part I had hoped to play, and nursing my scheme like an old maid cheated

of the woman’s part she, on her side, should have played on earth.

I shall not dwell longer than I need upon the days of the war, considering them rather as an incident, a protracted incident, than as a central point in my story, for we have no need or desire to revive artificially the realities we have lived through. I quote, however, Malory on this subject:—

“... Our sons will scarcely be _our_ children, for the war will have fathered them and mothered them both. The children of the war! growing up with the shadow of that great parent in the background of their lives, a progenitor dark as the night, yet radiant as the sun; torn with misery, yet splendid and entire with glory; poor and bereft by ruin, yet rich with gold-mines as the earth; a race of men sprung from loins broad and magnificent. They will stand like the survivors of the Flood when the waters had retreated from the clean-washed world. What will they make of their opportunity? They will not, I trust, hold up a mirror to reflect the familiar daily tragedy, but out of the depths of their own enfranchised hearts will call up a store of little, lovely, sincere, human, and simple things wherewith to make life sweet. They must be as children in a meadow. Let us have done with pretence and gloom. There is no room now in the world for the introspective melancholy of the idler. We hope for a world of active sanity.”

He reverted several times to the men who had been torn from their homes, the men who, but for war, would never have gone beyond the limit of their parish. He compared himself angrily with them, and I perceived that his theory, in embryo at Sampiero, had struck deep roots under the rain of present day realities.

“... I want to shout it aloud: objectivity! objectivity! action, the parent of thought. We had worn thought to a shadow, with hunting him over hill, plain, and valley. We were miners who had exhausted the drift of gold. Thank God, we are daily burying fresh gold for our successors. We were sick with the sugar of introspection; introspection, subtlest of vanities; introspection, the damnable disease. We were old and outworn in spirit. The soil bore weakly crops, and cried out for nourishment. We are giving it blood to drink, and it grows fertile in the drinking.

“I am aware of the coarsening of my fibres; I grow more conscious of my body, less conscious of my mind. I am very humble. I know that the meanest hind who turned the ridges under the ploughshare had a truer value than I, the critic, the analyst—I use the words disparagingly—the commentator. He silently constructed while I noisily destroyed.”

Malory continued at great length in this strain, and I read between the lines of his letter that he had devoted much of the intolerable leisure of his soldier’s life to the evolution of a new creed, not really new to him, for its precepts were and must always have been in his blood, but now for perhaps the first time formulated and taken close to his heart. He wrote to me more and more openly, and I knew that I was getting the expression of his inmost thoughts. I have all his letters—for they came now in numbers though with great irregularity—and have sometimes thought that I have not the right, nor he the right to compel me, to keep them to myself. As he said:—

“... All men have creeds, and I behold myself a faddist in a universe of faddists. I cannot be wholly right, nor they wholly wrong. But I argue in my own defence, that a creed such as mine, resting on many pillars, the most mighty of which is the pillar of tolerance, is at least inoffensive in a world it does not even seek to convert. I offer my little gift—and if it is rejected I withdraw my hand, and tender it elsewhere.

“I am not concerned with practical matters, nor with controversial subjects; I am not a political or a social reformer, nor a nut-eater, nor a prophet of the Pit. I am not, I fear, a very practical preacher even in my own region, for my words, were I ever to spread them abroad, could germinate only in the ready tilled field of a contented soul, and will put no bread into the mouth of the hungry. So I desist, for mere reflection is of no value in our times, and he alone has justified his existence who has relieved the poor, benefited the sickly, or fed the starving.”

I do not wholly agree with him.

At least in one particular I will take his advice, and will not dwell further upon those years. We know now that, interminable as they seemed at the time, they passed, and in a golden autumn peace came to the earth like sleep returning after night upon night of insomnia. Malory wrote to me on that occasion also, a letter more full of sarcasm, bitterness, and sorrow than any I had yet received.

