his childish days when he announced to her his
+cricket-scores and his prizes; even so, she had thought then, the
+adjutant of a banished leader might hand him down arrows to shoot on the
+city that had exiled him. And indeed the success of their conspiracy had
+been marvellous. In old times they had looked out of this house under
+lowered and defiant brows, knowing there was none without who knew of
+them who did not despise them. But now they could smile tenderly and
+derisively out into this hushed moonlight that received the uncountable
+and fatuously peaceful breaths of the sleepers who had been their
+enemies and were to be their slaves. It was strange that at this of all
+instants she should for the space of a heartbeat lose her sense of the
+uniqueness of her fate and be confounded by amazement at the common lot
+in which they two and the vanquished sleepers alike partook. Was it
+possible that this could be? That this plethora of beings that coated
+the careless turning earth like grains of dust on a sleeping top were
+born--mysterious act!--and mated--act so much more mysterious than it
+seemed!--and died--act which was the essence of mystery! She was dizzied
+with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught
+hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to
+her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less
+broad body. She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking
+about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as
+unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest. Penitently she dropped a kiss
+on his forehead and muttered, "Richard, you're a good son. You've made
+up for everything I've been through many times over...."
+
+"Then stay up with me a little," he said. "Don't let's go to bed yet."
+He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the
+hearth till it faced the grate. "Sit down, dear, and I'll make you a
+fire. Dear, do sit down. This is the last night we shall have
+together." She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew
+to be in him a mask of intense desire. He busied himself with the fire
+and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he
+had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her
+lap and seemed to sleep.
+
+But he did not. Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep
+of his eyelashes. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered; and discovered
+happily, "Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen." She waited serenely,
+while the clock ticked.
+
+Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being
+here...."
+
+She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough
+that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.
+
+But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to
+my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm
+mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case--because they've got the works
+on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I
+shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a
+place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll
+be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to
+our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising
+his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him,
+though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before.
+"It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what
+it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar
+thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go,
+hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I
+were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place
+where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that,
+mother?"
+
+She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened
+here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a
+reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling.
+"Yes, I love it."
+
+They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He
+grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if
+he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like
+the house?"
+
+She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.
+
+"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.
+
+For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward
+and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked
+unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"
+
+He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six
+hours with her without seeing that I must? She--she's a lamp with a
+double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little
+soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the
+same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from
+hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned
+again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty
+faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at
+him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he
+repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making
+for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live."
+And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his
+lips would not--that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen,
+there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made
+him leaden and uneager.
+
+"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured,
+and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than
+your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying
+to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to
+find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune
+in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."
+
+He made no response. The words were strangled in her throat, and she
+fell to tapping her foot rhythmically against the fender. Her eyes were
+moist; this was so different from the talk she had expected.
+
+Presently his shoulders twitched. "Don't do that, mother dear," he said
+impatiently.
+
+"I'm sorry, darling," she answered wearily. She threw herself back in
+her chair and clenched her fists. Desperation fevered her, and she began
+to speak vindictively. "Of course it was a great relief to me when I saw
+the kind of girl Ellen is, considering how up till now you've sidled
+past women of any sort of character as if you'd heard that men got sent
+to prison for loving any but fools."
+
+He laughed uneasily.
+
+"Yes," she went on; "you always seemed to be looking carefully for
+anything you could find that was as insipid as a water-melon. You can't,
+you know, possibly count your love-affairs as amongst your successes."
+She jerked her head back, her lips retracted in a kind of grin.
+"Mariquita de Rojas!" she jeered.
+
+He started, though not much. "I never knew you knew about that," he said
+mildly.
+
+"Of course I did." She quivered with exaggerated humiliation. "To see my
+son spending himself on something so nearly nothing. And then the way
+you moped and raged at her when she threw you over. Seeing the poor
+woman was a fool, how else could you expect her to behave but like a
+fool? It was undignified of you to put the burden of being the woman you
+loved on a poor thing like her--like overworking a servant girl." She
+perceived that she was hot and shaking, and that she was within an ace
+of betraying the secret that there sometimes rose in her heart a thirst
+to beat and hurt every woman that he had ever loved. Words would pour
+out that would expose her disgusting desire to strike and scratch if she
+did not substitute others. So she found herself crying in a voice that
+was thinner than hers: "And a married woman! To see you doing wrong!"
+
+The moment she said it she was ashamed and drew an expunging hand across
+her lips. And as she had feared, he threw over his shoulder a glance
+that humorously recognised the truths which she had insincerely
+suppressed: that while she desired to hurt the woman whom he had loved,
+she would gladly have murdered any woman who had refused to love him,
+whether married or single; and that she had never cared what he had done
+so long as he did not lose his physical and moral fastidiousness, and
+did not lust after flesh that, having rotted its nerves with delight
+unsanctioned by the spirit, knew corruption before death, and so long as
+he had not pretended to any woman that he wanted her soul when he wanted
+her body.
+
+Seeing the tears in her eyes, he said kindly: "Well, I never thought
+Mariquita's marriage counted for much. Do you remember how you took her
+in one night when old de Rojas hid in a cloisonne vase on the verandah
+for cover and potted at the stars with his gun?" But in his voice she
+read wonder that for the first time in his life he should have found his
+honest mother forging a moral attitude.
+
+It was dreadful that, on this of all nights, and so soon after a special
+illumination of their relationship, she should have set him making
+allowances for her to cover up her insincerity. She stammered miserably:
+"Well, Ellen's a dear, dear girl," and twisted her fingers in her lap,
+and cried out in a fresh access of fever: "It's strange: this is a cold
+night, and yet I feel hot and heavy and sticky as I did in Italy when
+the sirocco blew."
+
+He slid his hand into hers again and altered his position so that he
+could smile up into her face. "Yes, she's a dear girl," he agreed
+comfortingly.
+
+"Then marry her soon!" she begged. "You're thirty. It's time you had a
+life of your own. You must make the ties that will last when I am dead.
+Marry her soon."
+
+"Yes," he said. "I will marry her soon."
+
+"At once!" she urged. "You can be married in three weeks, you know, if
+you set things going immediately. You'll see about it to-morrow, won't
+you?"
+
+He said nothing, but stroked her hand.
+
+"You will do that?" she almost shrieked.
+
+He moistened his dry lips. "I hadn't thought ... quite so soon...."
+
+"Why not? Why not?"
+
+"She is so very young," he mumbled, and turned away his face.
+
+"Why, Richard, Richard!" she exclaimed softly. "God knows I'm not in
+love with old-fashioned ideas. I've only to put up my hand behind my ear
+to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down
+Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas
+are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this
+idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What
+you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old
+enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you
+miscall--that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed
+in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her
+inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of
+the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to
+each other, like other mothers and sons?
+
+He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right,
+mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false
+brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in
+town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything
+really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got
+lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with
+her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult
+to get."
+
+"Ah, jewellery," she said.
+
+"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented,
+unconscious of her irony.
+
+Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen,
+that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and
+would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you,
+they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to
+give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for
+certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The
+heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are
+no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well
+with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was
+not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her
+son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise
+ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the
+house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling
+under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be
+lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still
+suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's
+misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but
+lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who
+sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So
+it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft
+as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself. It had seemed to
+Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the
+moon's faith in them. Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights
+were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion
+had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to
+hunger for something hardly to be attained by man. Perhaps his son, if
+he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had
+forgotten. She said eagerly: "Richard, before you go to bed, let us go
+out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island."
+
+"No," he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap. She began to
+rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation.
+There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that
+there was no hope, things never went well on this earth. Then he
+exclaimed suddenly, "Marion."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of
+Ellen's magic which he loved and desired to share with her. But he
+muttered, "That box on the dresser. Up there on the top shelf."
+
+She followed his eyes in amazement. "The scarlet one in the corner? That
+belongs to cook. I think it's her workbox. What about it?"
+
+He stared at it with a drowsy smile. "You had a cloak that colour when I
+was a child," he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.
+
+"Why, so I had," she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, "How
+he loves me! He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good
+ale that he could drink. He speaks like a sweetheart...." And then
+caught her breath. "But that," she wept on, "is how he ought to speak of
+Ellen, not of me." A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into
+her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong,
+competent hands, and said to herself uneasily: "I wish life could be
+settled by doing things and not by thinking...." But the conviction had,
+by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind. She cried out to
+herself in anguish: "Of course! Of course! He cannot love Ellen because
+he loves me too much! He has nothing left to love her with!" A tide of
+exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement
+within her of the pride that leads to death. For if Richard went on
+loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never
+thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do. The girl
+would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its
+heart hurt as dear little Ellen. And there would be no future. She would
+have no grandchildren. When she died he would be so lonely.... And it
+was her own fault. All her life long she had let him see how she wanted
+love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry's failure; and so he
+had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his
+own needs. "What can I do to put this right?" she asked herself. "What
+can I do?"
+
+She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap. "Mother,
+what's the matter?"
+
+"The matter?"
+
+"You were looking at me like a judge who's passing sentence."
+
+"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who
+sentences the children for the sins of the father."
+
+His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father.
+"Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."
+
+It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could
+free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any
+more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit
+groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.
+It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she
+were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.
+
+She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was
+strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at
+each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a
+hammer on her own delicate reluctances.
+
+"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I
+ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before
+he died."
+
+He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.
+
+"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent
+because of the beating of her heart.
+
+Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."
+
+"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the
+afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of
+course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house,
+which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father
+standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was
+happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't
+got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which
+he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia
+and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their
+names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled
+from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them,
+so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.
+
+Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went
+on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in,
+if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite
+close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped
+himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got
+to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come
+and see you.'"
+
+Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The
+snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left
+you to for years."
+
+"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I
+took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me
+all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a
+dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly
+frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him
+saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world,
+will it be as jolly as this?'"
+
+"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"
+
+"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said
+that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise
+what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had
+been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."
+
+"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a
+woman, what would you have said?"
+
+"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for
+one's husband. One expects much more."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his
+eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a
+house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we
+talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to
+him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been
+worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But
+men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a
+mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a
+son's a happier thing than a daughter--there's something a little sad
+about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do
+with this business of having children--and men like that do so love
+happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the
+lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the
+couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke
+up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four,
+and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you
+and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked
+if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you
+would."
+
+"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"
+
+"Yes. It was Punch."
+
+She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had
+loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that
+he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up
+old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.
+
+She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know
+that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."
+
+"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque
+Hall."
+
+The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had,
+so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went
+on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.
+And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead."
+For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she
+raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that
+there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling
+it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't
+you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long
+before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a
+part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each
+other--and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't
+matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making
+something--something--" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for
+some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot,
+and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is
+so!" she cried defiantly.
+
+The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and
+envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to
+bed," he said.
+
+"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.
+Uneasily he stood and watched her.
+
+"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"The Registrar?"
+
+"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one
+does."
+
+"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in
+the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there
+only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes," he said. "Good-night."
+
+When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the
+table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought
+grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to
+her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door. She
+flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there
+would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything.
+She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the
+passage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the
+memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive
+and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken
+of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve,
+and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad
+complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and
+crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were
+there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered
+her.
+
+Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite
+with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it
+seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on
+her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had
+read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said
+that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant
+cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was
+somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause
+of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was
+no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked
+with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits
+that were all that was to be seen of the girl.
+
+"Ellen," she said.
+
+The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved
+her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should
+have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.
+
+"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."
+
+Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled
+like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.
+
+"I know. We've got the vote."
+
+"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."
+
+The girl sat up. "When did he come?"
+
+"Last night."
+
+"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"
+
+"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."
+
+Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've
+nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said
+shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she
+noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet
+high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too
+modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my
+dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets
+lose their value when they are disclosed...."
+
+She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a
+glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.
+Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity,
+for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she
+felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but
+to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end
+of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a
+silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the
+floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining
+green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored
+the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees
+and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like
+the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the
+chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred
+smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls,
+in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured
+itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She
+nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.
+
+Ellen ran across the lawn to her, beetle-black in her mourning, but
+capering as foals do.
+
+"I'll not have my breakfast till he does," she announced. "Is there
+anything I can do for him?"
+
+"Nothing, my dear, I'm afraid. But look at the view. Isn't it lovely?"
+
+The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, it's bonny. And it's neat. It's redded
+itself up for Richard's coming."
+
+"'Redded itself up'? What does that mean?"
+
+"Don't you use the word here? English seems to be a terribly poor
+language. Redding up means making everything tidy and neat, so that
+you're ready for anything."
+
+That was what one must do: red oneself up. It was true that it was no
+use doing that for Richard any more, and that there was no one else in
+the world for whom she wished to be ready. But she must be schooled by
+the spectacle of the earth, for here it was shining fair, and yet it had
+nothing to expect; it was but the icing of a cake destined for some
+sun's swallowing.
+
+"Is Richard a good riser?" asked Ellen, adopting a severe,
+servant-engaging tone to disguise the truth that she was trembling with
+desire to see her lover.
+
+"Usually, but he may be late to-day since he went to bed such a short
+time ago. He evidently isn't up yet, for his blind's still down. That's
+his room on the left."
+
+But as they gazed the blind went up, and they saw him turning away from
+the window.
+
+"Oh, why didn't he look at us!" cried Ellen. "Why didn't he look at us?"
+
+"Because he is thinking of nothing but how soon he can get down to
+breakfast and meet you," said Marion; but being aware of the quality of
+her blood, which was his, she knew that he had not seen his women and
+the glittering world because he had risen blind with sullenness.
+
+"Will he be long, do you think?" she pondered. "Not that I'd want him to
+miss his bath." She broke into a kind of Highland fling, looking down on
+the blue and silver estuary and chanting, "Lovely, lovely," but desisted
+suddenly and asked: "Mrs. Yaverland, do you think there's a future
+life?"
+
+Marion said lazily, "I shouldn't have thought you need to think out that
+problem yet awhile."
+
+"Oh, I'm not worrying for myself. But on a fine day like this I just
+hate to think my mother's not getting the benefit of it somewhere. And
+seeing your age, I thought you might have begun to give the matter
+consideration."
+
+Marion resolved to treasure that remark for repetition to Richard; and
+was dashed to remember that it was probable in future they would not
+share their jokes. "Well, I don't think there's any evidence for it at
+all," she said aloud; "but I don't think that proves that there isn't
+one. I don't think we would be allowed to know if there was one, for I'm
+sure that if most people knew for certain there was going to be another
+world they wouldn't make the best of this." But she saw, from the way
+that Ellen continued to stare down at her toes, that that abstract
+comfort had not been of any service, so she parted with yet another
+secret. "But I do know that when Richard's father died all the trees
+round the house seemed to know where he had gone."
+
+Ellen raised wet but happier eyes. "Why, I felt like that when they
+brought mother's coffin out of the Fever Hospital. Only then it was the
+hills in the distance that knew--the Pentland Hills. But do you really
+think that was true?"
+
+"I knew it was then," said Marion. "If I am less certain now it is only
+because I have forgotten."
+
+They nodded wisely. "After all, there must be something."
+
+"Yes, there must be something...."
