Part 27

“_O Grave where is thy sting? O death where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is in the law._”

No. There was no following that. It sounded like nonsense. One just missed the implications. It was like listening to some one who was too far off to be heard distinctly but who made eloquent gestures and noises.

The service came to an embarrassed pause. Everyone was motionless, arrested.

“_Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.... He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow...._”

Set in motion by unseen hands the coffin went gliding towards the furnace doors which opened to receive it. There was a deep roar, a sound like a mighty rushing wind, an elemental and chaotic sound....

Life is a faint dispersed film upon one little planet, but flames roar like this and great winds rush and whirl, out to the remotest star in the unfathomable depths of space. That deep disorderly tumult is the true voice of lifeless matter, not of dead matter, for what has never lived cannot be dead, but of lifeless matter, outside of and beneath and beyond life.

Everyone in the chapel seemed still and bowed and hushed and dwarfed to minute dimensions until the furnace doors had closed again upon that soulless devouring clamour.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

_May at Udimore_

§ 1

Bobby _forgot_ that glimpse of the elemental powers that the furnace doors had given him altogether, for such things do not remain naturally in the mind. They inconvenience life. But the voice of the clergyman hustling the arguments of St. Paul along, and the scene in the Crematorium Chapel with the little coffin waiting to be launched into eternity and the few still black mourners dotted among the yellow benches came back to him very vividly when Paul Lambone began to quote and twist those familiar sentences about the contrast between the corruptible and the incorruptible and expand a fantastic philosophy of his own. Bobby had always intended to read that funeral service over again slowly and judicially, but he had never done so and he regretted it now very much. It left him--and Paul of Tarsus--at the mercy of Paul Lambone, and he knew that Paul Lambone loved ingenious slight misquotations.

It was a very warm, serenely still May evening, and Lambone’s party sat after dinner in the twilight, some just inside the house and some on deck-chairs upon the terrace. They looked out over the marsh and over the still sea. The sky was like the inside of a deep blue globe on which an ever increasing multitude of starry midges was alighting, and Rye and Winchelsea crouched low beneath it, black low lumps with a street light and a window or so showing minutely. Receding out to sea was a liner quite brightly lit. With a swift steadiness the beam of the nearer lighthouse swept the distant flats, came near, lit the faces of the talkers, lit the room, called a church tower and a group of trees into existence and dropped them back into the darkness and forgot about them and passed on. And then presently it was coming again, a thin white streak of light hurrying far away across the levels.

When one’s attention wandered from the talk one became aware of an abundance of nightingales. They were nightingales newly come from the south. One or it might be two were in the trees close at hand; others remoter wove a gauze curtain of faint sweet sounds over the visible universe.

Bobby sat on the step between the room and the terrace with his back against a pillar and with his empty coffee-cup beside him. He had put himself there by the feet of Christina Alberta, who was deep in a big arm-chair and very still. Her face was dim except when her cigarette glowed and showed a red-lit unfamiliar face. And yet that afternoon she had been the most familiar thing in the world to him; she had kissed him and pulled his ears and he had kissed her bare shoulders and clasped her in his arms. Devizes too was silent and preoccupied. He sat over against Christina Alberta on the other side of the opening of the room; and he was so much in the twilight that except when the lighthouse beam lit his face, only his shining shoes and socks were clearly visible to Bobby. There had been times when Bobby had thought that Devizes was in love with Christina Alberta, and he had a vague inexplicable feeling that to some extent she was or had been in love with Devizes. He had a sense of unfathomed deeps in their relationship, but he did not know where these deeps lay. If Christina Alberta loved Devizes she would have said so. Bobby knew of no reason why she should not. But to-day she had hugged and kissed Bobby so that it was impossible to believe she loved anyone else.

Yet in the last three or four months she had gone about with Devizes a lot; Bobby had seen her mind responding and changing with her talks with this man. She used to quote him, and she would say things exactly like the things he said. It had been a great inconvenience and trial to Bobby, this preoccupation. And then suddenly he found Devizes wasn’t the lover at all, never could have been a lover. That day she had proved that up to the hilt. And now in a state between pride and servitude Bobby sat at her feet. He sat at her feet and close to her; Devizes in the darkness was remote, a full three yards away.