“... So here we are at last at the end of this long, long road, more like straight railway-lines than like a road, which is a poetical thing. I look back, and I see iron everywhere: iron hurtling through the air and smashing against the soft flesh of men and the softer hearts of women; iron thundering in the sea; masonry toppling; careful labour destroyed; skies full of black smoke; giant machines. Impressionism is the only medium to express the war. In this chaos little men have laboured, trying to put their brains round the war like putting a string round the globe; and pitting their little bodies against the moving tons of iron, like a new-born baby trying to push against a Titan. What has emerged? a new, a great tradition, greater than the Trojan or the Elizabethan; a new legend for the ornament of art. For it all comes down to art in the end; the legend is greater than the fact; the mind survives the perishing matter. We are the heirs of the past. The man of action is the progenitor of the dreamer. What am I saying? The progenitor? he is the manure, merely the manure dug into the soil on which the dreamer will presently grow. Poor, inarticulate, uncomprehending men have died in their anonymous millions to furnish a song for the future singer, a vicious, invertebrate effete, no doubt; a moral hermaphrodite of a worthless generation.

“How many before me have asked, What is Truth? is it indeed a flower which blooms only on a dung-heap?

“... I have seen so many men here die in their prime, who were precious to mankind or all in all to their individual loves, yet they have been taken, and I, the valueless, the solitary, am left. Is there a purpose behind these things? or am I to believe that fate is, after all, the haphazard of chance?”

We held no peace rejoicings at Pennistans’, for Nancy’s sake; peace was to her an additional sorrow. During the war she had had the feverish interest of having given her greatest sacrifice to the ideal of the moment, but as the horror faded away so the memory of those who had died faded also. Nancy and her kindred ceased to shine as the heroic, and became merely the unfortunate, a sad and scattered population to whom the war would last, not a few years, but all their lives. Shattered women and shattered men; but to us the war appeared already as a nightmare interlude from which we had wakened.

I was now confronted with my own particular purpose, the one I had bargained with myself to carry out; I turned it over and over in my mind, and though by the light of reason I could perceive no solution to the obvious difficulty presented, yet my curious instinct persisted, that all would be well. I was certain that my purpose was a good one. I contemplated a Malory changed, softened, hardened, sobered, steadied, by the red-hot furnace of war; he had called himself an inconstant man; I felt that he would be now no longer inconstant. I contemplated a Ruth intolerant, after her four years lived in liberty, of her former bondage. I saw them fuse, in my own mind, in mutual completion.

In the meantime, Westmacott stood ominously in the centre of the road.

I heard first of his return from Amos, as I stood with Mrs. Pennistan watching the folding of the sheep. Amos had brought the sheep with him in a cart from Tonbridge market; he was taciturn while he turned them out from under the net into the hurdled fold, but when the hired man had driven away the lumbering cart, he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder,—

“Wife, who d’you think I met on the road yonder?”

She stared at him, and he added, in his laconic way,—

“Rawdon.”

“He’s back?” she said, dismayed.

Amos expanded.

“Ay. They’ve a system for bringing them home, it seems, according to their employ: farmers and food producers come first.”

“Then Malory,” I said involuntarily, “will come among the last lot as a man of no occupation.”

“That’ll be it. We’ll be looking soon for those boys of ourn,” he said to his wife.

She smiled gladly at him, but remained pensive. Then she asked,—

“Was he alone, Amos?”

“Ay. He’d his pack on his back, too, so I doubt he’d come from the station. He’d his back to Penshurst and his face towards home. He touched his cap at me, friendly, and I twirled my whip to him, friendly, too.”

“I’m glad of that,” his wife murmured.

Amos shrugged.

“A man’s glad to welcome his son-in-law back from the wars,” he said ironically as he turned to go.

Mrs. Pennistan and I strolled out towards the road.

“He’s dead against Rawdon; always was,” she said in a distressed tone. “I was for making up, and making the best of it, but Pennistan isn’t that sort. He’d sooner have life unbearable than go a tittle against his prejudices. After all, Rawdon’s married to Ruth, and the father of our grandchildren, and there’s no going against that. He’s an unaccountable hard man, my man, when he chooses. I couldn’t never do nothing with him, and Nancy she’s the same.”

“And Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.

The distress in her tone deepened.

“I used to think Ruth a good quiet girl, but since the trick she played me over her marriage I haven’t known what to think. I’ve lain awake o’ nights worrying over it. You’ve heard the whole tale from Mr. Malory. Gentle she was until then, and a good daughter to me, I must say, and then ... gone in a night withouten a sign, and never a word to me in explanation since. What’s a mother to make of that?”

I could have laughed at the poor woman’s perplexity. I thought of the hen whose brood of ducklings takes suddenly to the water.

“But has she never alluded to her ... her elopement?”