+
+Ellen began to dance again. Marion turned aside and tried to lose the
+profound malaise that the reticent feel when they have given up a secret
+in thinking how well worth while it had been, since Ellen was such a
+dear, young, loving thing. She found consolation in this frost-polished
+morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her
+abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance
+over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of
+rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine
+jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world
+had neglected nothing in its redding up.
+
+At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go
+in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"
+
+"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. From now onwards he's
+yours, not mine."
+
+Ellen ran in and Richard came to the window to meet her. As he drew her
+over the threshold by both hands he called down the garden, "Good
+morning, mother." But Marion had perceived that from the moment of
+seeing her his face had worn the dark colour of estrangement. She turned
+and walked blindly away, not noticing that Mabel had come out to bring
+her the morning post, and was following at her heels, till the girl
+coughed.
+
+There were four letters. She opened them with avidity, for they were
+certificates that there were other things in life as well as Richard
+with which she could occupy herself. Two were bills, the first from her
+dressmakers and the other from the dealer who had sold her some coloured
+glass a few weeks before; and there was a dividend warrant for her to
+sign and send to her bankers. Sweeping about the lawn as on a stage, she
+resolved to buy clothes that would make her look like other untormented
+women, and more hangings and pictures and vases to make her house look
+gay. Then she observed that the fourth envelope was addressed in the
+handwriting of the son whom she could not love.
+
+She looked towards the house and saw the son whom she loved, but he did
+not see her. Ellen's red head was close to his shoulder.
+
+It was horrible handwriting outside and inside the envelope: a weak
+running of ink that sagged downwards in the second half of every line
+and added feeble flourishes to every capital that gave the whole an air
+of insincerity. It had the disgusting appearance of a begging letter,
+and indeed that was what it was. It begged for love, for condonation of
+the writer's loathsomeness. She held it far off as she read:
+
+"DEAR MOTHER,
+
+"You will be wondering why I had not written to you. You will know soon
+that something you would not have expected has happened to me. I am not
+sure how you will take it. But I will be with you in two days, and then
+you will see for yourself. I hope you will not harden your heart against
+me, dear mother.
+
+"Your loving son,
+
+"ROGER."
+
+There was no address, but the postmark was Chelmsford. No doubt he had
+written in the cells. For the letter could have no other meaning but
+that the disgrace she had foreseen had at last arrived.
+
+She could not bear to be out there alone on that wide lawn, in the
+bright light, in the intense cold. She ran to the window, and not daring
+to look in lest they should be very close together, she called,
+"Richard, Roger is coming."
+
+There was a noise of a chair being pushed back, and Richard stood over
+her, asking: "When? Has he written?"
+
+She held out the letter.
+
+There was the rustling of paper crushed in the hand, and she looked up
+into his burning and compassionate eyes. Her head dropped back on her
+throat; she grew weak with happiness. He was her own once more, if she
+would but disclose in what great fear and misery she stood. But in the
+room behind there sounded the chink of china. Little Ellen was bending
+over the table, putting the tea-cosy over Richard's egg.
+
+Marion said levelly: "Well, I shall be glad of Roger's company while
+you're occupied with Ellen." She added reprovingly, as if she were
+speaking to a child: "You mustn't be jealous of the poor thing. I saw
+last night that you can be jealous...."
+
+His eyes blazed at the indecency. He stepped back from the window.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Ellen was very glad that Marion was going out for the whole of the
+afternoon, for then she would be alone with Richard; and though they had
+been out together all the morning, there had been that in the atmosphere
+which made a third. The whole time it had been apparent that the coming
+of this Roger, who must be an awful man, was upsetting him terribly.
+When he had taken her out into the garden after breakfast he had looked
+up into the vault of the morning and had put his hand to his head,
+making a sound of envy, as if he felt a contrast between its crystal
+quality and his own state of mind. He had liked standing with her at the
+edge of the garden and setting names to the facets of the landscape,
+which he plainly loved as he had never told her that he did. He really
+cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be
+afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned
+out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not
+lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way
+among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the
+golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts
+and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black
+gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped.
+Something in the orchard below had waylaid his attention. Ellen looked
+down the steep bank to see what it was, and saw Marion sitting in the
+low crook of an apple-tree. She snatched at contemptuous notice of the
+way that the tail of the woman's gown, which anyway was far too good for
+any sensible person to wear just going about the house and garden in the
+morning, was lying in a patch of undispersed frost; but fear re-entered
+her heart. Marion was sitting quite still with her back to them, yet the
+distant view of her held the same terrifying quality of excess as her
+near presence.
+
+There could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the
+earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat,
+stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.
+
+Richard said: "No, she isn't crying. She isn't moving. I should feel a
+fool if I went down and she didn't want me." And because his voice was
+thin and husky like a nervous child's, and because he was answering a
+question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid. This woman was
+throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But these were only the things that one thought about life. As soon as
+one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be. The world was not
+really tragic. When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where
+they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure,
+and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even
+now, since the water looked so smooth. He answered that winter boating
+was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation
+that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but
+which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had
+had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white
+oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed
+the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin
+snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only
+warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the
+primrose moon on the right. She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to
+take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take
+her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in
+the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.
+
+Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he
+turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious
+abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world
+that he refused to hurry, "Go and put on your hat and we'll start at
+once." So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the
+harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she
+forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.
+There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically
+unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat
+dwellings that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and
+boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs
+of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being
+designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know
+of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and
+there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the
+place which struck the same note of innocence.
+
+The town council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the
+esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a
+bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with
+cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen
+thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too,
+when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed
+the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The
+houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep
+green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which no one sat,
+and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its
+base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take
+the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air
+had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish,
+spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were
+brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but
+breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the
+pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the
+simple people who lived in the other part of the town.
+
+She was amused by it all, and was sorry when they came to the
+Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked
+very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was
+polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant
+port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to
+land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains,
+spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled
+beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the
+boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before
+had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men
+who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on the
+tradition of brave life, and it made her want to cry to see how
+crowsfeet of pleasure came at the corners of their eyes when they looked
+at Richard, and how they liked to slap his strong back with their rough
+hands, which age was making delicate with filigree of veins and
+wrinkles. And she could see, too, that they liked her. They looked at
+her as if they thought she was pretty, and teased her about the
+Votes-for-Women button she was wearing, but quite nicely.
+
+When they were standing under the dark eaves of the boathouse, looking
+up at the gleaming tawny sides of the motor-launch, one of the old men
+pointed at the golden letters that spelt "Gwendolen" at the prow, and
+said, "Well, Yaverland, I suppose you'll have forgotten who she is these
+days." Another added: "He'd better, if he's going to marry a
+Suffragette." And all broke into clear, frosty laughter. She cried out
+in protest, and told them that Suffragettes were not really fierce at
+all, and that the newspapers just told a lot of lies about them, and
+that anyway it was only old-fashioned women who were jealous, and they
+listened with smiling, benevolent deference, which she enjoyed until her
+eyes lighted on Richard, and she saw that he was more absorbed in her
+effect on his friends than in herself.
+
+For a moment she felt as lonely as she had been before she knew him, and
+she looked towards the boat and stared at the reflection of the group in
+the polished side and wished that one of the dim, featureless shapes she
+saw there had been her mother, or anyone who had had a part in her old
+life in Edinburgh. She turned back to the men and brought the
+conversation to an end with a little laughing shake of the head, giving
+them the present of an aspect of her beauty to induce them to let her
+mind go free. Again she felt something that her commonsense forbade to
+be quite fear when he did not notice for a minute that she was wistfully
+asking him to take her away. It was all right, of, course.
+
+When they had said good-bye to the happy old men and were walking along
+the promenade, he asked: "What was the matter, darling? Didn't you like
+them? They're really very good old sorts"; and understood perfectly when
+she answered: "I know they are, but I don't want anybody but you." There
+was indeed vehemence in his reply: "Yes, dear, we don't want anybody but
+ourselves, do we?" Undoubtedly there was a change in the nature of the
+attention he was giving her. Instead of concentrating in that steady
+delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated
+between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete
+abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his
+stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of
+the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She
+hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend,
+whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished
+home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and
+disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and
+soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life
+explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the
+luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where
+Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness,
+overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the
+hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the
+squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything
+else in the glittering, brittle world around her.
+
+Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under
+Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within
+herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were
+always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their
+absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white,
+view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the
+hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she
+turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have
+you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of
+her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more
+desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen
+had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house
+with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the
+midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast
+mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And
+Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had
+noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is
+he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very
+poor person, ma'am. His boots is right through, and his coat's half off
+his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.
+Shall I tell him to go away?"
+
+But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.
+She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a
+minute."
+
+Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each
+other queerly.
+
+She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook
+haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably
+haven't seen him since he was a boy."
+
+"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at
+the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and
+unsuspicious."
+
+Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face
+suffused with the bloom of kind, sad passion, and lifted towards her
+son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the
+rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if
+she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful,
+closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some
+hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated
+her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard
+of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had
+stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the
+kitchen.
+
+"Richard!" breathed Ellen.
+
+He went on eating.
+
+"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does
+she want it to be Roger?"
+
+"God knows, God knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are
+lots of things about her that I don't understand."
+
+Some moments passed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she
+said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."
+
+"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He
+stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly,
+coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out
+suddenly. "Who is it?"
+
+"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a
+ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's
+Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman
+but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away
+because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and
+now he's on the road. I must give him something, poor creature. Such a
+nice wife he had--he says she's in Chelmsford workhouse. I'll send him
+on to old Dawkins at Dane End; I'll get him to give the poor wretch a
+few days' work."
+
+Ellen disliked her as she left the room. She looked thick and ordinary,
+and was apparently absorbed in the mildly gross satisfaction of a
+well-to-do woman at being bountiful. Moreover, she had in some way hurt
+Richard, for his face was dark when he came back to the table.
+
+But an amazement struck Ellen as she thought over the scene. "Richard,"
+she exclaimed excitedly, "is it not just wonderful that this man should
+come to your mother for help after she'd put him to the door? I'm sure
+she'd make a body feel just dirt if she was putting them to the door. It
+would be a quiet affair, but awful uncomfortable. But she's such a good
+woman that, even seeing her like that, he knew she was the one to come
+to when he was really in trouble. Do you not think it's like that?"
+
+"Oh yes," he almost groaned. "Even when she's at her worst you know that
+she's still better than anyone else on this earth."
+
+When Marion came back she sat down at the table without noticing what
+seemed to Ellen his obvious dejection, and began to talk about this man
+Milford, telling of the power he had over his beasts and how a prize
+heifer that they then had, by the name of Susan Caraway, had fretted for
+three weeks after he had left. She said that he gained this power over
+animals not by any real love for them, for he was indifferent to them
+except when he was actually touching them, and would always scamp his
+work without regard for their comfort, but simply by some physical
+magnetism, and pointed out that there it resembled the power some men
+have over women. It surprised Ellen that she laughed as she said that,
+and seemed to find pleasure in the thought of such a power. When the
+meal was over she sat for a moment, gathering together the breadcrumbs
+by her plate, and said pensively: "Yes, it might quite easily have been
+Roger." Ellen wondered how it was that Richard had always spoken of his
+mother as if she needed his protection, when her voice was so nearly
+coarse with the sense of being able to outface all encounterable events,
+and she felt a flash of contempt for his judgment. She wished, too, that
+when Marion rose from, the table he had not followed her so closely
+upstairs and hovered round her as she took up her stand on the
+hearthrug, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her foot in the fender,
+and kept his eyes on her face as she settled down in an armchair. It was
+just making himself cheap, dangling after a woman who was perched up on
+herself like a weathercock.
+
+When she said, "I'm going to walk over to Friar's End. Old Butterworth
+wants me to do some repairs which I don't feel inclined to do, so I want
+to have a look at the place for myself," the announcement was so little
+tinged by any sense of the persons she was addressing that she might as
+well have held up a printed placard. Ellen thought he was a little
+abject to answer, "So far as I can remember, Butterworth's rather a
+rough specimen. Wouldn't you like us to come with you?" and almost
+deserved that she did not hear. Such deafness argued complete
+abstraction; and indeed, as she turned towards them and stood looking
+out towards the river, her face again wore that incomprehensible
+expression of secret and even furtive satisfaction. The sight of it
+fell like a whip on Richard. He lowered his head and sat staring at the
+floor. Ellen cried out to herself, "She's an aggravating woman if ever
+there was one. It's every bit as bad as not saying what you feel, this
+not saying what you look," and tried to pierce with her eyes the dreamy
+surface of this gloating. But she could make nothing of it, and looked
+back at Richard; and shuddered and drew her hands across her eyes when
+she saw that he had lifted his head and was turning towards her a face
+that had become the mirror of his mother's expression. He, too, was
+wrapped in some exquisite and contraband contentment. She raised her
+brows in enquiry, and mockingly he whispered back words which he knew
+she could not hear.
+
+"I think I'll go now," said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.
+Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly: "Why
+are you looking at me like that?" But he would not answer, and began to
+laugh quietly. "Tell me!" she begged, but still he kept silence, and
+seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but
+would not disclose. It struck her as another example of Marion's
+dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room
+after she had left it and that it should blot out the son's habitual
+splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly: "Oh, very well, be a
+Cheshire cat if you feel called to it," and went and pretended to look
+for a volume in the bookcase. It was annoying that he did not come after
+her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat
+until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front
+door.
+
+She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above
+the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was
+at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but
+because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling,
+she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the
+smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored
+world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to
+ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again
+in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little
+bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God
+could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right
+too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our
+time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the
+living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put
+about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the
+outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.
+She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly reassured.
+For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it
+borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved
+in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts
+commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the
+broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only
+frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve
+and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to
+find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed
+them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her
+wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body
+close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was
+astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and
+felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to
+him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her
+on to his knee and began to kiss her.
+
+But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain
+expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process
+which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had
+a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of
+course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over
+and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told
+herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind
+of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of
+love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest
+kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were
+impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she
+found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare,
+bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of
+tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had
+their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it
+was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that
+he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like
+trees.
+
+Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it
+was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first
+there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when
+one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a
+tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk,
+and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces
+where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the
+birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the
+grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches
+that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the sturdy elms that were
+their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together;
+the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when
+they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making
+anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves
+his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he
+sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad
+when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.
+
+"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade
+necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good
+against your white, white skin."
+
+"That's verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by," she told
+him wisely, "for I couldn't go wearing a green necklace when I'm in
+mourning."
+
+"But you won't be in mourning much longer."
+
+"Six months in full mourning, six months half. That's as it should be
+for a mother."
+
+"But what nonsense!" he exclaimed irascibly. "When you're a young little
+thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes. It doesn't do your mother
+any good, your going about in black."
+
+"I know well it doesn't, but, remember, mother was old-fashioned Scotch,
+and she was most particular about having things just so. Specially on
+melancholy occasions. I remember she was most pernickety about her
+blacks after my father's death. And though she's entered into eternal
+life, we've no guarantee that that makes a body sensible all at once."
+She saw on his face an expression which reminded her that he had been
+careful never to acquiesce when she spoke of the possibility of a future
+life, and she cried out: "You needn't look so clever. I'm sure she's
+going on somewhere, and why you should grudge it to the poor woman I
+don't know. And your mother thinks there's something after death, too.
