Part 2

“You may be sure I should always let you know at once. And what is this I hear about Lila? Poor Lila! It’s the last chapter, I’m afraid. I advised her from the beginning that the American public will not tolerate—but dear Lila is a law unto herself.” And then, as Miss Howe came in—“Lila, my dear! How good of you to venture! A night like this makes me wonder why I continue in London. Madala has urged me to move out ever since——No. No news. But Jasper’s been energetic——” She circled mazily about them while I brought the coffee.

“Kent coming?” said Mr. Flood, fumbling with his papers.

Anita shrugged her shoulders.

“Who can account for Kent? It may dawn on him that he’s due here—and again, it may not. It depends as usual, I suppose, on the new picture.”

“Oh yes, there’s a new one,” recollected the Baxter girl carefully.

“There must be! He was literally flocculent yesterday.” Miss Howe chuckled. “That can only mean one of two things. Art or——”

“—the lady! Who can doubt? Well, if Carey doesn’t object to his brotherly love continuing, I’m sure I don’t. But I wish it need not involve his missing his appointments.” Mr. Flood eyed his typescript impatiently.

Anita was instantly all tact.

“Oh, we won’t wait. Certainly not. Pull in to the fire. Now, Jasper!”

But Miss Howe, as she swirled into Anita’s special chair, her skirts overflowing either arm, abolished Mr. Flood and his typescript with a movement of her soft dimply hands.

“Oh, I’m not in the mood even for Jasper’s efforts. I want to let myself go. I want to damn publishers—and husbands! Damn them! Damn them! There! Am I shocking you, Miss Summer?”

She smiled at me over their heads. She was always polite to me. I liked her. She was like a fat, pink pæony.

“Well, if you take my advice——” began Anita.

“My darling, I love you, but I don’t want your advice. I only want one person’s advice—ever—and she has got married and is doing her duty in that state of life——Hence I say—Damn husbands! I tell you I want Madala to soothe me, and storm at the injustice of publishers for me, and then—no, not give me a brilliant idea for the last chapter, but make me tell her one, and then applaud me for it. _You_ know, Anita!” She dug at her openly.

I caught a movement in Great-aunt’s corner.

“Coffee, Auntie?”

She gave me a goblin glance.

“My daughter!” She had an air of introducing her triumphantly. “Listen! She don’t like fat women.”

We listened. Anita’s voice was mellow with cordiality.

“Yes indeed. Madala has often said to me that she thought you well worth encouraging.”

Miss Howe laughed jollily.

“I admire your articles, Nita. I wilt when you review me. But you’ll never write novels, darling. You’ve not the ear. Madala may have said that, but she didn’t say it in that way.”

“She certainly said it.”

“Some day I’ll ask her.”

“Some day! Oh, some day!” The Baxter girl was staring at the fire. “Shall we ever get her back?”

“In a year! Let us give her a year!” Mr. Flood looked up at the lady beside him with a thin smile. I couldn’t bear him. He sat on the floor, and he called you ‘dear lady,’ and sometimes he would take hold of your watch-chain and finger it as he talked to you. But he was awfully clever, I believe. He wrote reviews and very difficult poetry that didn’t rhyme. Anita was generally mellifluous to him and she quoted him a good deal. She turned to him with just the same smile—

“Ah, of course! You’ve met John Carey too.”

“For my sins, dear lady—for my sins.”

“Not the same sins, surely,” breathed the blonde lady.

“As the virtuous Carey’s? Don’t be rude to me! It’s a fact—the man’s a churchwarden. He carries a little tin plate on Sundays! Didn’t you tell me so, Anita? No—we give her a year. Don’t we, Anita?”

“But what did she marry him for?” wailed the Baxter girl.

They all laughed.

“Copy, dear lady, copy!” Mr. Flood was enjoying himself. “Why will you have ideals? Carey was a new type.”

“But she needn’t have married him!” insisted the Baxter girl. The argument was evidently an old one.

“She, if I read her aright, could have dispensed with the ceremony, but the churchwarden had his views. Obviously! Can’t you imagine him—all whiskers and wedding-ring?”

“But I thought he was clean-shaven! I thought he was good-looking!” I sympathized with the Baxter girl’s dismay.

“Ah—I speak in parables——”

“You do hate him, don’t you?” said Miss Howe with her wide, benevolent smile. “Now, I wonder——”

Mr. Flood flushed into disclaimers, while the woman beside him looked at Miss Howe with half-closed eyes.