“Never a word, I tell you. I asked her once, and she put on a look as black as night, and I never asked her again. I’ve sometimes wished Mr. Malory could speak to her, I’ve a fancy she might answer him freer; and yet I don’t know.”

“I’ve never fully understood,” I said, wishing to make the most of my opportunity, “whether she cares at all for her husband or not?”

“Small wonder that you haven’t understood,” said Mrs. Pennistan tartly, “when her own mother is kept out in the dark. It’s my belief she hates him, and it’s my knowledge that he ill-treats her, but at the same time it’s my instinct she loves him in a way. It sounds a hard thing to say of one’s child, but I’ve always held Ruth was a coarse, rough creature at times under her smoothness.”

She instantly repented of her words.

“There, what am I saying of my own kith and kin? I get mad when I get thinking of my girl, so you mustn’t lay too much store by my talk. Pennistan’d give it me if he heard me.”

I persisted.

“Then you think that, when she ran away with him, she hated him and loved him both together?”

Mrs. Pennistan paused for a long time.

“Well,” she said at last, “if you ask me what I think, it’s this. There was a deal more in that running away than any of us knew at the time. What it exactly was I don’t know even now. I doubt Ruth doesn’t know either, or if she does know, she doesn’t own to it, not to herself even. I doubt Rawdon knows most about it.”

I saw another man becoming inevitable.

“And Mr. Malory?”

She shot at me a quick suspicious look.

“You’re Mr. Malory’s friend, what do you know?”

“I know nothing,” I said. “He didn’t know himself.”

“No,” said Mrs. Pennistan suddenly, “that’s the truth. He didn’t know himself. He wasn’t a man to fancy those things. To me it was as plain as daylight, but Pennistan he always scoffed at me, and I daren’t speak it to Ruth, and I’ve thought since that maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe she went with Rawdon because she loved Rawdon: maybe she didn’t go, as I’ve sometimes thought, because she was afraid.... It’s hard, isn’t it, to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with them? Day in, day out, and you know little more of them than the clothes they wear and what they like to get to eat.”

I was sorry for her. She went on,—

“Your children, they seem so close to you when they’re little; they come to you when they’re hungry, and they come to you when they tumble, and you cosset them; and then when they’re big you find you’re the last person they want to come to. It’s cruel hard sometimes on a woman. But they don’t mean it,” she added, brightening, “and my children have been good children to me, even Ruth.”

* * * * *

I met Westmacott, the formidable man, the day after his return, a Sunday, walking on the village green with his wife and the two eldest children. As I looked at him I felt a little pang of horror on realising how ardently I had desired this man to die in the trenches, and now, as he materialised for me out of a mere name into a creature of flesh and blood, I grew dismayed, and was overcome by the reality of the obstacle. Perhaps I had always unconsciously thought of him as a myth. And now here he was, and Ruth shyly introduced me.

I fancied I caught a sullen look on her face, a look of suffering, long lulled to sleep, and suddenly returned. Perhaps for the last four years he had been a myth to her also.

By his home-coming he soon waked the echoes of scandal; his way of life, they said, had not been mended by the war, and after the long restraint of discipline he broke loose into his old debauches. I noted the growing of that sullen look on Ruth’s features; she made no comment, but I divined the piling-up of the thunderstorm. So, I thought, she must have looked during the month of her engagement to Leslie Dymock, when Malory in his error had considered her as a nun in her novitiate. The kettle, she had said, is long on the hob before it boils over.

She spent less time at Pennistans’ than formerly, pride and obstinacy withholding all confession from her lips or from her actions. Amos was gloomy, and Mrs. Pennistan oppressed. As for me, I lived dreamily, content to let the river of events carry my boat onwards. I made no prophecies to myself, I experienced no impatience; Malory was not yet home, and I believed that by the time he got home my problem would have resolved itself automatically.

IV

How? I never formulated, but I suppose now, looking back, that the prosaic solution of divorce lay behind my evasions. I did not take into account the dreary conventionality of the English side to Ruth’s nature. People like the Pennistans do not divorce; they endure. Nor do they run away; yet Ruth had run away. Which would prove the stronger, her life-long training, or the flash of her latent blood?