+She told me this morning in the garden that she was quite certain of it
+when your father died. She said that all the trees round the house
+seemed to know where he had gone."
+
+"Oh, she said that, did she?" His arms released her. He stared into her
+face. "She said that, did she?" he repeated in an absent, faintly
+malevolent murmur; and clasped her in his arms again and kissed her so
+cruelly that her lips began to bleed.
+
+"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. "You're not loving me, you're just
+taking exercise on me!"
+
+He let her go, but not, she knew from the smile on his face, from any
+kindness, but rather that he might better observe her distress and gloat
+over it. She moved away from the heat of the fire and from that other
+heat which had so strangely been engendered by these contacts which
+always before engendered light, and went to the window and laid her
+forehead against the cold glass. The day had changed and lost its smile,
+for the sky was hidden by a dirty quilt of rain-charged clouds and the
+frost had seeped into the marshes and left them dark, acid winter green,
+yet she longed to walk out there in that unsunned and water-logged
+country, opening her coat to the cold wind brought by the grey, invading
+tides, making little cold pools where she dug her heels into the sodden
+ground, getting rid of her sense of inflammation, and being quite alone.
+That she should want not to be with Richard, and that she should not be
+perfectly pleased with what pleased him, seemed to her monstrous
+disloyalty, and she turned and smiled at him. But there was really
+something wrong with this room and this hour, for as she looked at him
+she felt frightened and ashamed, as if he were drunk, though she knew
+that he was sober; and indeed his face was flushed and his eyes wet and
+winking, as if smoke had blown in them. For some reason that she could
+not understand he reminded her of Mr. Philip.
+
+She cried out imploringly. "Take me down to the marshes, Richard!"
+
+He shook his head and laughed at some private joke. She felt desolate,
+like a child at school whom other children shut out from their secrets,
+and drooped her head; and heard him say presently: "We are going out
+this afternoon, but not on the marshes."
+
+"Where?"
+
+He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would
+not answer. She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a
+game of it to cover her near approach to tears. Then he told her, not
+because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed
+to put him in a good humour. "We're going to the registrar, my dear, to
+fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks' time."
+
+The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing
+at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.
+He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more
+suitable to a smaller man. Oh, he was terribly different to-day! His
+eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were
+narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full. She screamed "Oh, no!
+Oh, no!" without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was
+crying out.
+
+He laughed and pulled her down on his knees. He was laughing more than
+she had ever known him laugh before. "Why, don't you want to, you little
+thing?"
+
+Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some
+reason. But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet,
+unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.
+She said feebly, as one who asks for water: "Please, please take me down
+to the sea-wall."
+
+His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness. "But why don't you
+want to come and see about our marriage? Are you frightened, dear?"
+
+Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as
+he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and
+said: "Nellie, ma wee lassie, dis onything ail ye?" and yet left her
+with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of
+curiosity and not because he really cared for her. She was dizzied.
+Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard. She muttered: "Yes, a
+little."
+
+He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with
+a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine. "Frightened of me, my darling?"
+
+She pulled herself off his knee. "I don't know, I don't know."
+
+"Why? Why?"
+
+She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the
+flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to
+Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The
+immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and
+twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly
+because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr.
+Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had
+hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects
+was not so great as she would have hoped. She could bear it no longer,
+and screamed out: "Oh! Oh! That's how Mr. Philip looked!"
+
+It took him a minute to remember who she meant. Then his face shadowed.
+"Don't remind me of him, for God's sake!" he said through his teeth. "Go
+and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar."
+
+She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her
+trembling. He was very like Mr. Philip. Softly she said: "You sounded
+awful, as if you were telling me."
+
+"I was."
+
+She began to want to cry. "I'll not do anything that I'm told."
+
+He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat. It struck her as a
+mark of debasement that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their
+minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made
+some wordless sound. He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard
+him before: "Go and put on your things."
+
+"Away yourself to the registrar," she cried more loudly still, "and tell
+him he'll never marry you to me."
+
+The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled
+something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.
+She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was;
+and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards
+a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden
+feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peacock it in heaven, had
+come to show his wings to earth. On the other side, turned to the colour
+of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that
+Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were
+remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many
+concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman. The
+woman was not young and wore a man's cloth cap and a full, long, filthy
+skirt. They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard
+apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures
+across the gap. At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces
+close together, and vomited coarse cries at one another; and she had
+looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at
+the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than
+terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some
+boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners. Then she
+had been sixteen. Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting
+across a space. Could it be that vileness was not a state which one
+could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human,
+one must pass? If that were so, life was too horrible. She cried out
+through his vehemence: "No, I'm not going to marry you."
+
+"Don't be stupid. You're being exactly like all other women, silly and
+capricious. Go and put your things on."
+
+"I will not. I'm going away."
+
+"Don't talk nonsense! Where are you going?"
+
+"Back to Edinburgh." She made a hard line of her trembling mouth. "My
+mind's made up."
+
+He made a sound that expressed pure exasperation untouched with
+tenderness, and his eyes darted about her face in avaricious
+appraisement of this property that was trying to detach itself from him
+with a display of free will that might not be tolerated in property. She
+could see him resolving to take it lightly, and thought to herself:
+"Maybe it's just as well that it's to be broken off, for I doubt I'm too
+clever for marriage. I would read him like a book and, considering
+what's in him"--a convulsion of rage shook her--"he'd be annoyed at
+that."
+
+He had been saying with deliberate flippancy: "Oh, you silly little
+Ellen," but at that convulsion a change came over him. Delight
+transfigured him. He jerked his head back as she had done, as if he
+would like to continue the violent rhythm of her movement through his
+own body, and blood and laughter rushed back to his face. Taking a step
+towards her, he called softly: "Oh, my Ellen, don't let us quarrel! Come
+here."
+
+But she remembered then how that scene at the base of the golden stone
+had ended. The pair had swung apart and had staggered their several
+ways, shrieking over their shoulders; and had suddenly pivoted round and
+stood looking at each other in silence. Then they had run together and
+joined in a rocking embrace, a rubbing of their bodies, and had put
+their mouths to each other's faces so munchingly that it had looked as
+if they must turn aside some time and spit out the cores of their
+kisses. She would have no such reconciliation. "I won't! I tell you I
+hate you!" she cried, and escaped his arm.
+
+Rage came into his face without displacing his intention to make love to
+her. That was against nature, unless nature was utterly perverse! She
+could not bear it. She struck him across the mouth and ran out of the
+room.
+
+There was a moment of confusion on the landing when she could not tell
+which of the white doors on the right and left led into her bedroom. The
+first one she opened showed her a table piled with heavy books; a vast
+wardrobe with glass doors showing a line of dresses coloured like autumn
+and of fabrics so exquisite that they might be imagined sentient; under
+a shelf beneath it a long straight line, regular as the border plants in
+a parterre, of glossy wooden shoe-trees rising out of rather large shoes
+made from many kinds of leather and velvets and satins; and in the
+carpets and the hangings a profound and vibrant blue. Accusingly she
+exclaimed into the emptiness, "Marion!" and darted into her own room
+just as Richard burst out into the passage. She flung herself on the bed
+and lay quite still while he knocked on the door. Twice he called her
+name. Nothing in her desired to answer. That was both relief and the
+loss of all. Three times again he knocked, and there penetrated through
+the panels one of those wordless noises that had been disgusting her all
+the afternoon. After a moment's silence she heard him go downstairs. She
+leaped up and dragged her trunk from a corner into the middle of the
+room, but instead of beginning to pack she fell on her knees and wept on
+to the comfortingly cool and smooth black surface.
+
+"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I
+thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll
+just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and
+looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them
+terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my
+face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into
+her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and
+found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely
+guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be
+dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be
+dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a
+necessary and noble journey towards economic and spiritual independence
+it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh,
+which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her
+mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight.
+What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real
+way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be
+crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer
+pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it
+and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried
+about the town.
+
+Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed
+and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained
+and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her
+life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man
+whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to
+disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in
+the glass which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate
+the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It
+struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from
+her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was
+overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened
+to her in it.
+
+She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping,
+but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that
+her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a
+vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have
+foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the
+galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many
+fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who
+died God's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one
+of them.
+
+She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that
+it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of glass
+which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a
+dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the
+victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of
+this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and
+wept and wept, until she fell asleep.
+
+It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she
+remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past
+few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a
+light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that
+it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want
+to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet
+terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those
+superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and
+waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps
+that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more--they
+were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was
+the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep
+and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing
+heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he
+was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he
+was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you
+poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"
+
+But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt
+down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face
+from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent
+of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words
+and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.
+
+"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute--oh, such a
+brute. Do, do forgive me."
+
+"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."
+
+"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.
+
+"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly,
+and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and
+the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my
+love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"
+
+He broke into anguished laughter. "No, you wee little thing!" He
+strained her to him and faltered vehemently: "You generous dear! When
+I've insulted and bullied you and shouted at you, you ask me if you've
+hurt me! I wish you had. It would have given me some of the punishment I
+deserve. Oh, keep me, you wonderful, strong, forgiving dear! Keep me
+from being a hound, keep me from forgetting--whatever it is we've found
+out. You've seen what I'm like when I've forgotten it. Oh, love me! Love
+me!"
+
+"I will, I will!"
+
+They clung together and spent themselves in reconciling kisses.
+
+"It was my fault, too," she whispered. "I was awful hard on you. And
+maybe I took you up too quick."
+
+"No, it was all my fault," he answered softly. "I was worried and I lost
+my head."
+
+"Worried? What are you worried about, my darling? You never told me
+that."
+
+"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. It's not a definite worry. It's to
+do"--his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of
+the room--"with my mother."
+
+If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft. "Your
+mother?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes," he said petulantly. It struck her that there was something
+infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might
+feel against its nurse. "She's been the centre of my whole life. And now
+... I don't know whether she cares for me at all. I don't believe she
+ever cared for anybody but my father. It's puzzling."
+
+His eyes were fixed on the shadows. He had quite forgotten her. She
+leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling
+of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.
+
+He dropped a kiss on it and went on: "So, you see, I fell back on you
+for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me. It's
+funny the change it makes in everything. I became--so conventional. When
+you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn't follow you because
+I was conscious that I oughtn't to come into your room. Afterwards,
+when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by
+you, I didn't care a damn for any rule." Their lips met again. She had
+to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about
+anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a
+woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more
+fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for
+you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...
+that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The
+corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like
+my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot
+her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came
+back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.
+"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know
+why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.
+Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that
+time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you
+might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in
+the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your
+living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially
+happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those
+lustful old swine."
+
+She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she
+had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and
+what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she
+had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she
+was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as
+if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them lustful?"
+
+In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could
+see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them
+proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you
+if he'd been young."
+
+Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it
+meant, but accepted it.
+
+A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and
+began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that
+means?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."
+
+In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured: "Sometimes. A little."
+
+He was trembling. "You poor thing. You poor little thing. Yet I can't
+tell you."
+
+She clapped her hands over her ears. "Ah, no. I couldn't bear to listen
+if you did." They sank into a trembling silence. Her black eyes, fixed
+on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white
+evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying
+under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which
+seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other
+sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in
+them proofs that the core of life was darkness. There came on her
+suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when
+she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard. She
+remembered it with a singular lack of dismay. There ran through her on
+the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new
+experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid
+annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had
+fallen down about her shoulders. They stood easily together in the light
+of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head,
+he looking down on the disordered glory.
+
+"But what's that for?" he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the
+middle of the floor.
+
+Her eyes filled with tears. "I was packing to go back to Edinburgh."
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said solemnly. "I came near to imperilling a
+perfect thing." He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss
+her, but she started away from him.
+
+"Oh, maircy! What cold hands!" she exclaimed.
+
+"I've been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle. It was
+freezing. And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and
+shaking with rage."
+
+"You poor silly thing!" she cried lovingly. "Give me yon bits of ice!"
+She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.
+
+For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great
+for him to bear, and he whispered: "This is all it is! This is all it
+is!"
+
+"What do you mean?" she murmured.
+
+"What you fear ... is just like this. You will comfort my whole body as
+you are comforting my hands...."
+
+She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her
+face, and she answered loudly, plangently: "Then I shall not be afraid!"
+They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy: "I will marry
+you any day you like." When he answered, "No, no, I will wait," she
+jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I
+want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they
+travelled far into a new sphere of love.
+
+It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from
+her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express
+train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her
+that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.
+But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder
+out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and
+pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear.
+She swung round to see what it was.
+
+A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.
+Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that
+the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what
+was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with
+her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that
+these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet
+interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut
+unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass
+buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the
+woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored
+skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were
+ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."
+
+The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting
+clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the
+shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they
+should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured
+the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect
+harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in
+disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.
+She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into
+their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection
+and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover
+what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.
+There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united
+several qualities that one would not have thought could be found
+together. She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet
+worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at
+the shoulders as if she were fragile. But the man was odd enough. He was
+pale and had a very long neck, and wore an expression of extreme
+foolishness. From the frown with which he was accompanying his gaping
+stare it was evident that his mind was so vague and wandering that he
+found it difficult to concentrate it; she was reminded of an inexpert
+person she had once seen trying to put a white rabbit into a bag. She
+looked again at the girl, with that contempt she felt, now that she had
+Richard, for all women who let themselves mate with unworthy men, and
+found that her dark eyes were fixed sullenly, almost hungrily, on
+Richard. She laid her hand on Richard's arm and cried: "If it's not
+impudence, it's the next thing to it, staring like that into a pairson's
+room! They're collecting, I suppose. Away and give them a penny."
+
+"No," said Richard. "They are not collecting. That is Roger."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Ellen could not understand why Richard whispered explosively as they
+turned away from the window: "Pin up your hair! Quickly! We must go down
+at once!" or why he hurried her downstairs without giving her time to
+use her brush and comb. When they got down into the old parlour Richard
+went to the side door that opened into the farmyard and flung it open,
+beginning a sentence of greeting, but there was nothing to be seen but
+the grey sheds, the wood-pile, and the puddle-pocked ground. He uttered
+an exasperated exclamation, and drew it to, saying to Ellen: "Open the
+front door! Please, dear." She did so, but saw nothing save the dark and
+narrow garden and the black trees against the white north sky. "What in
+Christ's name are they doing?" Richard burst out, and flung open the
+side door again. Both put their heads out over the threshold to see if
+the two visitors were standing about anywhere, and a gust of wind that
+was making the trees beat their arms darted down on the house and turned
+the draught between the two open doors into a hurricane. Ellen squealed
+as her door banged and struck her shoulder before she had time to steer
+clear of it. "Oh, my poor darling!" said Richard, and he was coming
+towards her, when they heard the glug-glug-glug of water dripping from
+the table to the floor, and saw that the draught had overturned a vase
+filled with silver boughs of honesty. He picked it up and uttered
+another bark of exasperation, for it had cracked across and he had cut
+his hand on the sharp edge of the china.
+
+"Oh, damn! oh, damn! oh, damn!" he cried, in a voice that rage made
+high-pitched and childish, sucking his finger in between the words.