“I? How could I? Our orbits don’t touch. _I_ approved, I assure you. An invaluable experience for our Madala! A year of wedded love, another of wedded boredom, and then—a master-piece, dear people! Madala Grey back to us, a giantess refreshed. Gods! what a book it will be!”

“I wonder,” said Miss Howe vaguely.

Anita answered her with that queer movement of the head that always reminded me of a pouncing lizard.

“No need! I’ve watched Madala Grey’s career from the beginning.”

“For this I maintain—” Mr. Flood ignored her—“_Eden Walls_ and _Ploughed Fields_ may be amazing (_The Resting-place_ I cut out. It’s an indiscretion. Madala caught napping) but they’re preliminaries, dear people! mere preliminaries, believe me.”

“I sometimes wonder——” Miss Howe made me think of Saladin’s cushion in _The Talisman_. She always went on so softly and imperviously with her own thoughts—“Suppose now, that she’s written herself out, and knows it?”

The Baxter girl gave a little gasp of horrified appreciation.

“So the marriage——”

“An emergency exit.”

But Anita pitied them aloud—

“It shows how little you know Madala, either of you.”

“Does anyone? Do you?”

Anita smiled securely.

“The type’s clear, at least.” Mr. Flood looked round the circle. His eyes shone. “_Une grande amoureuse_—that I’ve always maintained. Carey may be the first—but he won’t be the last.”

“Is he the first? How did she come to write _The Resting-place_ then? Tell me that!” Anita thrust at him with her forefinger and behind her, in the corner, I saw the gesture duplicated.

“So I will when I’ve read the new book, dear lady.”

“If ever it writes itself,” Miss Howe underlined him.

“As to that—I give her a year, as I say. Once this business is over—” his voice mellowed into kindliness—“and good luck to her, dear woman——”

“Ah, good luck!” said Miss Howe and smiled at him.

“Once it’s over, I say——”

“But she _will_ be all right, won’t she?” said the Baxter girl.

“I should certainly have been told——” began Anita.

Miss Howe harangued them—

“Have you ever known Madala Grey fail yet? She’ll be all right. She’ll pull it off—triumphantly. You see! But as for the book—if it comes——”

“When it comes,” corrected Mr. Flood.

“What’s that?” said Anita sharply.

There was a sound in the passage, a heavy sound of feet. It caught at my heart. It was a sound that I knew. They had come tramping up the stairs like that when they fetched away Mother. Thud—stumble—thud! I shivered. But as the steps came nearer they belonged to but one man. The door opened and the fog and the man entered together. Everyone turned to him with a queer, long flash of faces.

“Kent!” cried Anita, welcoming him. Then her voice changed. “Kent! What’s wrong? What is it?”

He shut the door behind him and stood, his back against it, staring at us, like a man stupefied.

The Baxter girl broke in shrilly—

“He’s wired. He’s had a wire!” She pointed at his clenched hand.

Then he, too, looked down at his own hand. His fingers relaxed slowly and a crush of red and grey paper slid to the floor.

“A son,” he said dully.

“Ah!” A cry from the corner by the fire eased the tension. Great-aunt Serle was clapping her hands together. Her face was wrinkled all over with delight. “The good girl! The pretty——And a son too! A little son! Oh, the good girl!”

Anita turned on her, her voice like a scourge—

“Be quiet, Mother!” Then—“Well, Kent? Well?”

“Well?” he repeated after her.

“Madala? How’s Madala? What about Madala Grey?”

“Dead!” he said.

_Dead._ The word fell amongst the group of us in the circle of lamp-light, like a plummet into a pool. _Dead._ For an instant one could hear the blank drop of it. Then we broke up into gestures and little cries, into a babel of dismay and concern and rather horrible excitement.