There came a day—for I have dallied a long time over Malory’s letters and my own reflections—when Ruth came into Pennistans’ kitchen, hatless, with her three children clinging round her skirts. Her father and mother stared at her; she gave no explanation, and Amos, who was a great gentleman in his way, asked for none, and moreover checked the doleful inquiries of his wife, to whom the prompt and vulgar tear was always ready. I saw then a certain likeness between the father and the daughter; that apostolic beard of his gave him a southern dignity, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt with a blood-red slash, as red as her lips over her little teeth white as nuts. She could remain at the farm as long as she chose, he said. She had, he did not add, but his eyes added it, a refuge from all mankind in her father.

No reproaches, no recriminations, and when Mrs. Pennistan, after Ruth had gone out with all apparent calm to put her children to bed, began anew to wonder tearfully what had happened, and to suggest lugubriously that as Ruth had made her bed, so she must lie in it, he checked her again and frightened her into silence by his sternness. She went out weeping, and Amos and I were left together.

I offered to go, but he assured me that my presence in the house would be a help, adding that he supposed I had heard something of his daughter’s story, and that her marriage was not a happy one. It probably cost him a great effort to say this. I tried to make it as easy as I could for him. He then asked me to remain with Ruth should her husband follow her, and should he, Amos, or one of her brothers, not be in the house.

I could see that he thought it likely Westmacott would come over sooner or later.

I was greatly elated at the turn things had taken, and felt that my belief in the lucky star of my scheme had been justified. I had no doubt now that Ruth would rid herself of Westmacott, and do for herself what the war had not done for her. I hung about the farm all day, partly to oblige Amos, who had his usual work to attend to, but principally to satisfy the tense spirit of expectation which had risen in me since the morning. As the player sees an imaginary line running between his ball and the objective, so I imagined a string running between the moment at Sampiero when Malory had said, “Do you know the Weald of Kent?” and this moment when I, a tardy, but, I flattered myself, an essential actor, waited about Pennistans’ threshold for the advent of Rawdon Westmacott. All the beads but one were now threaded on that string; I must watch the last and final threading, before I could put on the clasp.

Towards evening I espied Westmacott entering a distant field, and something in me gave a fierce leap of exultation. I then realised the practical difficulties of the position. Here was I, left on guard, but physically quite unable to grapple with the wiry man should he lay hands on me, or on his wife. I thought for an instant of summoning Amos, but as instantly rejected the idea: the final act must lie between Westmacott, Ruth, and myself. Had I been alone, I would have chanced his violence; as it was, I must consider the woman. I ran quickly into the house, up to my room, and brought down my service revolver.

When I came into the kitchen carrying this weapon, Ruth, who was sitting there sewing, as placidly, I swear, as she had sat sewing in her own kitchen the first time I had seen her, looked at my loaded hand and up into my face with a grave, inquiring surprise. I reassured her. Her husband, I told her, was coming across the fields and would doubtless insist on seeing her, and considering the nature of the man I had thought it best to have an unanswerable threat ready to hand. With that muzzle we would keep him at bay.

Ruth rose very quietly and took the weapon from me. I had no idea of resistance. Malory himself could not have felt more definitely than I that the words we were to speak, the actions we were to perform, were already written out on a slowly unwinding scroll.

She asked me to leave her alone with her husband; to my feeble protest, made by my tongue, but barely seconded by the vital part of my being, the part so intensely conscious, yet at the same time so pervaded by a sense of trance and unreality,—to that feeble protest she replied, bitterly enough that she had faced him many times before and with my weapon on the table beside her would face him with additional confidence and security. She had already taken it from me, and now laid it on the table, speaking as one does to a child from whom one has just taken a dangerous toy. She smiled as she spoke, so serenely that I felt sure she had accepted the revolver merely for the sake of my peace of mind. She charged me to keep the children away, should I see them drawing near to the house, and with that injunction she took me kindly by the shoulders and turned me out into the garden.

Westmacott entered it at the same moment by the swing-gate. His looks were black as he passed me and strode into the house he had not darkened since his marriage. I stood out in the garden alone in the dusk. I looked in through the latticed window of the kitchen, seeing every detail as the detail of a Dutch picture, lit by the fire; the window was very largely blocked by the red geraniums, but I could see the deal table, the swinging lamp, the brass ornaments gleaming by the fireplace, the pictures on the walls, the thin ribbon of steam coming from the spout of the singing kettle; I could even see the brown grain in the wood of which the table-top was made. I saw Ruth standing, and Westmacott looking at her; then he caught sight of me, and with an angry gesture dragged the curtain across the window.