+"What a filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two
+halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of
+distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered
+uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a
+desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the
+maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards
+the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved
+it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round
+till I've found that fool and that woman! This is some new
+folly--probably I'll have to get him away before mother comes! Come on!
+Perhaps they're hanging about the garden, though God knows why!" After
+making a savage movement towards the broken vase, as if he could not
+bear to leave the disorder as it was, and checking it abruptly,
+jarringly, he rushed into the dining-room, and Ellen followed him.
+
+The two were there, their faces pressed against the window-panes. Behind
+them the grey waste of stormy shallow waters, and the salt-dimmed
+pastures, and the black range of the Kentish hills, hung with
+grape-purple rainclouds, made it apparent how much greater dignity
+belongs to the earth and sea than to those who people them. As Richard
+and Ellen halted at the door the faces receded from the glass. The woman
+stepped backwards and, looking as if she were being moved on by a
+policeman, passed suddenly out of sight beyond the window's edge.
+Richard crossed the room and opened the French window, but by the time
+he had unlocked it the man in uniform, who had been beckoning to his
+companion with long bony hands, had gone in search of her. As Richard
+put his head round the door to bid them enter, the wind, which was now
+rushing round the house, made itself felt as a chill commotion, an icy
+anger of the air, in which both he and Ellen shivered. Presently the
+pair in uniform appeared again, but at some distance across the lawn,
+and too intensely absorbed in argument to pay any attention to him.
+
+"Oh, damn! oh, damn!" sobbed Richard. The wind was blowing earth-daubed
+leaves off the flowerbeds through the open door into the prim room. He
+stepped into the gale and shouted: "Roger! Roger! Come in!"
+
+Roger waved his arms, which were too long for the sleeves of his coat,
+and from his mouthings it was evident that he was shouting back, but the
+wind took it all. In anger Richard stepped back into the room and made
+as if to close the doors, and at that the two on the lawn ran towards
+the house, with that look which common people have when they run for a
+train, as if their feet were buckling up under them. Richard held the
+door wide again, but when the couple reached the path in front of the
+house they were once more seized with a doubt about entering and came to
+a standstill.
+
+"Come in," said Richard; "come in."
+
+The man took off his cap and ran his hands through his pale, long hair.
+"Is mother in?" he demanded in a thin, whistling voice.
+
+"Come in," said Richard; "come in."
+
+The man began: "Well, if mother's not in, I don't know--"
+
+Richard fixed his eyes on the woman's face. "Come in," he said softly,
+brutally, loathingly. Ellen shivered to hear him speak thus to a woman
+and to see a woman take it thus, for at once the stranger moved forward
+to the window and stepped into the room. As she brushed by him she
+cringingly bowed her shoulders a little, and looked up at him as he
+stood a head and shoulders higher than herself. He looked back steadily
+and made no sign of seeing her save by a slight compression of the lips,
+until she passed on with dragging feet and stood listlessly in the
+middle of the room. It was evident that they completely understood one
+another, and yet their understanding sprung from no recollection of any
+previous encounter, for into the eyes of neither did there come any
+flash of recognition. There could be no doubt that Richard was feeling
+nothing but contempt for this woman, and her peaked yet rich-coloured
+face expressed only sick sullenness; yet Ellen felt a rage like
+jealousy.
+
+Richard turned again to the garden, and said: "Come in."
+
+"Now don't be high-handed, old man," expostulated the stranger. But then
+he seemed to remember something, and stretched out both his arms, held
+them rigid, and opened his mouth wide as if to speak very loudly. But no
+sound came, and his arms dropped, and his long bony hands pawed the air.
+Then suddenly his arms shot out again, and he exclaimed very quickly in
+a high, strained voice: "Pride has always been your besetting sin,
+Richard. You aren't a bad chap in any way that I know of. But you're
+proud. And it doesn't become any of us to be proud"--his spirit was
+shaking the words out of his faltering flesh--"for we're all miserable
+sinners. You needn't order me"--he spoke more glibly now, the flesh and
+the spirit seemed in complete agreement--"to come out of the garden like
+that. I wish Poppy hadn't gone in." He caught his breath with something
+like a sob; but the woman in uniform made no movement, and turned her
+eyes to Richard's face as if it were he that must give the order. "I've
+got a reason for staying out here. I know mother's not got Jesus. If
+she's ashamed of me now that I'm one of Jesus' soldiers, I won't come
+in. I'll go and wrestle on my knees for her soul, but I won't hurt her
+by coming in. So here I stay till she tells me to come in."
+
+"But she's out," said Richard.
+
+The man in uniform was discomfited. The light went out of his face and
+his mouth remained open. He shifted his weight from one foot to the
+other and muttered: "Ooh-er, is she?"
+
+"Yes," said Richard pleasantly. "She's gone over to Friar's End, but
+she'll be back any time now. I wish you'd come in. I haven't seen you
+for years, and I'd like to swap yarns with you about what we've been
+doing all the time."
+
+"You'd have the most to tell," answered the other wistfully. "You've
+been here, there, and everywhere in foreign parts. And I haven't been
+doing nothing at all. Except--" he added, brightening up, "being saved."
+
+"That's your own fault," Richard told him. "I've often wondered why you
+didn't try your luck abroad. You'd have been sure to hold your own.
+Well, anyway, come in and have some tea. I don't know what mother would
+say to me if she came in and found I'd let you stay out in the cold.
+She'd be awfully upset."
+
+"Do you think she would?" the man in uniform asked, and seemed to
+ponder. He looked up at the grey sky and shivered. "'Tis getting
+coldish. And the cloth this uniform is made from isn't the sort that
+keeps out cold weather. God knows I don't want to grumble at the uniform
+I wear for Jesus' sake, but me having been in the drapery, I can't help
+noticing when a thing is cheap." He stared down at his toes for a time,
+lifting alternately his heels and pressing them down into the wet
+gravel; then raised his head and said nonchalantly: "Well, old man, I
+think I will come in after all." But he halted yet again when he got one
+foot over the threshold. "Mind you, I'm not coming in just because it's
+cold," he began, but Richard, exclaimed, "Yes, yes! Of course I know
+you're not!" and gripped him by the arm and pulled him into the room. He
+did not seem to resent the rough treatment at all, and went over at once
+to the woman in uniform, and, looking happily about him, cried: "Isn't
+this a lovely home? I always say there's nobody got such a nice home as
+my mother."
+
+His voice whistled; and Ellen in her mind's eye saw a vision of some
+clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy
+and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and
+breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise.
+She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard,
+meaning to tell him by a smile that she would help him to be kind to
+Roger. But Richard was still occupying himself with the window,
+examining with an air of irascibility a stain of blood which his cut
+finger had left on the white paint near the lock. His eyes travelled
+from it to the muddy footprints of the two who had come in from the
+garden and to the spatter of earth-daubed leaves on the polished floor,
+and his mouth drew down at the corners in a grimace of passion that made
+Ellen long to run to him and kiss him and bid him not give way to the
+madness of order so prevalent in this house. But he did not even look at
+her, so she could do nothing for him.
+
+He went forward to Roger, determinedly sweetening his face, and shook
+his hand heartily. "It's good that you should have turned up just at
+this moment, for I'm going to be married before long to Miss Melville,
+whom I met in Scotland when I was working at Aberfay. Ellen, this is my
+brother, Roger."
+
+Roger took Ellen's hand and then seemed to remember something. After
+exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked
+steadfastly into her face and said sombrely: "I hope all's well with
+you, sister! I hope all's well with you!"
+
+"Pairfectly," answered Ellen; and after a pause added, shyly: "And I'm
+pleased to meet you. I hope anyone that's dear to Richard will be
+friends with me."
+
+He flung his head backwards and cried, in that whistling voice: "Yes,
+I'll be that! And I'm a friend worth having now I've got Jesus! And He's
+given me Poppy too! Aha, old man!" With a little difficulty he put both
+his thumbs inside the corked edge of his armholes and began to stride up
+and down, taking steps unnaturally long for thin legs. "You aren't the
+only man who's thought of getting married! Great minds think alike, they
+say!" With a flourish he stretched out his hand, and it was plain that
+he thought he would touch the woman in uniform, though he was some feet
+away. Richard's and Ellen's eyes met; it was repulsive to see a man
+dizzied by so small a draught of excitement. "Richard, Miss Melville,
+this is Lieutenant Poppy, who's going to be my wife."
+
+It was difficult to know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although
+she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which
+conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was
+glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted
+darkness of her eyes.
+
+"We're going to be married as soon as I've served my year of probation.
+That's a long time ahead, for I've only been at it a fortnight. I expect
+you'll be getting married much sooner. Things always went easier with
+you than me," he complained. "But it'll be a happy day when it comes,
+and I get the two blessings at the same time, becoming a full soldier of
+Jesus and marrying Poppy. She's nearly a full soldier already. She
+joined the Army seven months ago."
+
+"Do you preach in the streets?" asked Richard.
+
+Roger's eyes filled with water. Ellen reflected that he must be
+curiously sensitive for one so dull-witted, for the rage and disgust
+behind the question had hardly shown their heads. "Yes, I do!" he said
+pettishly. "And if Jesus doesn't object, I don't see why you should."
+
+"I don't object at all," Richard assured him amiably. "I only wondered
+what sort of work you did. I suppose you haven't come to work at the
+Hallelujah Colony here, have you?"
+
+"That's just what I've done!" answered Roger joyfully. "I joined up at
+Margate and I've laboured there for three weeks. I didn't do so bad. Did
+I, Poppy? Not for a start? No one could exactly shine at street
+preaching at first, you know. They will laugh so. But I didn't do worse
+than other people when they begin, did I, Poppy? However, they've
+transferred me over here to the Colony, to do clerk work." He added with
+a touch of defiance: "And, of course, they'll want me to take services
+too, sometimes. In fact I'm going to take a service this evening."
+
+"How long are you to be here?"
+
+"Maybe always. They may feel I do the best work for Jesus here." He drew
+a deep, shuddering breath, and took his cap off and threw it on the
+table with a convulsive gesture. "If mother doesn't turn me away because
+I've given myself to Jesus," he said with that whistling note, "I'll be
+able to see her every day."
+
+"She won't turn you away."
+
+There was folly, there was innocence in Roger's failure to notice that
+Richard was speaking not in reassurance but in grimness, as one might
+speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place
+where he stood. "You ought to know, old chap," he murmured hopefully.
+"She's always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me.... I
+don't know.... Oh, I've prayed...."
+
+"Well, you'll know for yourself in a minute," said Richard. "I heard the
+front door open and close a second ago."
+
+Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the
+sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached
+him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother's being. She
+longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all
+the other things, but again he wouldn't pay attention to her. Indeed, he
+could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up
+to pain and apprehension. Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the
+case against Roger. He was sickening like something that has been fried
+in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral
+flaw made it all the more sinister. If there was not vileness in his
+will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded
+into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor,
+and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair. She looked at him
+accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum
+version of the emotion of embarrassment was sucking and gnawing one of
+her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true
+love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used
+despitefully. Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.
+
+The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger. But when
+Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else,
+because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held
+in her hand.
+
+There was stillness till Richard whispered: "Mother."
+
+She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, "Oh,
+Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the
+parlour."
+
+He answered softly: "No one broke it. The wind blew it down when I
+opened the door to Roger."
+
+Her eyes did not move from his. Her mouth was a round hole. He put out
+his hand to take the piece of china from her. They both gazed down on
+it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance. She gave it to
+him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger. When she found him
+she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the brass buttons, and
+the brass studs on his high collar. Then she became aware of the woman,
+and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her
+uniform. His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it
+up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters
+on the magenta ribbon.
+
+"So you've joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?" she said, in that
+muffled, indifferent tone.
+
+"Yes," he murmured.
+
+"Do you preach in the streets?" Her voice shook.
+
+"Yes," he whispered.
+
+She gave the cap another turn on her hand. "Are you happy?" she asked,
+again indifferently.
+
+"Yes," he whispered.
+
+She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him.
+"Oh, my boy!" she cried. "Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at
+last!" Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room,
+and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger
+crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all
+soft, mothering curves to him.
+
+Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor. Roger's sobbing made a
+queer noise. Ahe ... ahe ... ahe.... It had an unmechanical sound, like
+the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard's
+motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a
+mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an
+unmechanical situation. It must break down soon. She looked across at
+Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but
+not so dejected as she might have feared. It struck her that he was
+finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the
+situation which was making her grieve--which must, she realised with a
+stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with
+that wrongness. He would rather have things as they were, and see his
+mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been
+natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing
+her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their
+children do. Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the
+far view of the river and the marshes.
+
+"Oh, mother!" spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion.
+"I'm a rich man now! I've got Jesus, and you, and Poppy! Mother, this is
+Poppy, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can."
+
+The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as
+if she would have liked to jump through it. One could imagine her
+alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some
+small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short
+hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and
+abjectly: "I didn't want to come."
+
+Marion answered smoothly: "But now that you are here, how glad I am
+that you have," and took her two hands and patted them. Looking round
+benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed: "I'm
+a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week." She was
+behaving like an old mother in an advertisement, like the silver-haired
+old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh's
+toffee or who reads the _Weekly Telegraph_ in plaques at
+railway-stations. The rapidity with which she had changed from the
+brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching
+hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been
+resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the
+perfection with which she had assumed this bland and glossy personality
+at a moment's notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration. She liked
+the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate. She was
+glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel
+proud on joining a pirate crew. She went over and stood beside Richard
+and slipped her arm through his. Uneasily she was aware that now she,
+too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it
+was. She drooped her head against Richard's shoulder, and hoped all
+might be well with all of them.
+
+"You see, mother, since I saw you I've had trouble--I've had trouble--"
+Roger was stammering.
+
+Marion turned from him to Richard. "Ring for tea," she said, "and turn
+on the lights. All the lights. Even the lights we don't generally use."
+
+Roger clung to her. "I don't want to hide anything from you, mother," he
+began, but she cut him short. "Oh, what cold hands! Oh, what cold
+hands!" she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him. As the lights went
+up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in
+the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as
+long and yellowish and covered with warts. The parlourmaid came in and,
+over her shoulder, Marion said easily: "Tea now, Mabel. There're five of
+us. And we'll have it down here at the table."
+
+She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an
+armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a
+look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it
+became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that
+Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant
+was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when
+she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies
+the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short
+and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been
+talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in
+watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation,
+which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched
+Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in
+their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors,
+were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor
+her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly
+to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned
+and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body,
+taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of
+attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was
+no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.
+
+"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a
+second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been
+very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm
+cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on
+the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward.
+And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard
+and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about
+it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that
+she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs
+had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was
+this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate
+Broadway--"
+
+The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they
+all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she
+nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways
+they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at _Margate_."
+
+"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got,
+Poppy!"
+
+Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided
+shoulders as she passed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and
+take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be
+very comfortable when one's tired."
+
+Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red
+fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at
+once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed
+thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular
+curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round
+Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls
+horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember
+also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses
+dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the
+bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of
+sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand
+among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for
+the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave
+her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones
+marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared
+that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her
+bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to
+destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was,
+perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there
+had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned
+effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the
+pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind
+the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking
+just like this; but it was gone immediately.