Except for Lambone’s unquenchable flow it had not been a very talkative party. To-night it was less talkative than ever. “This is too perfect,” Margaret Means had sighed. “I can’t talk. I just thank God I am alive,” and she had nestled into her big deck-chair upon the terrace. This was the girl--it had suddenly become apparent to Bobby a fortnight ago in London--whom Devizes intended to marry. Abruptly she had come upon the scene to destroy the triangle that had obsessed Bobby’s imagination. A sweetly pretty fragile thing she was; in the twilight she seemed as faint and fragrant as nightstock, and she was a wonderful pianist. Last night she had played for two hours. Paul’s sister, Miss Lambone, had been evoked from somewhere in the west of England to come and be hostess to the engaged couple. Bobby had tried to talk to Christina Alberta about Margaret, but Christina Alberta hadn’t wanted to talk about her. “You see,” said Christina Alberta compactly, “she has opened the whole world of music to him. That’s what brought them together. She’s clever; she’s very clear and clever.

“I’d never heard of her--until you mentioned their engagement.

“They’ve gone to concerts together and that sort of thing. He’s known her much longer than he has known me.”

“When did you first meet Devizes?”

“About the time my Daddy came to Midgard Street. As recently as that. It’s hardly six months. Paul Lambone took me to him to get advice about Daddy. But _they_ have been going about--for more than a year. I thought it was just music that interested them. They’d seemed to be friends. And I thought he didn’t mean to marry again. He just suddenly decided.”

Christina Alberta reflected. “That’s the way with life, Bobby. Things accumulate, and then you suddenly decide.”

“Had she been undecided? Had she made him wait?”

“Not her,” said Christina Alberta with a remarkable hardness in her voice.

“No,” she said. “_He_ decided.”

She seemed to feel there was still something to express. “He just took hold of the situation.”

§ 2

This was Bobby’s second visit to Udimore. Paul Lambone had suddenly seen fit to gather this party; apparently on the spur of Devizes’ engagement. In the interval Bobby had seen Christina Alberta a number of times and developed an immense sense of relationship to her. It filled his life. He had always been dreaming things about her from the time when he anticipated her with blue eyes and a fragile person, and always she was and did things that tore his dreams to shreds. This made her profoundly interesting. More and more he had become dependent upon her for interest. He wanted to marry her if only to make sure he wouldn’t lose the interest of her. She had refused--twice. Without any of the graces proper to the occasion. “No fear, Bobby,” she said. “It wouldn’t do. I’m not the woman you take me for.”

“You never are,” he said. “I don’t mind that.”

“You’re the dearest companion,” she said. “I like the way your hair grows.”

“Then why not make it yours, and be companions for ever?”

“Nothing more frightful,” she said, and so dismissed the proposal.

They went about together; they spent much of their spare time together except for those distressing occasions when she would suddenly throw him over to go to a theatre or walk with Devizes. Or to go to Devizes to talk. She never hesitated to throw him over for Devizes. Yet Bobby got a lot of her. She didn’t know much about theatres or music-halls or restaurants or dancing-places or that sort of thing, and Bobby was discreetly competent in that province. The Malmesburys felt themselves deserted, and Susan was vindictive in her resentment at his frequent absence from her bed-time rituals. Tessy, Bobby declared, remained his dearest friend; but when he tried to tell her all about himself in the old, old fashion--which he did when Christina Alberta was away with Devizes--he naturally had to tell her all about Christina Alberta. But Tessy declined in the most emphatic way to be told about Christina Alberta. It was extremely surprising and disappointing to Bobby to find out how incapable Tessy was of appreciating the endless interestingness and charm of Christina Alberta. It was a blind spot in her mind. She seemed to assume that Christina Alberta was no better than she should be, whereas she was much better. It estranged Bobby and Tessy very much, and it was a great sorrow to Bobby.