I was now shut out from all participation in this act of the drama, but I did not care; I felt that what must be, must be, that the inevitable was right, and, above all, ordained. Come what might, no human agency could interfere. I smiled to myself as I thought of Malory’s triumph could he behold my resignation, and as I smiled I felt Malory’s presence in the garden, waiting like me, and, like me, entirely passive. I saw his face; his iron gray hair where it grew back from his temples; I saw the tiny hairs in his nostrils, and the minute pores of his skin. My head was swimming, and the vividness of my perception stabbed me.

Then a little scent floated out to me, and I wondered vaguely what it was, and what were the memories it awakened, and in some dim, extremely complicated way I knew those memories were awakened by a mental rather than a physical process, and that they were, at best, only second-hand. A narrow street, yoked bullocks, and the clamour of a Latin city.... These meaningless and irrelevant words shaped themselves out of the mist of my sensitiveness. I linked them and the picture they created to the violence of feeling within the little room behind the drawn curtain, and as I did so they fell away together from the twilit English garden, the English country; fell away to their own place, as a thing apart; or shall I say, they stood behind the English country as a ghostly stranger behind a familiar form? This was the ghost of which Malory had always been conscious. Then I knew that my troubled perplexity was but the echo of Malory’s first perplexity, and I narrowed it down with an effort of will to the scent of roasting chestnuts. The ancient woman in her bedroom was at her usual occupation.

I folded my arms and leant my back against the house wall; I heard the rise and fall of angry voices within the room; I found that I could look only at little things, such as the cracks in the stone paving of the garden path, or the latch on the gate, and that the horizon, when I raised my eyes towards it, swam. I tried to drag back my failing sense of proportions. As I did this, clinging on to and deliberately ranging my thoughts in ordered formation, there emerged the dearness and all-eclipsing importance of my scheme to me in the past; I realised that never for a moment had it been absent from my conscious or my sub-conscious thought. So, I said to myself, this is the phenomenon of poets, and are they, I wonder, as passive as I am when after months of carrying their purpose in their brain, the moment comes of its fruition? Have they, like me, no feeling of control? I remembered what Malory had said of the corelation of human effort.

I looked towards the darkened window and, hearing the drone of voices, beheld myself again as the brother of the poet whose puppets, brought by him to a certain point, continue to work along the lines he has laid down, as though independent of his agency. I would resume control, I thought, when this so terribly inevitable act had played itself out. Then I would step in, lead Malory to Ruth, and again step out, leaving them to the joy of their bewilderment.

Why should I have cherished this scheme so passionately? so passionately that my desire had risen above my reason, carrying with it that strange conviction that by the sheer force of my will events would shape themselves—as indeed they were shaping—under my inactive hand? Why? I could not explain, but as the twilight deepened rapidly in the garden I saw again Malory’s grave, lean face, heard his half-sad, half-happy comments, was pierced by the pitiable and unnecessary tragedy of his loneliness—Malory away in France, unconscious of the intensity of the situation created around him, without his knowledge and without his consent, by a woman who loved him and a man who, I suppose, loved him too.

It was at that moment, when I had worked myself up into a positive exaltation, that I heard a sudden angry shout and a shot from a revolver.

I awoke, and I confess that before rushing into the house I stood for a dizzy second while a thousand impressions wheeled like a flock of startled birds in my brain. It was over, then? Westmacott was dead, I was sure of that. Would the mice, two miles away, be waltzing? I had an insane desire to run over and look. Westmacott was dead; then I had killed him, I was his murderer as much as if I stood in Ruth’s place with the smoking revolver in my hand. It was over; the recent tradition of war, where life was cheap, had joined with Concha’s legacy for the fulfilment of my purpose. What a heritage! for that double heritage, not fate, had helped me out. Blood, war, and I were fellow conspirators.

I stood for a second only before I burst open the door, but the strength of my impression was already so powerfully upon me that when I saw Westmacott by the fire holding the revolver I did not believe my eyes. When I say I did not believe my eyes I mean that I was quite soberly, deliberately persuaded that my eyes were telling an actual falsehood to my brain. Westmacott could not be standing by the fire; he must be lying somewhere on the ground, huddled and lifeless. I removed my eyes from the false Westmacott standing by the fire, and sent them roving over the floor in search of that other Westmacott from whom life had flown.