+
+"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going
+along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band
+playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to
+pass it by--think of it, mother, I was going to pass it by!--when the
+band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy.
+Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful
+voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a
+pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw
+her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was
+plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked
+straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that
+is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother
+for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were
+really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but
+when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you
+know, mother, Poppy _is_ Spanish--half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her
+mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good
+family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died
+when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by
+a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married
+again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other
+side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very
+godless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man
+who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted
+to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so
+cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she
+never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as
+she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."
+
+After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the
+appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."
+
+The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.
+
+"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung
+about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got
+Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden
+pale, febrile passion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to
+their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"
+
+"Yes, Roger," she answered him. "You'll be very happy--a husband that
+any woman would be proud of."
+
+"Oh, I'm not nearly good enough for Poppy," he said deprecatingly. He
+seemed used to Poppy's silence, and, indeed, whenever her silent absence
+from speech was most marked, he bent towards her in a tender attitude
+which showed a resolution to regard it as maidenly bashfulness. "Well,
+to get back to my story. I stood there peering through the crowd for
+another look at her, and an officer began preaching. Captain Harris it
+was. I didn't take any particular notice of him." He jerked his whitish
+face about contemptuously. "He's a poor preacher, isn't he, Poppy? He
+never gets a grip on the crowd, does he? And they can't hear him beyond
+the first few rows. I don't think I heard more than a few sentences that
+first evening. If I'd had been in the Army as many years as he has, and
+I couldn't preach any better than that, I'd find some other way of
+serving Jesus. I would really.
+
+"But after that"--he stopped, looked at some vision in the air before
+him which filled his eyes with tears and fire, and sighed
+deeply--"Captain Sampson preached the gospel. It's Captain Sampson I've
+been working under since I joined the Army. Oh, mother, mother, I wish
+you could hear him preach. He would give you Jesus. That first evening I
+heard him I saw Jesus as plain as I see you. I saw Him then looking
+fierce like He was when He scourged the moneychangers out of the temple.
+But when I'm alone, I see the other Jesus, the way he was most times."
+He put his head back and bleated: "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' The
+One that loves us when we're weak and when we fall, and loves us all the
+better for it. Even you"--he looked at Richard with a faint, malign
+joyfulness--"must feel the want of Him sometimes. Life can't be a path
+of roses for any of us, however strong and clever we are. So I say it's
+not good preaching to go on always about fighting for Jesus and being a
+good soldier, and making it seem as if religion was just another trouble
+we had to face." His voice broke with petulance. "It's a shame not to
+show people Gentle Jesus."
+
+He checked himself. Remorse ran red under his pale skin. "What am I
+saying?" he cried out. "Captain Sampson is a holy man! If he's harsh to
+those that work under him it's right he should be. God chasteneth whom
+He loveth, and it's the same way with Captain Sampson I expect. It's
+really a way of showing that he cares about you and is anxious about
+you. And anyway, he did give me Jesus that evening. Oh, mother, it was
+so wonderful!" The words rushed out of him. "He made you feel all
+tingling like you do when the fire engine goes past. Oh, it's an evening
+to remember! And it gave me Jesus! Oh, mother, you don't know what it's
+like to find Jesus! To know"--his voice whistled exultantly over the
+stricken tea-table--"that there's Somebody who really loves you!"
+
+For one second Marion covered her face with her hands.
+
+Unseeingly he piped on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into
+thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night,
+instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that
+happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been
+born as I wasn't any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel
+lovely and warm. And I've got earthly happiness as well. I've got Poppy.
+Oh, I'm a lucky man, lucky man! And I've got a lifework instead of being
+an odd-come-short. I'll always have something to do now. They've had
+experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into
+soldiers for Jesus. Surely they'll be able to find some work for me,
+even if they don't want me to preach. Look at what I'm going to do now.
+Even if I don't do anything but clerk work, it's helping the Labour
+Colony along--helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living
+under Bible influence when, if they weren't, there they'd be, roaming
+about the streets hungry and in sin. I'll be doing my bit, won't I,
+mother?"
+
+She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.
+
+Ellen felt contemptuous. She had read about those Hallelujah Army
+Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour
+meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the
+pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing
+with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few
+hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions. The very
+consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the
+flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the
+meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter
+(which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost
+security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard
+talk of revolution. She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence
+of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that
+made this world as unsightly as himself. And it was like him to talk
+about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of
+things that weren't true. The spectacle of this mean little intelligence
+refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and
+Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common
+hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingratitude to the great and
+wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man
+had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society. She
+leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone: "But you must
+know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the
+fringe of the problem. There's no way of settling the question of
+unemployment until the capitalist system's overturned."
+
+He looked at her with wide eyes and assumed an air of being engaged in
+desperate conflict. It was evident that his egotism was transforming
+this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon. "Ah! You're
+a Socialist. They only think of giving people money. But it isn't money
+people need. Oh, no. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
+world and lose his own soul?' It's Jesus they need. Give them the Bible
+and all their wants will be satisfied," he cried in a shrill peewit cry.
+
+"But the Bible isn't final. There's lots of things we know more about
+than the people who wrote it. Look at all yon nonsense they put in about
+Adam and Eve because they didn't know about evolution. That alone shows
+it's absurd to rely solely on the Bible...."
+
+She looked round for signs of the others' approval. She knew that
+Richard agreed with her, for among his Christmas presents to her had
+been Huxley's Essays, and when he had talked to her of science she had
+seen that research after that truth was to him a shining mystic way
+which he would have declared led to God had he not been more reverent
+than Church men are, and feared to use that name lest it were not sacred
+enough for the ultimate sacredness. But to her amazement he kept his
+eyes on the crumbs which he was picking up from the tablecloth, and
+through his parted lips there sounded the faintest click of
+exasperation. She looked in wonder at Marion, and found her eyes also
+downcast and her forefinger tapping on her chin as if she were seeking
+for some expedient to stop this dangerous chatter. Ellen despised them
+both. They had been terribly exercised at the thought that Roger was
+going to preach in the streets, but they did not care at all that he was
+delivered over to error. She looked at him sympathetically over the
+table, feeling that since these horrid people with whom she had got
+entangled did not like him, he might be quite nice, and found him
+exchanging a long, peculiar glance with Poppy, which was followed on
+both sides by a slow, meaning nod.
+
+He looked in front of him again and his round eyes vacillated between
+Richard and Ellen, growing rounder at each roll. Presently he swallowed
+a lump in his throat and addressed himself to her. "Ah, you're an
+unbeliever," he said. "Well, Captain Sampson says there's always a
+reason for it if people can't believe." He moistened his lips and panted
+the words out at her. "If you've been doing anything that's wrong--"
+
+A sob prevented him. "Oh, I can't go and spoil this lovely tea, even if
+I ought to for Jesus' sake!" he cried. "We're all so happy, I can't bear
+to break it up by telling you what it's my duty to do! Poppy, doesn't
+mother have everything nice? I've often thought of this tea-table when
+I've been eating at places where they did things, roughish. Look at the
+flowers. Mother always has flowers on the table, even when it's winter.
+Jesus wouldn't expect me to break this up." His face became transfused
+with light. "I believe Jesus loves everything that's done nicely,
+whether it's a good deed or bread-and-butter cut nice and thin. That's
+why," he mourned, so wistfully that all of them save the impassive woman
+in uniform made a kind, friendly bending towards him, "I mind not to be
+able to do anything really well. But Jesus loves me all the same. He
+loves me whatever I'm like!" His brow clouded. "But because He loves me
+I owe Him a debt. I ought to preach Him wherever I am, in and out of
+season. But I can't spoil this. Aren't we all happy, sitting here? I'll
+tell you what. They've asked me to take the Saturday evening service
+to-night because the Commandant and the two under him are all down with
+influenza. If you'll come and hear me I'll tell you what Jesus wants you
+to hear. Oh, mother, Richard, do, do come!"
+
+"Yes, Roger dear, we'll come."
+
+"You won't ... make fun of it?"
+
+"Oh no! Oh no!" Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy. "We
+haven't seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought.
+There are lots of things about me you don't know. For all you know, what
+you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me...."
+
+"What I said about Richard?..."
+
+"About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help
+one...."
+
+She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a
+pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining: "Oh, mother, if I
+could bring you to Jesus! Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I
+want!" But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started
+to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards. "Yes,"
+he cried reproachfully, "Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I
+reward Him!"
+
+They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the
+tea-leaves in her cup.
+
+"I told a lie!" he answered their common mute enquiry.
+
+"A silly, vain lie. I told you they'd asked me to take the Saturday
+evening service to-night. They didn't. I offered to take it. Nobody ever
+asks me to preach. They say I can't. Mind you, I don't think they're
+right. I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn't speak so
+badly. But that's not the point. I told a lie. I distinctly said they'd
+asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a
+success of things like Richard always does. Oh, what a thing to do to
+Jesus!"
+
+"But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry. It
+wasn't a deliberate lie."
+
+"Oh, mother, you don't understand," he fairly squealed. "You haven't
+been saved, you see, and you're still lax about these things. It does
+matter! It was a lie! I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees.
+Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?"
+
+Marion answered tenderly: "My dear, of course you can," but Poppy
+clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish,
+considered exasperation: "You haven't time. We ought to be at the chapel
+half an hour before the meeting. It's a quarter to six now."
+
+"Oh dear! oh dear! Is it as late as that? I wanted to write on a piece
+of paper what I'm going to say! Now I won't have time! Oh, and I did
+want to preach well! Oh, where's my cap?" He began to stumble about the
+room.
+
+Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set
+an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal. Richard
+and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the
+anticipation of disorder always provoked in them. "Tcha!" exclaimed
+Poppy contemptuously. "But it's there! On the armchair!" cried Ellen:
+she could not bear the look on Richard's and Marion's faces. "Where?"
+asked Poppy. It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen.
+"There! There! Among the cushions," she answered, and rose and went
+round the table to pick it up herself. Richard came and helped her.
+
+Roger seemed a little annoyed when Richard and Ellen found the cap for
+him among the cushions. Having to thank them spoiled, it could be seen,
+some valedictory effect which he had planned. He stood by while they
+shook hands with Poppy, who turned her head away as if to hide some
+scar, and when she had gone across to Marion tried to get in his
+designed tremendousness. By the working of his face, which made even
+his ears move a little, they knew they must endure something very
+characteristic of him. But into his weak eyes there bubbled a spring of
+joyful tenderness so bright, so clear, so intense that, though it would
+have seemed more fitting on the face of a child than of a man, it yet
+was dignified.
+
+"You make a handsome couple, you two!" he said.
+
+"Richard, you're a whole lot taller than me. When I'm away from you I
+forget what a difference there is between us. And the young lady, she's
+fine, too."
+
+"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.
+
+He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he
+murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite
+ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well,
+good-bye, mother."
+
+"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out
+myself, my dears."
+
+Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat
+down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he
+would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an
+overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and
+stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the
+sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door:
+Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the
+click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger,
+which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all,
+the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn
+of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark.
+But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body,
+and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him
+as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the
+dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to
+their own lives.
+
+When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps
+save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber,
+fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to
+polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped
+in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the
+candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four
+chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair
+had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have
+known that Ellen had been sitting there too.
+
+Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol
+of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words.
+Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that
+have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."
+
+"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh
+formula.
+
+"But you must have an eclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used
+to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the
+table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that
+her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties
+they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed
+their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite
+which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than
+whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be,
+little, sweet, and moderate.
+
+Marion brought her an eclair on a plate. She took it and stood up,
+asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and
+Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."
+
+"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found
+herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into
+the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been
+laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the
+stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes
+which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone
+of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've
+no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little
+gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more
+than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked
+draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the
+disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the
+mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side
+by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like
+rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and
+its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable--this tall man
+who could assail all things with his outstretched strength, this
+broad-bodied woman whom nothing could assail because of her crouching
+strength.
+
+Marion stretched out her hand to the fire. Her insanely polished nails
+glittered like jewels.
+
+She said in that indifferent tone: "Well, it wasn't so bad."
+
+Some passion shook him. "Mother! Mother! To think of him bringing that
+woman into this house--to meet you and Ellen!"
+
+"Hush, oh hush! He does not know."
+
+"But, mother! He ought to! Anyone could see--"
+
+"What she was. Yes, poor woman. But remember I made a bad job of Roger.
+I gave him no brains."
+
+"Mother--it mustn't happen again. She can't come here again."
+
+She grew stern. "Richard, you must say nothing to Roger. Nor to her.
+She's his love and pride. So far as he's concerned, she's a better woman
+than I am. I never put my love and pride in his life. If you speak to
+either of them you will ... add to my already heavy guilt. Besides ...
+how can she hurt Ellen and me? She's very weak. We're very strong."
+
+"But, mother, you saw what she was."
+
+"More than you did. She's had a child not long since."
+
+"A child?" He stared at her curiously, reverently. "How do you know?"
+
+"Some people get a brown stain on their face when they're having a baby,
+and afterwards it lingers on. I had it with you. Not with Roger. She has
+it now." She slowly drew her fingers over her face, her eyes wide in
+wonder. "It's a queer thing, birth...."
+
+Ellen tingled with shame because such things were spoken of aloud, by
+someone old. But Richard muttered huskily: "I wonder what the story
+is...."
+
+"Something horrible. She's come from a good home. Her teeth were well
+looked after when she was a girl. That hair took some conscientious
+torturing to make it what it is. She was caught, I suppose, by her love
+of beauty. Did you ever hear anything more pathetic than her name--Poppy
+Alicante?"
+
+"I don't see anything more in it than it's an obvious lie."
+
+"It was much more than that. Think of her as a little girl going with
+her mother into a greengrocer's and hearing about Alicante grapes, and
+asking what Alicante was, and being told it was in Spain, and making the
+most lovely pictures of it in her mind and keeping them there ever
+since. Oh, she's a poor, beauty-loving thing. That's how the handsome
+sailor picked her up in Chatham High Street on Saturday night."
+
+"No doubt you're right," he said, looking into the fire.
+
+"And she hated giving up the child. That's why she snarls at Roger.
+Until she gets another she'll be famished. It was taken over, I expect,
+by a married sister or brother who've got no children of their own.
+She's not allowed to see it now. Not since she left the nice place that
+was found for her after she'd got over her trouble. Twenty pounds a
+year--because of her lost character; and for the same reason rather more
+work than the rest of the servants, who all found out about it. So she
+ran away."
+
+He interrupted her: "Supposing all that's true. And I know it is. It's
+like you, mother, to read from a patch of brown skin on a woman's face
+things that other people would have found out only by searching registry
+records and asking the police. It's like the way you always turned your
+back on the barometer and read the sky for news of the weather. You're
+an old peasant woman under your skin, mother." His voice was hazed with
+delight. He had forgotten the moment in the timeless joy of his love for
+her. Ellen, in the shadows, stirred and coughed. He broke out again:
+"Well, supposing all that's true! Are you going to be honest and be as
+clear-sighted about what happened after she ran away? Mother, think of
+the things that have been done to her, think of the things she's seen!"
+
+The indifferent tone continued now, although she said: "Think of the
+horrible things that have been done to me, think of the horrible things
+I've seen! Oh, you're right, of course. Unhappy people are dangerous.