Because Christina Alberta _was_ good--and interesting--beyond dispute. She was growing with tremendous rapidity mentally and in her knowledge of the world. Every time he met her she seemed more of a person, with richer, fuller, more commanding ideas. She seemed to be living every moment of her time. She was working now at the Royal College of Science under Macbride. She was taking hold of her new studies there with tremendous enthusiasm. She was in love with comparative anatomy. Bobby had always thought that comparative anatomy was dry, pedantic stuff about bones, but she declared it lit up the whole story of life for her. It changed her ideas about the world and about herself profoundly. “It is the most romantic stuff I have ever read or thought about,” she said. “It makes human history seem silly.”

She took him three times to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington to show him something of the fine realizations that stirred her mind. She made it clear to him how the bones of a wing or the scratches of a flint could restore the storms and sunlight and passions of ten million years ago.

And then suddenly a week ago Christina Alberta had consented to marry Bobby. She had taken back her two refusals. But the way she did it made it like everything else she did, astonishing and disconcerting. She had a confession to make, and for a time until he could think it over thoroughly that confession seemed to Bobby to explain her refusals completely and to clear up everything about her.

She got him to take her to Hampton Court. But they did not go into the gardens because they saw through the park gates that the chestnuts of Bushey Avenue were in full blossom; they went instead by the pond and up under the riotously flowering branches. A belated spring was coming now in a hurry, warm and brilliant. The trees were glorious. It was as if a bright green sea was splashing up warm creamy foam under a shower of cannon shots. The blue sky hummed with light.

“The spring has come fast now that it has begun to come,” she said.

He felt she had something to say and waited.

“I never know, Bobby--this year less than ever--whether spring is the happiest time in the year or the most miserably restless. Everybody and everything is falling in love.”

“I didn’t wait for spring,” said Bobby.

“But what of the frogs that can’t find water?” said Christina Alberta.

“There’s water where there are frogs,” said Bobby.

“Everybody is marrying and giving in marriage,” she said. “I thought--I thought--Dr. Devizes at least was an inconsolable widower. But the spring tides have caught even him. They catch everybody.”

“They’ve caught you?”

“I don’t know. I’m miserable, Bobby, and restless and all astir.”

“Then let yourself go.”

“One aches--alone.”

“But are you alone?”

“Fairly.”

“There’s me.”

“Bobby dear, what do you want in me?”

“_You._ To be with you. To be always about with you. And to be loved by you.”

“It’s kind of you.”

“Oh, nonsense! _Kindness!_”

“Listen, Bobby,” she said, and made a long pause.

Her voice when she spoke had adopted the ease of casual conversation. “Do you believe in chastity, Bobby? Could you love a girl who wasn’t--chaste?”

Bobby winced as if she had struck his face with a whip. He went white. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Plainly,” she said.

For a time neither of them said a word.

“You have had _your_ experiences,” she thrust. “In France. They all did.”

Bobby made no answer to that.

“Now you know,” she flung at him.

For a little while the light had gone out of Bobby’s world.

“Did you love the man?” he asked.

“If I did I don’t remember it. It was just--curiosity. And the stir of growing up. And the intolerable sense of being forbidden. No--I think I was almost--cold-blooded. I liked the look of him. And then I disliked him.... But there it is, Bobby. That’s how things are.”

Bobby weighed his words. “I’d care if it were any girl but you. You--you’re different. I love you. What has or hasn’t happened to you doesn’t matter. At least--it doesn’t matter so much.”

“You’re sure it doesn’t matter so much?”

“Quite.”

“Sure for good?”

“Yes.”

“From this moment you forget, you begin to forget what I have told you? As I want to forget it?”

“It will go soon enough if you want to forget it. It doesn’t matter at all. I see now, it doesn’t matter at all.”

“But why on earth do you want to marry me, Bobby? What is there in me? I’m ugly, rude, greedy, inconsiderate. I’ve no purity, no devotion.”