I ran my eyes up and down the cracks between the tiles until they came to a darkness, and then, running them upwards, I reached the face of Ruth. She was there, shrinking as she must suddenly have shrunk when he snatched the revolver from her. In her face I read defeat, reaction, submission. She had struck her blow, and it had failed; and she and I were together beaten and vanquished.

I knew that my attempt would be hopeless, but a great desperation seized hold of me, and I cried out, absurdly, miserably,—

“There are other methods.”

She only shook her head, and, pointing at the revolver, said,—

“It kicked in my hand.”

I looked across the room, and running to the fire I picked up some bits of china which had fallen in the grate; I tried to fit them together, repeating sorrowfully,—

“Look, you have broken a plate, you have broken a plate to pieces.”

V

For how long we stood gazing at those ironical shards I do not know. There are moments of suspension in life when the whirling mind travels at so great a rate that everything else seems stationary; so, now, we were touched into immobility while our minds flew forward into space and time. I cannot say what the others found in that fourth dimension of thought; I, personally, returned to earth utterly inarticulate, with these two words shaping themselves and singing over and over in my brain: Futile creatures! futile creatures! It was as though some little mocking demon sat astride my nerve cords, drumming his heels, and chanting his refrain. I could have shaken myself like a dog coming out of water to shake him off. Then I became aware of Westmacott’s voice speaking at an immense distance.

He must have been speaking for some time before the sound pierced through to my ears, for I saw Ruth moving in obedience to his voice before I had grasped what he was saying. Her movement made the same impression upon me as his voice: muffled, slow, and infinitely remote; she crept, rather than she walked, and when she raised her hand she raised it with such torpid and deliberate effort that she seemed to be dragging it upwards with some heavy weight attached. As for her feet, they positively stuck to the ground. Westmacott said something more; he pointed. She turned, still with that slow laborious deliberation, and moved like a shackled ghost from the room.

Westmacott and I were left, and we were silent, he perhaps from choice, I certainly from inability to speak. I think now that he was less shattered than Ruth or me, having played a more negative rôle; he had merely stood there to be shot at, while Ruth and I had flung, she direct, I indirect passion into the shooting. We were worn, spent, exhausted, he had his forces still intact. An absurd phrase came into my mind, so childish that I hesitate to write it down: Which would you rather be, the shooter or the shootee? and presently I hit on the rhyme, so that a sing-song began in my head:—

“Which would you rather be, The shooter or the shootee?”

and still Westmacott stood there holding the revolver, and I stood there holding the pieces of the broken plate, and all the while I seemed to hear the corner-stones of my cherished schemes dropping to earth like pieces of masonry after an explosion. We stood quite motionless. Overhead somebody was moving about. Outside it was nearly dark.

Perception was beginning to return to me, bringing in its train a sense of defeat. I had often wondered how the people in a play or in a story continued to live their lives after the climax which parted spectator and actor for ever, I had often followed them in spirit, come down to breakfast with them next morning, so to speak, producing the situation into the region of inevitable anticlimax. Here I was, then, at the old game, an actor myself. I supposed that the play was at an end, and that this was the return to life. That the play should end happily or unhappily, was an accident proper to the play only; all that was certain, all that was inevitable, was that life must be gone on with after the play was over. You couldn’t stop; you were like a man tied on to the back of a traction-engine, willy-nilly you had to go on walking, walking, walking. The dreariness of it! I looked at the pieces of broken plate in my hand, the sum total of all that passion, all that great outburst of pent emotion. I threw back my head, and laughed long, loud, and bitterly.

Westmacott regarded me without surprise, scarcely with interest. He appeared cold and quite indifferent, entirely in possession of his faculties. I grew ashamed under his dispassionate gaze, my laughter ceased, and I laid the pieces of plate on the table. Then it occurred to me we were waiting for something. The movement overhead had died away, but as I listened I heard steps upon the stair, several sets of steps, light pattering steps as of children, and heavier steps, as of a grown person.

Then Westmacott stirred; he went across the room and opened the door. I saw Ruth standing in the passage with her children. She was hatless as she had arrived, but the glow of the lamp, hanging suspended from the ceiling, where it fell upon the curve of her little head, drew a line of light as upon a chestnut. Westmacott nodded curtly, passed out, and his family followed him in a passive and mournful procession.