Instinctively I separated myself from them. It was neither bad news nor good news to me, but it recalled to me certain hours, and they—it was as if they enjoyed the importance of bereavement. Anita talked. Miss Howe was gulping, and dabbing at her eyes. The Baxter girl kept on saying—‘Dead?’ ‘Dead?’ under her breath, and with that wide nervous smile that you sometimes see on people’s faces when they are far enough away from laughter. Great-aunt had shrunk into her corner. I could barely see her. The blonde lady had her hand on her heart and was panting a little, as if she had been running, and yet, as always, she watched Mr. Flood. He had pulled out a note-book and a fountain-pen and was shaking at it furiously, while his little eyes flickered from one to another—even to me. I felt his observance pursue me to the very edge of the ring of light, and drop again, baulked by the dazzle, as I slipped past him into the swinging shadows beyond. It’s odd how lamp-light cuts a room in two: I could see every corner of the light and shadow alike, and even the outer room was not too dim for me to move about it easily; but to those directly under the lamp I knew I had become all but invisible, a blur among the other blurs that were curtains and pictures and chairs. They remembered me as little as, absorbed and clamorous, they remembered the man who had brought them their news, and then had brushed his way through question and comment to the deep alcove of the window in the outer room and there stood, rigid and withdrawn, staring out through the uncurtained pane at the solid night beyond. I could not see his face, only the outline of a big and clumsy body, and a hand that twitched and fumbled at the tassel of the blind.

And all the while Anita, white as paper, was talking, talking, talking, saying how great the shock was, and how much Miss Grey had been to her—a stream of sorrow and self-assertion. It was just as if she said—‘Don’t forget that this is far worse for me than for any of you. Don’t forget——’

But the others went on with their own thoughts.

“Dead? Gone? It’s not possible.” Miss Howe was all blubbered and deplorable. “What shall we do without her?”

“Yes—that’s it!” The Baxter girl edged-in her chair to her like a young dog asking for comfort.

“For that matter, from the point of view of literature,” Anita’s voice grated, “she died a year ago.”

“It’s not possible! That’s what I say—it’s not possible!” It was strange how even the Baxter girl ignored Anita. “Dead! I can’t grasp it. It’s—it’s too awful. She was so vivid.”

“Awful?” Mr. Flood was biting his fingers. “Awful? Nothing of the kind. You know that Holbein cut—no, it’s earlier stuff—‘Death and the Lady,’ crude, preposterous. And _that’s_ what it is. Old Bones and Madala Grey? That’s not tragedy, that’s farce! Farce, dear people, farce!” Then his high tripping voice broke suddenly. “Dead? Why, she wasn’t thirty!”

“She was twenty-six last June,” said Anita finally. “Midsummer Day. I know.”

“June!” He caught it up. “Just so—June! Isn’t that characteristic? Isn’t that Madala all over? Of course she was born in June. She would be. She _was_ June. June——

“Her lips and her roses yet maiden A summer of storm in her eyes——”

Miss Howe winced.

“For God’s sake don’t Swinburnize, Jasper! She’s not your meat. Oh, I want to cry—I want to cry! Dead—at twenty-six——”

“In child-bed,” finished Anita bitterly, and her voice made it an unclean and shameful end.

Mr. Flood’s glance felt its way over her, hatefully. It never lifted to her face.

“Of course from your point of view, dear lady——” he began, and smiled as he made his little bow of attention.

I thought him insolent, and so, I believe, did Miss Howe. She lifted her head sharply and I thought she would have spoken; but Anita gave her no time. There was always a sort of thick-skinned valiance about Anita.

“Oh, but you all know my point of view. She knew it herself. I never concealed it. You know how I devoted myself——”

“A bye-word, a bye-word!” said Miss Howe under her breath.

“—but not so much to her as to her gift. I should never allow a personal sentiment to overpower me. I haven’t the time for it. But she had the call, she had the gift, and because she had it I say, as I have always said, that for Madala Grey, marriage——”

“And all it implies——” Mr. Flood was still smiling.

She accepted it.

“Marriage and all that it implies was apostasy. I stand for Literature.”

“And Literature,” with a glance at the others, “is honoured.”

They wearied me. It seemed to me that they sparked and fizzled and whirred with the sham life of machinery: and like machinery they affected me. For at first I could not hear anything but them, and then they confused and tired me, and last of all they faded into a mere wall-paper of sound, and I forgot that they were there, save that I wondered now and then, as stray sentences shrilled out of the buzz, that they were not yet oppressed into silence.

For there was grief abroad—a grief without shape, without sound, without expression—a quality, a pulsing essence, a distillation of pure pain. From some centre it rayed out, it spread, it settled upon the room, imperceptibly, like the fall of dust. It reached me. I felt it. It soaked into me. I ached with it. I could not sit quiet. I was not drawn, I was impelled. _Dead_—the dull, bewildered voice was still in my ears. _That_ I heard. But it was statement, not appeal. It was not his suffering that demanded relief, but some responding capacity for pain in me that awoke and cried out restlessly that such anguish was unlawful, beyond endurance, that still it I must, I must!