“You’re incessantly interesting. You’re straight, swift, and endlessly beautiful.”

“Bobby, truly! Does it look like that to you?”

“Yes. Doesn’t my manner--? Don’t you _know_?”

“Yes,” she said gravely; “I suppose I know.”

She came to a stop in front of him with her arms akimbo. They stood looking at one another, and Bobby winced as if he was going to cry. Her face was grave and troubled, and then at the sight of his expression her smile broke through. Her gravity vanished. She was a different Christina Alberta. She was suddenly the gayest conceivable thing to him, confident and impudent.

“If you were to kiss me, Bobby, right here and now in Bushey Park, would they lock us up?...”

Most wonderful it was to Bobby to take her in his arms. A new Christina Alberta was revealed to Bobby; Christina Alberta seen from a distance of six inches or so, an amazingly beautiful Christina Alberta. One might have thought she had never lived for anything but being loved by Bobby.

“You’re learning,” said Christina Alberta after a little while. “Now do it all over again, Bobby. Nobody seems to be looking....”

§ 3

Neither Lambone nor Devizes had seemed in the least surprised at their engagement. Indeed their attitude of gratified expectation was almost embarrassing. The young couple had come down to Udimore with Devizes and Miss Means under the ample protection of Miss Lambone almost as though they had been appointed for each other from the beginning of things.

But at Udimore there were further surprises and perplexities for Bobby. All day Saturday Christina Alberta seemed to be not so much in love as in a thoroughly bad temper. She seemed far more concerned by the fact that Devizes was going to marry Miss Means than by the generous devotion that Bobby was prepared to lavish upon her. She was inattentive to his various little manœuvres to get isolated with her. The two couples played tennis after tea until it was time to dress for dinner; she was badly out of practice and fundamentally unorthodox, and Margaret played with a smoothness and sweetness that roused her to a pitch of viciousness only too evident to Bobby’s fine perceptions. It seemed to Bobby that Devizes also noted her annoyance, but Miss Means was blissfully unobservant of anything in the world but Devizes.

On Sunday morning Christina Alberta carried off Bobby through the distant cheerfulness of church bells for a walk to Brede Castle. And she announced to Bobby that she did not intend to marry him.

Bobby protested. “You don’t love me?”

“Haven’t I kissed you? Didn’t I hug you? Haven’t I ruffled your hair?”

“Then why don’t you want to marry me?”

“I do not want to marry anyone. I don’t love anybody. Except of course you. But even you, I can’t marry. I want to be loved, Bobby, yes. But not to be married.”

“But why? Not the--the old reason?”

“No. I took your word about that. But all the same I don’t want to marry you, Bobby.... I think it’s because I don’t want to be bound up with anyone’s life. I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be my free and independent self. I’ve got to grow. That’s it, Bobby. I want to be free to grow.”

Bobby made protesting noises.

“I don’t want some one seeing me grow all the time. You’d always be looking at me, Bobby; I know you would.”

It was useless of Bobby to say he wouldn’t. He would.

“I didn’t know that things were going to take me like this until I fixed to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I consented--honestly I did. I wanted dreadfully then to get close to some one, as close as possible, and to be kissed and told ‘There! There!’ and to keep there. It was a comfort for me, Bobby. You are a comfort for me. I’d ache to madness without you. But how close we come when we love, Bobby, and how far away we are all the time! How can we know each other when we hardly know ourselves? When we don’t _dare_ know ourselves?

“You are such a dear, Bobby. You are so warm and kind that it seems ungrateful not to give myself to you with both hands. But I just can’t. I’m not a normal woman perhaps. Or something has happened to me unawares. Perhaps life has cheated me out of something.... Oh, I don’t know, Bobby. I want some one dreadfully; I want you dreadfully and I don’t want you at all. I’d rather be dead than a female thing like Margaret Means. If _that’s_ marrying----!”

“But I thought,” said Bobby, “after all that’s happened----”

“No.”