I watched them go, across the little garden, through the swing-gate, and into the dusky fields beyond. They seemed to me infinitely gray, infinitely dreary, infinitely broken, the personages of a flat and faded fresco. All that pulsating passion had passed, like an allegory of life, leaving only death behind. Gone was the vital flame from the human clay. And nothing had come of it, nothing but a broken plate. What ever comes of men’s efforts, I thought bitterly? so little, that we ought to take for our criterion of success, not the tangible result, but the intangible ardour by which the attempt is prompted. So rarely is the one the gauge of the other! I looked again at the little train rapidly disappearing into the darkness, a funeral cortège, carrying with it the corpse of slain rebellion. I saw the years of their future, a vista so stark, so arid, that I physically recoiled from its contemplation. How hideous would be the existence of those children, suffering perpetually from a constraint they could not explain, a constraint which lacked even to the elements of terror, so dead a thing was it, in which terror, a lively, vivid reality, could find no place. Death and stagnation would be their lot.

The darkness of the fields had now completely swallowed them up, but I still stood looking at the spot where I had last seen them, and saying a final good-bye to the tale that place had unfolded to me. This time, I was certain, no sequel was still to come. On the morrow I should leave the Pennistans’ roof, with no hope that an echo of the strangely cursed, ill-fated, unconscious family would ever reach me again in the outer world.

A peace so profound as to be almost unnatural had settled over the land, one or two stars had come out, and I wondered vaguely why Amos and his people had not yet returned home from work. I supposed that they were making the most of a fine evening. The Pennistans would accept their daughter’s defeat, I was sure, with the usual stoic indifference of the poor. At last I turned slowly in the doorway, a great melancholy soaking like dew into my bones, so that I fancied I felt the physical ache.

Now I have but the one concluding incident to tell, before I have done with this portion of my cumbersome, disjointed story, an incident which has since appeared to me frightening in its appositeness, as though deliberately planned by some diabolically finished artist as a rounding of the whole. Malory had spoken of destiny and nature as being the only artists of any humour or courage, and upon my soul I am tempted to agree with him when I think over the events of that packed evening, of which I was the sole and baffled spectator. I said this incident appeared to me frightening; I repeat that statement, for I can conceive of no situation more frightening than for a man to find himself and other human beings shoved hither and thither by events over which he has no control whatsoever, the conduct of life taken entirely out of his hands, especially a man, like me, had always struggled resentfully against the imposition of fate on free-will, but never more so than in the past few weeks. Wherever I turned that night, mockery was there ready to greet me.

I went again, as I have said, into the house with the intention of waiting in the kitchen on Amos’s return. In this small plan as in my larger ones I was, it appeared, to be thwarted, for as I passed down the narrow passage I noticed that the door of old Mrs. Pennistan’s room was open. I paused at first with no thought of alarm. I longed to go in, and to tell the ancient woman of the futile suffering she had brought upon her hapless descendants. I longed insanely to shout it into her brain and to see remorse wake to life in her faded eyes. As I stood near her door she grew for me into a huge, portentous figure, she and her love for Oliver Pennistan, and I saw her, the tiny woman I had all but forgotten, as a consciously evil spirit, a malign influence, the spring from which all this river of sorrow had flowed. Then my steps were drawn nearer and nearer to the door, till I stood at last on the threshold, looking for the first time into the room. Some one, presumably the now invisible servant, had lit the two candles on the dressing-table, and these with the glow of the fire between the bars threw over the room a fitful light. I had, curiously enough, no sense of intrusion; I might have been looking at a mummy. Yet I should have remembered that the occupant was not a mummy, for the familiar smell of the chestnuts had greeted me even in the passage.

She was sitting in her usual place over the fire, her back turned to me, and a black shawl tightly drawn round her shrunken shoulders. Again I was struck by her look of fragility. I had a sudden impulse that I would speak to her, and would try to draw some kind of farewell from her, explaining that I was leaving the house the next day—though whether she had ever realised my presence there at all I very much doubted.

As I went forward the crackle of a chestnut broke the utter stillness of the room. I waited for her to pick it out of the grate with the tongs, but she did not stir. I came softly round her chair and stood there, waiting for her to notice me, as I had seen the Pennistans do when they did not wish to startle her. Indeed, so tiny and frail was she, that I thought a sudden fright might shatter her, as too loud a noise will kill a lark.

I looked down at the chestnuts on the bar, and then I saw that they were quite black. I bent down. They were burnt black and friable as cinders. Sudden panic rushed over me. I dropped on to my knees and stared up into the old woman’s fallen face. She was dead.