I rose. I looked round me. Then I went very softly into the outer room.

He was still standing at the window. The street lamp, level with the sill, was quenched to a yellow gloom. It lit up the wet striped branches and dead bobbins of the plane-tree beside it, and the sickly undersides of its shrivelled last leaves. I never thought a tree could look so ghastly. Against that unnatural glitter and the luminous thick air the man and the half-drawn curtain stood out in solid, unfamiliar bulk of black.

I came and stood just behind him. He was so big that I only reached his shoulder. He may have heard me: I think he did; but he did not turn. I was not frightened of him. That was so queer, because as a rule I can’t talk to strangers. I get nervous and red, and foolish-tongued, especially with men. Of course I knew all the usual men, the doctor at home, and the church people, and husbands that came back by the five-thirty, and now all Anita’s friends, and Mr. Flood; but I never had anything to say to them or they to me. But with Kent Rehan, somehow, it was different. He was different. I never thought—‘This is a strange man.’ I never thought—‘He doesn’t know me: it’s impertinent to break in upon him: what will he think?’ I never thought of all that. I never thought about myself at all. I was just passionately desiring to help him and I didn’t know how to do it.

I think I stood there for four or five minutes, trying to find words, opening my lips, and then catching back the phrase before a sound came, because it seemed so poor and meaningless. And all the while the Baxter girl’s words were running in my head—‘They say he was in love with her.’

With her—with Madala Grey. She was the key. I had the strangest pang of interest in this unknown woman. Who was she? What was she? What had she been? What had she done so to centre herself in so many, in such alien lives? What had she in common for them all? Books, books, books—_I’d_ never heard of her books! And she was married. Yet the loss of her, unpossessed, could bring such a look (as he turned restlessly from the window at last) such a look to Kent Rehan’s face. I was filled with a sort of anger against that dead woman, and I envied her. I never saw a man look so—as if his very soul had been bruised. It was not, it was never, a weak face, and it was not a young one; yet in that instant I saw in it, and clearly, its own forgotten childhood, bewildered by its first encounter with pain. It was that fleeting look that touched me so and gave me courage, so that I found myself saying to him, very low and quickly, and with a queer authority—

“It won’t always hurt so much. It will get easier. I promise you it will. It does. Truly it does. In six months—I _do_ know.”

He looked down at me strangely.

I went on because I had to, but it was difficult. It was desperately difficult. I could hear myself blundering and stammering, and using hateful slangy phrases that I never used as a rule.

“I had to tell you. It isn’t cheek. I know—it hurts like fun. It’ll be worst out of doors. You see them coming, you see them just ahead of you, and then it isn’t them. But it won’t always hurt so horribly. I promise you. One manages. One gets used to living with it. I know.”

He looked at my black dress.

“Your husband?”

“No. Mother.”

He said no more. But he did not go away from me. We stood side by side at the window.

The voices in the other room insisted themselves into my mind again, against my will, like the ticking of a clock in the night. I was thinking about him, not them. But Anita called to me to put coal on the fire and, once among them, I did not like to go back to him again.

They had re-grouped themselves at the hearth. Miss Howe was in the chair with the chintz cover that was as pink and white and blue-ribboned as she herself. The Baxter girl crouched on the pouf and the fire-light danced over her by fits and starts till, what with her violet dress and her black boy’s head with the green band in it and that orange glow upon her, she looked like one of the posters in the Tube. The blonde lady had pushed back her chair to the edge of the lamp-light, so that her face was a blur and her white dress yellow-grey. Her knees made a back for Mr. Flood sitting cross-legged at her feet, and watching the Baxter girl as if he admired her. Once the blonde lady put her hand on his shoulder, and he caught it and played with the rings on it while he listened to her, and yet still watched the Baxter girl. She went on whispering, her hand in his, till at last he put back his head and caught her eye and laughed. Then she leaned back again as if she were satisfied. But I thought—‘How I should hate to have that dank hair rubbing against my skirt.’ Beside Mr. Flood lay the MS. he had brought, but I think Anita had forgotten it. She, sitting at the table in her high-backed chair (she never lolled), was still talking, indeed they were all talking about this Madala Grey. Anita’s voice was as pinched as her face.

“Oh, I knew from the first what it would be! She could never do anything by halves. She had no moderation. The writing, the work, all that made her what she was, tossed aside, for a whim, for a madness, for a man. I can’t help it—it makes me bitter.”