+They clutch at the happy people round them and drag them down into the
+vortex of their misery. But if you're going to hate anybody for doing
+that, hate me. Look how I've dominated you with my misfortunes, look how
+I've eaten up your life by making you feel it a duty to compensate me
+for what I've endured. Hate me. But don't hate Poppy. Oh, that poor,
+simple creature. Even now, after all that's happened, she'd be pleased
+like a child if you took her to a fair where there were merry-go-rounds.
+Oh, don't hate her. And don't hate Roger." Wildness flashed through her
+like lightning through a dense dark cloud. "Don't hate him, Richard!
+Take your mind off both of us. We're all right. I can manage everything
+quite well. I'm hard. I haven't got all those fine feelings you think I
+have. I'm quite hard. I can arrange everything beautifully. Roger's
+happy in the Hallelujah Army. He's gone to Jesus for the love I ought to
+have given him. I know they're thinking of turning him out. But I'll see
+to it that they keep him. I'll pretend to have leanings towards their
+religion, and I'll give them money from time to time so that they won't
+dare get rid of him. It will be rather amusing squaring them. I shall
+enjoy it. We will be all right. Leave us alone. Don't think of us. Think
+of Ellen. Think of Ellen. How you hold back from your happiness!" she
+cried gibingly. "I tell you, if I had had your chance of happiness when
+I was young, neither my mother nor my father would have held me back
+from it!"
+
+It was as if her soul had leapt, naked and raging, from out of her mouth
+when she said that. Ellen stirred among the cushions, feeling
+unformulated shame. She wondered how Richard could endure hearing that
+hoarse vehemence from the lips of one whom he must wish to be gentle and
+unpassionate. But he was gazing at his mother trancedly and with slight
+movements of his hands and feet, as if she were dancing and he desired
+to join her in her spinning rhythm; and she, mad, changeable woman,
+shivered and pressed her fingers against her mouth to silence herself,
+and looked down on her skirt, drawling lazily: "Well, here I am,
+standing about in my outdoor clothes. If there's anything I hate, it's
+wearing outdoor clothes in the house. However, it'll save me changing,
+and I've none too much time if I'm going to be punctual for Roger's
+meeting."
+
+She moved towards the door. He followed softly, as her shadow, and held
+it open.
+
+When he made to follow her out of the room she turned sharply. "You
+needn't come."
+
+"I promised Roger," he said falsely.
+
+"What nonsense!" she blazed. "I'll tell him you had to stay here with
+Ellen."
+
+She banged the door on him. He stood staring at its panels, which were
+rosy with firelight, and Ellen closed her eyes for weariness. After some
+seconds she heard his tread and felt him bend over her. "Ellen," he
+mumbled, "I must go with mother. That fool will be too awful on the
+platform. I must see her through."
+
+From the dark fey shape he made against the firelight she knew that he
+was not thinking of her, that the life she had given him by her love no
+longer ran in his veins. She scratched one of her wrists. If she could
+have let the life he had given flow out of her veins she would have done
+it. "Ay, do," she said. "I like you to be good to your mother. You never
+know how long you may have her with you," she added piously and not
+without cheerfulness.
+
+He left her with a kiss that was dry and spurious like a paper flower.
+She sank back into the chair and closed her eyes again, and listened for
+the closing of the front door which would leave her free to weep or rage
+or dance or do whatever would relieve the pressure of the moment on her
+brain. She filled in the throbbing tune by thinking of the visitors. It
+gave her a curious thrill, such as she might have felt if she had
+gratified her ambition to carry a heavy-plumed fan like Sarah
+Bernhardt's, to reflect that she had sat in the same room with a bad
+woman. A desire for unspecified adult things ran through her veins, as
+if she had just heard the strong initial blare of a band. Then she
+checked all thoughts, for from the hall she heard the sound of argument.
+
+The door was flung open by Marion. She moved towards the hearth with a
+burly speed which marked this moment a crisis in the house of languid,
+inhibited movements, and cast herself down on a low stool by the fender.
+Richard followed and stood over her, the firelight driving over his face
+like the glow of excited blood, the shadows lying in his eye-sockets
+like blindness. She cried up at him: "No, I will not go if you come too.
+How can I go and sit listening to him, with you beside me hating him!"
+He swayed slowly, but did not answer. She stripped herself of coat and
+furs and thrust them on him. "There. Take them up to my room. I'm not
+going. I'll tell some lie. Better than you hating him like this. And
+while you're up you'll find some papers on my desk about the mortgage on
+Whitewebbs. Attend to these. And don't come back just now. You drive me
+mad when you hate Roger so."
+
+When he had softly shut the door she put her hand to her head and said:
+"Oh, Ellen, what has happened to me? I have lost all my strength."
+
+But her voice was still level, and she was but a squat, crouching mass
+against the firelight. Ellen did not know whether she was really moved,
+nor, if she were, whether she could feel comradely with such emotion,
+since she had seen the woman blench at the thought of her son preaching
+in the street yet stay complacid at the prospect of him being lost in
+intellectual error. So she did not answer.
+
+"You must go for a long walk with Richard to-morrow," said Marion
+presently. "Over to Rochford, perhaps, where Anne Boleyn lived. It's
+pretty there."
+
+"That would be nice," Ellen answered. She liked it when they talked as
+if they were merely strangers. "Do you think it will be fine to-morrow?
+Richard said you were awful clever at telling the weather."
+
+"I can't say. I only looked out for a moment. The clouds are going and
+the moon's rising. But there's a queer feeling in the air to-night. It's
+not like the winter or spring or summer or autumn. It's as if we had
+come into some fifth season of the year." She fell silent and sat
+tapping the floor with her foot; and asked more loudly but in the same
+tone: "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
+me?"
+
+Ellen was sure she was being mocked; grown-up people never asked one's
+advice. She muttered sullenly: "I don't know"; but as she spoke she
+heard from Marion's dark shape a sound of discovery such as a searcher
+might make when his groping fingers closed on the lost pearl. Its
+intensity convinced, and she leaned forward, crying in full friendship:
+"You've thought of something to settle them?"
+
+But Marion answered, with that indifference grown nearly to a sneer:
+"Oh, no.... Oh, no...."
+
+Ellen leaned back, hating these adults that like to keep their secrets
+from the young.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Ellen was still on her knees fiddling with the lock of the French window
+in an effort to discover why Marion had found it so difficult to open
+and shut, when she saw through the lacquer of reflection which the lit
+room painted on the uncurtained glass that a dark mass had come to a
+halt just outside. It moved, and she perceived that it was a skirt. She
+stood up to face the intruder and looked through the glass into Marion's
+eyes. For a moment she stared back in undisguised anger. Of course, if
+the woman had had any sense she would never have formed this daft idea
+of going for a dander on the marshes at this hour of the night, whether
+her nerves were troubling her or not; but she never ought to have
+pretended to be so set on it, and let a body feel sure of having the
+evening alone with Richard as soon as he had finished with those beastly
+papers, if she was going to turn back in five minutes. Then she
+remembered that this was Richard's mother, and that for some reason he
+set great store by her; and she tried to smile, and laid her fingers on
+the doorknob to open it. But Marion shook her head and put out a
+prohibitory hand with so urgent a gesture that the unlit lantern which
+hung by a strap from her wrist bumped against the glass.
+
+Yet she remained for some seconds longer with her face pressed close to
+the window. She was peering into the room with an expression of wanting
+to fix its contents and its appearance in her memory, which was odd in
+the owner of the house. Ellen moved aside in order not to impede her
+vision, and stood disliking her for her pervasive inexplicability and
+for her extreme plainness. She had been very ugly all that evening since
+she came down to dinner, and now the shining glass in front of her face
+was acting in its uncomeliness like a magnifying lens. Her hair had
+suddenly become greasy during the last few hours, and it showed in lank
+loops where her hat had been carelessly jammed down on her head. In the
+same short space of time her face seemed to have grown fatter, and her
+skin had taken on the pallor of unhealthy obesity. Against it the dark
+down on her upper lip looked like dirt. Her eyes were not magnificent
+to-night. After she had stared round the room she looked again at Ellen,
+and gave her a forced smile that looked the more unpleasant because the
+corners of her mouth were joined to her nose by deep creases. It so
+manifestly did not spring from any joy, that Ellen could not answer it
+save by just such another false grin. Her honesty hated this woman who
+had thus negotiated her into insincerity, and she turned away. When she
+looked back the face had gone.
+
+She went back to the fire and sat thinking bitterly what a daft thing it
+was for a wife to go wandering round her own house in the night like a
+thief. But Marion was altogether an upsetting woman. She had kept the
+dinner waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and when she came down
+it was revealed that she had caused this delay, which must have
+inconvenienced the kitchen and was sheer cruelty to Richard, who had
+made next to nothing of a tea, by dressing herself up in a black and
+gold brocade affair that it was sheer madness to waste wearing when
+there was no company, and putting on jewels which made her stricken
+plainness look the more soiled and leaden. Then, once they sat down to
+the meal she had done her best to spoil, she had eaten so slowly that it
+dragged on interminably; and all the while had kept her great eyes fixed
+on Richard's face, so that though he sometimes turned aside and spoke to
+Ellen, he was always drawn away from her by his sense of that strong,
+exigent gaze. The minute they had finished, when there seemed a chance
+of their settling down in some more easy grouping by the fire, Marion
+had curtly and disagreeably asked him if he had gone through the papers
+about the mortgage; and when he answered that he had not been able to
+keep his mind on them she had told him to go upstairs and finish them
+just as if he were a child.
+
+Ellen raised her upper lip over her teeth at the thought of Marion's
+subsequent awkwardness. There had not, when she announced her plan of
+taking Richard and Ellen up to town the next morning and spending the
+day shopping and going to a theatre, been the least real party-giving
+joy in her tone. Her will seemed to be holding her voice in its hands
+like a concertina and waving it to and fro and squeezing out of it all
+sorts of notes; but the sound of generous happiness would not come. And
+when Ellen tried to tell her that it was very kind of her, but for
+herself she would rather stay quietly in the country and go for a walk
+with Richard, the woman had simply lifted her voice to a higher pitch
+and said: "Oh, but it'll be great fun. We must go before Sunday is on
+us." She was evidently one of those managing bodies who are accustomed
+to ride rough-shod over the whole world, and often do it under the
+pretence of kindness. It was most cunning the way she rang for the cook
+to try and make it seem that there was a pressing domestic reason for
+her taking this jaunt. But cook had let her down badly, staring in such
+ingenuous amazement, and blurting out: "Oh Lor', mum, I don't want no
+aluminium set now. All I said was I thought our copper saucepans would
+need re-coppering in a year or so, and that, considering the trouble and
+expense that meant, we might as well restock with aluminium." There had
+been a hysterical stridency about the way in which Marion had flouted
+the woman's protests by repeating over and over again: "Yes, you shall
+have them now. There's not the smallest reason why you should wait for
+them. I shall go up to Harrod's to-morrow morning."
+
+Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face
+and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing
+gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening
+the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die
+if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life
+could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the
+creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the
+garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely.
+Ellen crossed to one of the small leaded windows which were on each side
+of the French window and looked out of the open pane in its centre. It
+was as she feared. The light streaming from the room showed her Marion
+standing half-way across the lawn, looking up at the top storey of the
+house. As the ray found her she lowered her head and made a jerky,
+embarrassed movement in the direction of Ellen, who, feeling merciless,
+continued to hold back the curtain. Marion drew her cloak collar up
+about her ears and stepped aside into the darkness. Ellen went and sat
+down by the fire. From something in Marion's bearing, she knew that she
+would not be back for some time.
+
+It would be beautiful when Richard came down to her. Now that the room
+was purged of its late occupant she felt herself becoming again the
+miracle that Richard's love had made her in the days before they left
+Edinburgh. Her heart beat quicker, she was sustained by a general mirth
+and needed no particular joke to make her smile. She felt the equal of
+the tall flame that was driving through the fire. It did not worry her
+that Richard was not with her, for she knew that at each moment she was
+recovering more and more of that joy in life which had previously come
+to her every morning, though those were greyer than here: which had been
+a real possession, since Richard had often, when he was tired, found
+such restoration in reading its signs on her as a footsore man might
+find in throwing himself in long grass: which had been gradually going
+from her ever since the house had begun to draw her into its affairs.
+Now she was regaining it; though, indeed, ever to have become conscious
+of it, as she had during the time of being without it, was to have lost
+the glad essence of it. She quailed and rejoiced like a convalescent who
+sets out to put his strength to the test, when she heard the slamming of
+a door overhead.
+
+He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said:
+"Where's Marion?"
+
+It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the
+window, of the dark loiterer in the garden. Murmuring, "Oh, she'll be
+back in a minute," she opened her arms to him.
+
+He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very
+close. "Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run
+across the road!" he whispered in her ear. She knew immediately, from
+the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his
+lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he
+too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself
+with it. She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he
+avoided her kiss and said irritably: "I wonder if Roger made an awful
+ass of himself preaching to-night?"
+
+"I've no doubt," answered Ellen, "that he made Jesus most dislikeable.
+But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a
+setback here and there."
+
+"It's not that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having
+mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had."
+He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.
+
+Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his
+face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers;
+but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift
+from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill
+with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer,
+closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with
+him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a
+steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they
+were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as
+itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times
+which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found
+the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye
+first saw.
+
+"'Lamport and Holt. _Bruyere_, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for
+Rosario. _Lalande_, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande.
+_Leighton_, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. _Vestris_, left
+Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to
+Pernambuco?"
+
+"Once," he said.
+
+"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."
+
+"Like Venice? Why?"
+
+"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."
+
+She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be
+suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some
+symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he
+had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating
+past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had
+made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the
+silence settle.
+
+After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"
+
+She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as
+it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out,"
+she said timorously.
+
+"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"
+
+"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and
+that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."
+
+"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to
+the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the
+east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird
+of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the
+end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he
+exclaimed.
+
+"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen
+felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the
+woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There
+was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and
+yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.
+
+"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He
+turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been
+incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me
+she was doing this?"
+
+Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it?
+You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each
+other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like
+children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces.
+She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this
+trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all
+day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him,
+slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing
+that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her
+head after the day she'd had. And I could never think she was a woman
+who'd be afraid of walking in the dark. And it seemed natural enough.
+Because it has been a day for her, hasn't it?"
+
+He agreed grimly: "Yes, it's been a day," and looked over his shoulder
+at the quiet silvern garden, and shivered. "Tell me," he asked, with a
+timidity that filled her with fear, since it was the last quality she
+had ever expected to colour his tone to her, "what was she like, before
+she went out?"
+
+"Oh, verra bright," said Ellen, with conscious acidity. "She was all for
+making arrangements for you and me to go up to town with her to-morrow
+and see a play, and I don't know all what. And she had the cook in to
+tell her about some aluminium saucepans that we're going to buy
+to-morrow if we go."
+
+"Oh!" He was manifestly relieved. "Well, I suppose it's all right."
+
+"Yes, it's all right," she told him pettishly; and then tried to make
+amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion. "I can understand why your
+mother thought it would do her good to go out. If you've lived all your
+life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you. No
+doubt," she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she
+was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion's more pathetic aspect,
+"the poor thing's gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit
+of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young. Richard,
+Richard, what have I said?"