“I’ll wait ten years for you,” said Bobby, “on the chance of your altering your mind.”

“You are the dearest comforter,” said Christina Alberta, and stopped short....

And suddenly she had put her hands upon his shoulders and clung to him and broken into a wild passion of weeping.

“Wetting you instead of wedding you,” she sobbed and laughed. “Oh, my poor Bobby! you dear lover!”

She clung to him for a time. Then she detached herself and stood wiping her eyes, the Christina Alberta he generally knew, except for the traces of her tears. “If women can’t control their emotions better,” she said, “they’ll have to go back to Harems. We can’t have it both ways. But I _won’t_ marry you. There’s no man in the world I can marry. I’m going to be a free and independent woman, Bobby. From now on.”

“But I don’t understand!” said Bobby.

“It’s not because I don’t want you to love me.”

He was baffled. “_Bobby!_” she whispered, and seemed to glow.

Bobby took her back into his arms and held her, and pressed his cheek and ears against hers, and kissed her and kissed her again, and it seemed to him to mark his own unworthiness that he should think at such a time that there were no such wonderful kisses in the world as kisses flavoured with salt tears.

And yet she wasn’t going to marry him! She had snatched herself back from him and nevertheless she was in his arms.

He was enormously perplexed at what was happening, but it was quite clear that the end of his engagement was not to be the end of his love-making. Anyhow here was love. It was so manifestly the time for love. High May ruled the world. About them there were hawthorn trees white with blossom and great bushes of elder just breaking into flower.

§ 4

Bobby sat in the gloaming with his friends and thought of the things that had happened to him that day, thought of Christina Alberta’s salt tears and the incessant intriguing strangeness of her ways. He was still immensely puzzled, but now in a large, restful, contented fashion. Christina Alberta and he were not to marry it seemed; nevertheless he had kissed her and embraced her, and he was free to sit at her feet. For a time he was not even to humiliate himself by telling these others he was not to marry her. He said nothing. His thoughts and feelings were beyond words. Christina Alberta too was darkly silent. Everyone indeed seemed preoccupied. Talk about the view and the stars and the coming of the nightingales, and about migratory birds and lighthouses rambled on for a time and died away.

They were all too full for talking. The silence lengthened. He wondered what would happen if nobody spoke any more. He thought of Christina Alberta close behind him and he began to quiver in all his being. The silence was becoming oppressive. He felt as though he could no longer change his attitude. Nobody stirred. But Lambone saved the situation.

“It is exactly six months ago to-night that Sargon died upstairs,” said Lambone. He paused and seemed to answer an unspoken question. “We don’t know when he died exactly. He just faded out in the night.”

“I wish I could have known him,” said Margaret Means after quite a long interval.

Bobby’s thoughts came round to Sargon. That still young woman sitting in the darkness behind him ceased to dominate his thoughts. He was moved to speak, and had to cough to clear his throat.

“I hate to think of his being burnt and scattered,” he said.

“It’s not so disagreeable,” said Miss Lambone, “as to think of the body all shut up in the coffin and decaying.”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Bobby. “It’s death--any death, that I hate to think of. Now when it is spring time, when the whole world is so full of life, I remember all he was, the hopes he had, and they are scattered and dispersed. Anyhow they are scattered and dispersed, they are not boxed up and locked up and buried.... When I was here last he was like a little boy who has just heard of the world. He was going to fly, going to India and China, going to learn all about everything and then do all sorts of splendid things. And there were the beastly bacteria at work in his lungs and beating his strength down and none of it was ever to happen.... When first I heard he was dead I could not believe it.”

“_Is_ he dead?” said Paul Lambone.

There was no reply to be made to that.

Paul adjusted his shoulder-blades a little more comfortably against the back of the small deep sofa on which he sat. “The more I think over Sargon the less dead he seems to me, and the more important he becomes. I don’t agree with you, Roothing. I don’t find anything futile in his life. I think he was--symbolically--perfect. I have thought about him endlessly.”

“And talked,” said Devizes, “endlessly.”