“Do you grudge it her so?” The Baxter girl looked at her wonderingly. “I kicked at it too, of course. We all did, didn’t we? But now, I like to think how happy she looked the last time she came here. Do you remember? I liked that blue frock. And the scarf with the roses—I gave her that. Liberty. She was thin though. She always worked too hard. Poor Madala! Heigh-ho, the gods are jealous gods.”

Anita stared in front of her.

“Just gods. She served two masters. She was bound to pay.”

“You are hard,” said the Baxter girl in a low voice.

Miss Howe rocked herself.

“But don’t you know how she feels? I do. It’s the helplessness——”

Anita’s pale eye met and held her glance as if she resented that sympathy. Then, as if indeed she were suddenly grown weak, she acquiesced.

“I suppose so. Yes, it’s the helplessness. ‘If this didn’t happen’—‘If that weren’t so’—Little things, little things—and they govern one. A broken doll—a cowslip ball—stronger than all my strength. And she needn’t have met Carey. It was just a chance. If I’d known—that day! I used to ask her questions, just to make her talk. I remember asking her about her old home—more to set her off than anything. I said I’d like to see it some day. It was true. I was interested. But it was only to make her talk. But she—oh, you know how she foamed up about a thing. ‘My old home! Would you, Anita? Would you like to come? Wouldn’t it bore you, Anita? It’s all spoiled, you know. But I go down now and then. Nobody remembers me. It’s like being a ghost. Oh, I _feel_ for ghosts. Would you really like to come? Shall we go soon? Shall we go today?’ And then, of course, down we go. And then we meet Carey. And then the play begins.”

Miss Howe shook her head.

“Ends.”

Anita accepted it.

“Ends. Then the play ends.” And then, frowning—“If I’d known that day—if I’d known! I was warned, too. That’s strange. I’ve never thought of it from that day to this. If I were an old wife now——” She shivered.

“What happened?” said the Baxter girl curiously.

“Oh, well, off we went! We had a carriage to ourselves. I was glad. I thought she might talk.”

“And you always tried to make her talk,” said Miss Howe softly.

Anita went on without answering her.

“She grew quite excited as we travelled down, talking about her ‘youth.’ She always spoke as if she were a hundred.”

“She put something into that youth of hers, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Miss Howe.

“She did. The things she told me that day. I knew she had been in America, but I never dreamed——She landed there, if you please, without a penny in her pocket, without a friend in the world.”

“I never understood why she went to America,” said Miss Howe. “I asked her once.”

“What did she say?” said Anita curiously.

“To make her fortune. But I never got any details out of her.”

“Didn’t you know?” said Anita. “Her people emigrated. The father failed. It happened when Madala was eighteen, and she and her mother persuaded him, expecting him, literally, to make their fortunes. The mother seems to have been an erratic person. Irish, I believe. Beautiful. Extravagant. I have always imagined that it was her extravagance—but Madala and the husband seem to have adored her. I remember Madala saying once that her father had been born unlucky, ‘except when he married Mother!’ I suspect, myself, that that was the beginning of his ill-luck. Anyhow, when the crash came, they gathered together what they had and started off on some romantic notion of the mother’s to make their fortune farming. America. Steerage. The _Sylvania_.”

“_Sylvania?_ That’s familiar. What was it? A collision, wasn’t it?”

“No, that was the _Empress of Peru_. The _Sylvania_ caught fire in mid-ocean—a ghastly business. There were only about fifty survivors. Both her people were drowned.”

“Oh, that’s what she meant,” began Miss Howe, “that time at the Academy. We were looking at a storm-scape, and she said—‘People don’t know. It’s not like that. They wouldn’t try to paint it if they knew.’ She was quite white. Of course I never dreamed——Poor old Madala! Well, what happened?”

“Oh, she reached America in what she stood up in. There was a survivors’ fund, of course, but money melts in a city when you’re strange to it.”

“Couldn’t she have come back to England?”

“I believe she had relations over here, but her mother had quarrelled with them all in turn. They didn’t appreciate her mother and that was the unforgivable sin for Madala. She’d have starved sooner than ask them to help her. I shouldn’t wonder if she did, too!—half starve anyway. I shouldn’t wonder if those first bare months haven’t revenged themselves at last.”

“Oh, if one had known!” began the Baxter girl. “How is it that no one ever knows—or cares?”