+
+He looked at her coldly. "Nothing. What could you have said?" But he
+went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him
+hasten, and opened it and stepped outside. Against the moonlight he was
+only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to
+the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful
+look of rage which had made her cry aloud. He stepped in again and said:
+"I'm sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her."
+
+She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with
+him. "May I come with you?" she asked through tears.
+
+"No, no, it wouldn't be any fun for you," he answered fussily,
+"scrambling about these fields in the dark."
+
+"Let me come with you!" she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows
+knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be
+to him sombre with the day's events, and cried: "I shall feel afraid,
+waiting here."
+
+"Very well. Go and put your things on. But be quick."
+
+He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged
+the time spent in waiting for her. Wearily she followed him out of the
+window. From what her mother had told her about men, she had always
+known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of
+worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that
+she was being tiresome when she was not. But she would never have
+believed that it could come so soon. And it was spoiling her. She no
+longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of
+her own nobility. Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by
+pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which
+tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his
+presence no matter at what price. There was no knowing where all this
+would end.
+
+But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it
+had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had
+handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard,
+while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like
+walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised
+a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated
+with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like
+ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard
+piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white
+paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled
+hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had
+gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into
+the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and
+led her up in a slanting course towards the top of the elm-hedge that
+striped the hill. It was rough walking over the steep frozen hummocks,
+and she wished he would not walk so fast. But it was lovely going up
+like this, and with every step widening the wide, whitely-blazing view.
+The elm trees stood like chased toys made by silversmiths where the
+light struck them; and in the darkness seemed like harsh twiggy nets
+hung on tall poles to catch the stars. Scattered over the polished
+harbour, the black boats squatted on their shadows and the tide licked
+towards them with an ebony and silver tongue. But far out in the fairway
+a liner and some lesser steamers carried their spilling cargo of orange
+brightness, and the further fringe of the night was spoiled by the
+comprehensive yellow wink of a lighthouse; and these things tainted the
+black and white immaculacy of the hour. It was not on earth but overhead
+that the essence of the night displayed itself. Light rushed from the
+moon into the sky like a strong wind, carrying before it some shining
+vapours that might have been angels' clouts blown off a heavenly line.
+It was as if some horseplay was going on among the ethereal forces; for
+the stars, dimmed by the violent brilliance of the moon, were like
+tapers seen through glass, and were held, perhaps, by invisible beings
+who had been drawn to their windows by the sound of carnival. To its
+zenith the night was packed with gaiety.
+
+"Richard, Richard, is it not beautiful?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, yes," he answered.
+
+They reached the topmost elm in the row, and opened a gate into a field
+which stretched inland from the hill's brow. Under the shadow of its
+seaward edge they still walked westerly, the ploughed earth looking like
+a patch of grey corduroy lying to their right. It struck her that he was
+moving now like a hunter stalking his quarry, as if the lightness of his
+feet were a weapon, as if he were looking forward to an exciting kill.
+At the corner of the field they stopped before a gap in the hedge.
+Triple barbed wire crossed a vista of close-cropped grass running to
+trees that lifted dark spires against the pale meridian starlight.
+
+"Wait," said Richard.
+
+He went forward and stamped down the long grasses at one side of the
+gap, and then bent nearly double and seemed to be pressing against
+something with his hands and his knee. The barbed wire began to hum, to
+buzz excitedly; there was the groan of cracking wood, and the grunt of
+his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her
+face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am
+like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be
+true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced
+and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the
+stake which supported it.
+
+"Come on," he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They
+walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was
+hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled
+by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide
+Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads.
+It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who
+was walking on ahead, though there did not seem any reason why they
+should walk in single file, for the ground was level and the grass
+short. There was indeed a suavity about this place which was not to be
+found in fields or commons. The line of trees towards which they were
+going was only a spur of a dense wood that stretched inland, and light
+from some moonflooded place beyond outlined their winter-naked bodies
+and showed them beautiful with a formal afforested grace.
+
+"Is this a park?" she whispered, running forward to his side.
+
+"Yes. My father's park."
+
+"Oh!" she breathed in surprise; then, flaming up in loyalty, cried:
+"What a shame it isn't yours!"
+
+He made an exclamation of anger and disgust, and said coldly: "Can't you
+understand that I am glad that nothing which was his is mine?"
+
+Meekly she murmured: "That's natural, that's natural," and fell behind.
+
+They passed the lacy clump of withered bracken, casting a shadow much
+more substantial than itself, which was the last dwindled outpost of
+the screen of trees; and Richard hissed over his shoulder, "Hush!"
+though she had not spoken. But nothing could spoil this. The silver
+forest waited in a half circle round a clearing that looked marshy with
+moonbeams; and in the centre of the arc, set forward from the trees,
+shone a small temple, looking out to sea. It had four white pillars,
+which were vague with excessive light, columns of gleaming mist; and
+these upheld a high pediment, covered with deep stone mouldings which
+cast such shadows and received such brightness that it looked like a
+rich casket chased by some giant jeweller. That it should last longer
+than a sigh did not seem possible.
+
+But it endured, it endured; until the urgent advocacy of romance which
+was somehow inherent in its beauty, and which was not likely to be
+fulfilled, caused an ache. She caught her breath in a sob.
+
+"You think it beautiful?" asked Richard, close to her ear.
+
+"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"
+
+"I had a summer-house in that villa of mine at Rio," he said, hotly and
+defiantly, "which was just like this, but much more beautiful."
+
+He stepped forward and began to move towards the temple with that air of
+stalking a quarry. She followed him wearily, feeling that it was not
+right that they should have come here like this. They should have come
+in some different way. At each step the temple grew higher before them,
+more candid, more immaculate, but its beauty did not soften his
+inexorable aspect. When they could see the pale wedges which the moon
+drove in between the columns he paused and stared, and drew from his
+pocket something dark which lay easily in his hand. "What's that? What's
+that?" she asked in panic. "Only an electric torch," he muttered,
+without surprise at her suspicion, and went with springing, silent,
+detective gait up the three steps of the temple.
+
+She remained without, drooping. Would he find his mother there? She
+hoped so, for then they could all go home and leave this place, which
+she felt despised her. The tall trees of the forest, lifting their bare
+branches like antlers against the stars, seemed to be holding their
+heads high in contempt of her defeat. For so to be forgotten was defeat.
+
+No sounds came from the temple, and she timidly went up the steps and
+passed into the interior, which was cut by the colonnade into narrow
+chambers of shadows and broader chambers of light. At first she could
+not see him anywhere, and cried in alarm: "Richard!"
+
+"I'm here," he answered. He was standing beside her, leaning against a
+pillar, but put out no hand to soothe her fear.
+
+"Have you not found her?" she quavered.
+
+He let the yellow circle of the electric torch travel over the cracked
+stucco-wall that faced them, the paintless door at its left extremity,
+the drift of dead leaves on the stone floor.
+
+"What does that door open on to?" asked Ellen, forgetting the reason for
+their search in the queerness of the place.
+
+"A staircase up to the room above."
+
+"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the
+existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up
+there, do you think?"
+
+He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.
+
+"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall
+high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I
+stood up there, wouldn't it?"
+
+There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like
+a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has
+she told you anything about it?"
+
+"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just
+thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You
+take me up too quick."
+
+His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course
+she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's
+what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here
+together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely
+he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche,
+though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular
+soilure.
+
+"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand
+on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those
+bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"
+
+"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered,
+sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to
+slow thoughts.
+
+She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands,
+close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted
+by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out
+towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the
+woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the
+trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene
+in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and
+the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little
+thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud
+laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree
+and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands,
+and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered
+with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw
+suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a
+dancing lantern.
+
+She ran back to the temple. All she cared for really was pleasing him.
+"Richard, Richard! I've found her! She's down there on the marshes!"
+
+He was out beside her in a second. "Where? How do you know?"
+
+"I saw her lantern down on the marshes!"
+
+When they got back to the hill's edge the light was still to be seen,
+bobbing along towards the elm brow. Richard clipped Ellen's waist to
+show her how well pleased he was with her. "Ah, that'll be Marion!" he
+said. "Nobody else would be on the marshes at this hour." Then a little
+wind of anger blew over his voice. "Has she been to his tomb? Can she
+have been to his tomb in the time? It's a steep climb for her. I
+wonder.... I wonder...."
+
+The lantern bobbed out of sight behind the elm row. Feeling that they
+were again alone together, Ellen raised her lips to be kissed, but he
+had already turned away. "Let's go home now!" he said urgently. "I want
+to know where she's been."
+
+The place seemed far more beautiful to her than it had done before. "Oh!
+Now you're sure she's quite safe, mayn't we stay here a little?" she
+begged.
+
+"No, no. Some other night. I'll bring you to-morrow night. But not now,
+not now."
+
+She followed laggingly, looking about her with infatuation. There was
+something religious about the scene. Rites of some true form of worship
+might fitly be celebrated here. All appeared more majestic and more
+sacred than in the strained, bickering moments before she showed him the
+lantern. Now she perceived that it was the silver circle of trees which
+was the real temple, and that the marble belvedere was but a human
+offering laid before the shrine. It was in there, along the ebony paths
+which ran among the glistening thickets, that one would find the
+presence of the divinity.
+
+"Oh, Richard! It will never be so beautiful as this on any other night!
+Let us stay!"
+
+"No. It will be just as good any moonlit night. I swear I'll bring you.
+But now I want to get back home."
+
+He slipped her arm through his to make her come. She stumbled along,
+turning her face aside towards those mystic woods. At the end of those
+paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all
+sides by the forest; and there was something there.... Another temple? A
+statue? An event? She did not know. But if they found it, they would be
+happy for ever....
+
+"Richard--"
+
+"No."
+
+He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the
+ploughed field. When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row
+they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard
+gate, the bobbing lantern.
+
+"She's going fairly quickly," he said softly, speculatively. "I wonder
+if she's been to his tomb? Do you think she's had time?"
+
+"I don't know," Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when
+he must be aware she could not tell.
+
+"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and
+bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth
+at their feet. "We'll find out when we get home. Let's hurry back."
+
+They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread
+that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite
+nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance. The
+humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at
+shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the
+lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She
+was the lucky woman, Marion.
+
+"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in
+fine style."
+
+"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to
+ask her where she has been."
+
+"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull,
+drilling persistence.
+
+When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she
+standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such
+extraordinary things?"
+
+Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the
+left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady
+rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she
+said pettishly.
+
+He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which
+pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment
+there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed
+on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed
+past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in
+the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"
+
+The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen
+crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and
+prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight
+beams were still unclouded.
+
+"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a
+revolver.
+
+Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a
+doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.
+
+"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"
+
+It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's
+sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and
+wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown
+some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.
+
+"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm
+Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my
+married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would
+auntie give us the clothes she was making?"
+
+The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the kitchen
+brightness at them.
+
+"Where is your mistress?" Richard asked them, cutting into the girl's
+sweet, silly speech. "Has she come back?"
+
+The servants all started making twittering, consequential noises. "No,
+sir, she isn't." "We didn't know, any of us, you was out till the lady
+and gentleman come."
+
+"What lady and gentleman?"
+
+The two younger women shrunk back and left the cook to answer. "Mr.
+Roger Peacey, sir, and the lady." From the hindmost girl there came a
+giggle.
+
+That was why they had not heard the knocking at the door. They had all
+been sitting laughing at his mother's other son and going over the
+family history. Ellen shrank back from the light. Marion's misfortunes
+made things very ill to deal with; they seemed to bring out the worst in
+everybody. And how the whole affair was hurting Richard! He turned on
+his heel and walked back to the trellis arch and went through it without
+waiting for her. By the time she had followed him round the corner of
+the house he was opening the French window into the dining-room. He
+found it quite easy to open; again she thought with rage and contempt of
+the way that Marion had fumbled with the handle. She had to run along
+the path lest in his forgetfulness he shut her out into the night.
+
+She found him halted just within the room, pulling off his gauntlets
+and forcing a white smile towards Roger, who was standing swaying on the
+hearthrug, his cheeks dribbled with tears. Poppy stood beside him,
+staring sullenly at a blank wall, her mouth a little open with distaste
+for him.
+
+"So you're giving us another visit," said Richard, in that hollow
+conscientious tone of kindness he had used to them in the afternoon.
+
+Roger opened his mouth but could not speak; then flapped his hands to
+make it plain this was an occasion of importance, and cried bleatingly:
+"I've come to say that I forgive you all."
+
+"Forgive us!" exclaimed Richard, swept away to the bleak extremity of
+rage. Then checked himself. "Oh, for not coming to your meeting. We
+hoped you would. Ellen was tired."
+
+"I couldn't bear to think of you p'raps going to bed and feeling that I
+was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I've got
+Jesus I'll forgive anything that anybody does against me!" His voice
+wallowed rhapsodically. "So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of
+going straight back to the Colony."
+
+Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to
+disassociate herself from him, from the situation.
+
+"That was good of you," said Richard.
+
+"And now"--the whistling tone came back in his speech--"I want to tell
+mother!"
+
+"You can't do that. She isn't in."
+
+"What, weren't you all out together? Didn't she come home with you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then, love o' goodness, where is she at this time of night?"
+
+"Down on the marshes," said Richard casually. "She had a headache. She
+thought a walk in the night air would do her good." Slowly and
+deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the
+table.
+
+"Oh," murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and
+straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the
+wood. Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his
+brother's face. "Here! What's the matter with mother?"
+
+"Nothing! Nothing!" exclaimed Richard in exasperation. "She's down on
+the marshes, having a walk."
+
+"Oh, but you can't take me in that way!" the pallid creature cried,
+wringing his hands. "I can see you're frightened about mother!"
+
+"I'm not," said Richard vehemently.
+
+"You needn't try to fool me. I'm stupid about everything else, but not
+about mother! And I could always feel what was going on between you two.
+Many's the time I've had to leave the room because you two were loving
+each other so and I felt out of it. And now I know you're frightened
+about her! You are! You are!"
+
+"I'm not!" shouted Richard.
+
+Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and
+had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight. "If you'd got
+Jesus," he said tartly, "you'd learn to be gentle. Like He was." He
+recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy's hand, which she tendered him
+deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for
+orders. "Now you'd better tell me what it is about mother that's making
+you frightened. She'd not be pleased, would she, if she came in and
+found you treating me like this, as if I hadn't a right to know anything
+about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?"
+
+That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see. He looked down at his
+white knuckles and unclenched his hands. "It's really nothing," he told
+Roger in that false, kind voice. "I went upstairs after dinner to look
+over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here. When I
+came back Ellen told me she'd gone out for a walk on the marshes. It
+struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went
+out and had a look round, but couldn't see her anywhere. There's not the
+slightest occasion for worry."
+
+Roger stared at him, sucking his front teeth. "But you're frightened!"
+he said explosively.
+
+"I am not."
+
+"You are. You think she's come to some harm down on the marshes." He
+slipped past him and flung open the French window, calling in a thin,
+whistling voice that could not have been heard fifty yards away:
+"Mummie! Mummie!"
+
+A convulsion of rage ran through Richard. With one hand he jerked Roger
+back into the room by his coat-collar, with the other he slammed the
+French window. "Be quiet. I tell you she's all right. I know where she's
+gone."
+
+"Where, then?"
+
+"Never mind."
+
+"Where? Where?" His hands fumbled for the doorhandle again.
+
+"Oh, stop that!" Richard loosed hold of him with the expression of one
+who had grasped what he thought to be soft grass and finds his palms
+scored by a fibrous stalk. He said, and Ellen could see that he liked
+saying it as little as anything that he had ever said all his life long:
+"If you must know, I think she's gone up to my father's tomb."
+
+Roger shook his head solemnly. "No. You're wrong. She hasn't gone there.
+And she's come to harm."
+
+"Why in God's name do you say that?" burst out Richard.
+
+"I know. I've known all the evening. That's really why I came back here
+after the service. That talk about forgiveness was just something I made
+up as an excuse. I knew quite well that something was wrong with
+mummie." His pale eyes sought first Richard and then Ellen. "Don't you
+believe a person might know if something happened to another person," he
+asked wistfully, "if they loved them enough?"
+
+There was indeed such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard
+and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it
+is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of
+the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really,
+Roger, she was quite bright before she went out. Ellen, tell Roger...."
+
+But Roger stared out at the empty silver garden and whimpered
+inattentively: "I can't help it. I want to go down to the marshes and
+look for her."
+
+"Very well," agreed Richard, blinking. The sight of the love in those
+weak eyes made his voice authentically kind. "We'll go down. She ought
+to be easy to find as she's carrying a lantern. You're quite sure she
+has got a lantern with her, Ellen?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Ellen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back
+and looked through the window."
+
+"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"
+
+"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his
+mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the
+door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the
+glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went
+away."
+
+"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in
+amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a
+reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before
+she went out."
+
+She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her
+that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all
+in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about
+us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and
+talked to her about saucepans."
+
+"What saucepans?"
+
+"Aluminium saucepans."
+
+"But what about them?"
+
+She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple
+in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the
+narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on
+hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get
+them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."
+
+For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her
+because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She
+really was all right, Ellen?"
+
+"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."
+
+Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure
+of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring
+things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was
+not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it
+had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned
+towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face,
+which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will
+most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."
+
+Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He
+turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here,
+Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so
+preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for
+Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."
+
+They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than
+their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate
+into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but
+he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop
+about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and
+Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and
+hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.
+
+Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an
+extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do
+that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."
+
+"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the
+exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.
+
+"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the
+teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and
+drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:
+"Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with
+her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the
+flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life
+was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk
+restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly:
+"That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in
+the sky. Is that Chatham?"
+
+With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that
+those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered
+what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in
+Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it
+was."
+
+"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed
+her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was
+quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.
+
+Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What
+chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this
+woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so
+wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's
+brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and
+ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes
+fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned
+out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the
+moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she
+was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and
+crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night
+searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.
+
+She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had
+whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window
+into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and
+advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the
+farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound
+of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there
+was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was
+no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family
+had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been
+unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran
+downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she
+begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the
+parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in
+her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut
+on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had
+been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look
+like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.
+
+There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was
+sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the
+night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on
+the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections
+of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as
+pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head
+on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly
+enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the
+breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that
+had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood
+Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered
+about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o'
+you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear
+nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went
+in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said:
+"Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the
+fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was
+held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it
+were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became
+more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture
+of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her
+wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"
+
+That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped
+back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he
+muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric
+switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her
+hands.
+
+"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"
+
+"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the
+sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it
+difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In
+the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the
+right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there
+over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for
+years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right
+up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."
+
+Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked
+foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story,
+"But when did you find the lantern?"
+
+"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way
+along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon
+as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the
+lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."
+
+They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any
+moment it might move or speak.
+
+"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the
+light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of
+those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened
+yet!"
+
+He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."
+
+"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"
+
+He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead.
+There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's
+dead."
+
+It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if
+he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly
+unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and
+hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously
+stricken by a disease one sits and waits.
+
+"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank
+into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick
+and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her
+flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but
+the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken
+all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat;
+and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously
+exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food."
+He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked
+round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling
+in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.
+
+"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."
+
+He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head
+mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a
+thing on my stomach."
+
+"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying
+for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."
+
+That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor
+Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.
+
+Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he
+laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did
+you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"
+
+"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."
+
+"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing
+but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."
+
+"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to
+worry."
+
+"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone.
+"It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled:
+"Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to
+the sallowness of the morning.
+
+When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his
+hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was
+saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you
+silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"
+and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.
+
+Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.
+"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.
+
+"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"
+
+But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had
+been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's
+mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
+me?"
+
+"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was
+deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."
+
+She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for
+persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint,
+barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife
+for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been
+alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a
+charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should
+understand her sacrifice and grieve.
+
+"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so
+that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.
+"She wore high heels for her age--"
+
+That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She
+was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the
+chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.
+This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she
+had gone back on it.
+
+"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on
+the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."
+
+Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room
+where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to
+the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much
+longer."
+
+"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly
+when she was unhappy."
+
+His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not
+know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal
+her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear,
+you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."
+
+"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."
+
+Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.
+Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do
+nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in
+the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a
+theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as
+anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must
+notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and
+final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of
+force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that
+never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect
+crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always,
+till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell
+him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring
+were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering
+nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the
+window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the
+ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had
+seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his
+inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate
+her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her
+life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he
+would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained
+inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened
+women....
+
+"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it
+was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate
+and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which
+chair?"
+
+"Yon, at your hand."
+
+He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out
+of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she
+wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very
+upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And
+for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just
+because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily
+enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they
+needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him stroking the soft
+velvet, laying his cheek against it.
+
+"And the desk? You say she sat there while she talked to cook?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She hated the way he sat down in front of it; in a heap, like a tired
+navvy. By her death Marion deprived her of her beautiful lightfooted
+lover. But she must wait. He would come back. She became aware that
+Roger was speaking to her. It appeared that he had sobbed in his cup and
+had sent jets of tea flying over the tablecloth, and he was now
+apologising.
+
+"Never heed," she told him comfortingly; "we'll have a clean one for
+lunch." "I didn't mean to," he quavered piteously, but she checked him.
+Richard had turned over his shoulder a white face.
+
+"She sat here?..."
+
+"Yes. While the cook stood talking to her, she sat there."
+
+"She ... You didn't notice ... when she was sitting there ... if she was
+scribbling on the blotter?"
+
+"Yes, she did. I noticed that."
+
+"Ah ... ah...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was beside him in the time of a breath. But he had not fainted,
+though his head had crashed down on the wood, for his fingers, buried in
+his hair, still laced and interlaced. She did not dare touch him; but
+she grovelled for the blotter, which at the moment of his groan had
+fallen to the floor, and stood staring at it. For a second her attention
+was dispersed by a shudder of disgust, for she felt Roger's noisy
+mouth-breathing at her ears. Then the proof leapt to her eyes. There was
+a rim of plain paper round the calendar on the inside of the cover, and
+this was covered with words and phrases written in the exquisite small
+script of Marion. "This is the end. Death. Death. Death. This is the
+end. I must die. Give him to Ellen. I must die."
+
+Roger tumbled back towards Poppy. "The awful sin of self-destruction!"
+he wailed.
+
+This proof struck through her with an awful, unifying grief. She had had
+evidence of Marion's intention which had convinced her mind, but it was
+all derived from ugliness: from the awkwardness of the woman's talk, the
+plainness of the face against the glass, the intrusive loitering of a
+squat figure in the garden. The soul had hearkened to these ugly
+messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it
+had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as
+briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the
+power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at
+its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living
+might grieve for any that is dead, now knew the sorrow appropriate to
+the destruction of Marion's wide, productive body. For what her spirit
+learned and admitted it had always known of that burning thing which had
+been Marion she looked round the room in reverence, since she had lived
+there. The light on the handle of the French window caught her eye, and
+she wept. She had been annoyed with Marion because she could not turn
+it. But who would not find it difficult to open a door if it was death
+on which it opened?
+
+"Richard, I love your mother!" she sobbed. "I love your mother so!"
+
+He muttered something. In case he was speaking to her she bent down and
+listened. But he was repeating over and over again in accents of irony:
+"Give him up to Ellen. Give him up to Ellen. Oh, mother, mother...."
+
+By the passion for Marion that was wringing her she could measure the
+flame that must be devouring him. There was a strong impulse in her to
+feel nothing but pity for him; to apprehend with resignation that there
+might be a period ahead during which he might feel hatred for her,
+loathing her for being alive when his mother, who deserved so well, was
+dead. She stepped backward from the desk so that he need not be vexed by
+any sense of her. Yet she had a feeling as she moved that she was
+taking a step infinitely rash, infinitely dangerous....
+
+She became aware that behind her Roger was shaking words out of his
+weeping body. "You ought to be on your knees, you two! You've killed my
+mummie with your wickedness!"
+
+"What's that?" she murmured, turning on him. "What's that?" She was not
+quite attentive. A picture was forming in her consciousness which, when
+it was clear, would tell her why it was perilous to leave Richard to his
+grief....
+
+"Aw, shut up!" hissed Poppy, and tugged at his arm.
+
+But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She
+saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out
+what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught
+you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said
+pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till
+Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it
+wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."
+
+Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual
+shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when
+she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far
+worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been
+appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because
+there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain
+the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a
+thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was
+glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were
+reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being
+evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself
+the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose
+dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd
+accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it
+was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is
+felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious
+man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in
+her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has
+come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and
+a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over
+the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with
+resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there
+should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and
+perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round
+which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but
+of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned
+against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery
+of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses
+which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she
+had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would
+have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always
+suspected to be danger....
+
+"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I
+thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that
+she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her
+for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you
+weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you,
+and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers
+thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first
+service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."
+
+It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell
+her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to
+his passion.
+
+"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I
+suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay
+here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave
+you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"
+
+Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother,
+shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of
+the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which
+housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel
+dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly
+as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly,
+but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who
+allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than
+themselves to dwell in their men's attention.
+
+"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark
+what your brother's saying of us!"
+
+He stirred. He sat up.
+
+"He says we're bad."
+
+He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face,
+though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.
+
+"It's no use you looking at me like that," said Roger tearfully but
+resolutely. "I'm as good as you. In fact, I'm better now that I've got
+Jesus. And I tell you straight, you've killed my mummie with your
+beastly lust. Mind you," he cried, in a tone of whistling exaltation
+inappropriate to his words, "I'm not pretending I'm without sin myself.
+I did evil once with a woman at Blackburn, but I saw the filthiness of
+my ways. Old man, I do understand your temptations!"
+
+What was Richard's hand searching for on the breakfast table? She bent
+forward to see, so that she might give it to him.
+
+Richard had found what he wanted. His fingers tightened on the handle of
+the breadknife.
+
+"Let's put an end to this," he said.
+
+He drove the knife into Roger's heart.
+
+"Mummie!" breathed Roger. Meekly, but with no sign that he had any other
+quarrel with the proceedings save that they were peremptory, he sank
+down on the chair beside him and fell forward, his head lying untidily
+among the tea-cups. This, no doubt, was the disorder which Marion had
+always foreseen; to prevent which she had practised her insane tidiness.
+
+He held the attention much less than one had thought a dead man could.
+
+"God," said Poppy, "this is a copper's business. I'm off before they
+come. They think I know something about a thing that happened down in
+Strood last Easter, though God help me I don't. They kind of mixed me
+up with someone else. Let me go."
+
+"Right," said Richard, and put his hand into his pocket and brought out
+a fistful of coins. "Take this. Good luck."
+
+She snatched it, and with no further look at any of the company, ran out
+by the French window.
+
+They stood looking down on Roger. Death revealed no significance in him.
+The smallness of his head, the indefinite colour of his hair, palliated
+what had occurred and made them feel incredulous of their knowledge that
+presently much importance would be attached to it.
+
+Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Well, it's all cleared up now,"
+he murmured. "It is as if she had never seen Peacey...."
+
+Ellen broke into sobs. "'Tis I who made you do it. I thought of my poor
+mother and how she'd suffered through not making my father think of her
+first and last--and you were sitting there thinking of nothing but
+Marion--and I knew if you heard what Roger was saying about us you'd
+think of me, so I made you listen. If I hadn't given you yon dunts on
+your shoulders you never would have heard him and never would have
+killed him. Oh, my love, what I have done to you, and me that would have
+died rather than hurt you! But I saw my mother plain--"
+
+"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his
+arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"
+
+"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."
+
+"But there's nothing left."
+
+"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."
+
+"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's
+something still."
+
+He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes
+roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked
+thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it
+and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.
+
+"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.
+
+There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and
+contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's
+infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like
+for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the
+kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not
+to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."
+
+At the door he turned.
+
+"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.
+
+She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure,
+as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no
+going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about
+her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it
+was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror
+of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but
+horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there
+broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the
+miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home
+in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in
+brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago
+dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged
+but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.
+
+He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.
+
+"Come," he said. "Come."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...
+
+Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no
+tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the
+seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the
+further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it
+confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds
+pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they
+could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to
+take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden
+staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they
+could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the
+grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and
+she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his
+shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be
+there when he returned.
+
+But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what
+life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a
+corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread
+between two human tendencies: the insane sexual caprice of men, the not
+less mad excessive steadfastness of women. Roger had died, Richard was
+about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female
+faults--Harry and Marion ... Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and
+father.... And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life's
+disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous. Her love had not been
+able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love; and
+how like a doom that love had lain on him.... Since life was like this,
+she would not do what Richard asked. She tried to rise that she might
+flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs
+of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.
+
+But she could not move. Although her mind was still arguing the matter,
+all the rest of her being had consented. She was going to do this thing.
+In panic she looked along the wall at Richard, wishing he would come
+back to her. But he was going on talking to the fishermen, though he
+held their waders in his hand. She quite understood why he was doing
+that, and watched him through tears. This was the last time he would be
+able to exercise that charm of which he was a little vain, since on all
+his few future days his intercourse with his fellows would be strictly
+specialised; so he was taking the opportunity. In watching him and the
+reflection of his magnificence in the fishermen's smiling subjugation,
+she was shot through by a pang of pride and exultation. Though the night
+should engulf Richard and Marion, the triumph was not with the night. In
+throwing in her lot with them and with the human race which is
+perpetually defeated, she was nevertheless choosing the side of
+victory....
+
+She leaned back against the slope and waited. This was a good place to
+wait. The call of the redshanks, the cloud shadows that moved over the
+marshes like the footprints of invisible presences, made her feel calm.
+
+Nevertheless her heart could not help but beat quick with fear. She
+wished that he would come and comfort her. But though he had left the
+fishermen he was not coming straight to her. He had climbed the sea-wall
+and was looking out to the east, to the open sea, over the country of
+the mud. He was thinking of Marion, and wondering where the tide had
+carried her. The inexorable womb was continuing to claim its own. She
+wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his
+obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in
+the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out
+before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the
+safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant
+demand.
+
+She sat and looked at the island, and wondered whether it was a son or
+daughter that waited for her there.
+
+
+
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