Part 3

“You? You were a schoolgirl. Who had heard of her in those days? But she made friends. There was a girl, a journalist, who had been sent to interview the survivors. She seems to have helped her in the beginning. She found her a lodging—oh, can’t you see how she uses that lodging in _Eden Walls_?—and gave her occasional hack jobs, typing, and now and then proof-reading. Then she got some work taken, advertisement work, little articles on soaps and scents and face-creams that she used to illustrate herself. She was comically proud of them. She kept them all.”

“I suppose in her spare time she was already working at _Eden Walls_?”

“No. I asked her. And she said—‘Oh, no, I was too miserable. Oh, Anita, I _was_ miserable.’ And then she began again telling funny stories about her experiences. No, she was back in England before she began _Eden Walls_. However, she seems to have made quite a little income at last, even to have saved. And then, just when she began to see her way before her to a sort of security, then she threw it all up and came home.”

“Just like Madala! But why?”

“Heaven knows! Homesick, she said.”

“But she hadn’t got a home!”

“It was England—the English country—the south country—the Westering Hill country. She used to talk about it like—like a lover.”

“Isn’t that more probable?” said Mr. Flood.

“What?”

“A lover.”

“Carey?”

“Not necessarily Carey.”

Anita looked at him with a certain approval.

“Ah—so you’ve thought of that, too? Now what exactly do you base it on?”

He shrugged and smiled.

“Delightfullest—my thoughts are thistle-down.”

“But you have your theory?” She pinned him down. “I see that you too have your theory.”

“Our theory.” He bowed.

“You’ve got wits, Jasper.”

“What are you two driving at?” Miss Howe fidgeted.

“We’re evolving a theory—a theory of Madala Grey. Who lived in the south country, Anita?”

“Carey, for that matter.”

“Matters not. She didn’t come home for Carey. You can’t make books without copy. Not her sort of book. Any more than you can make bricks without straw. But she didn’t make her bricks from his straw, that I’ll swear.”

“No, she didn’t come home for Carey,” said Anita. “I tell you, that was the day she met him. It’s barely a year ago. She had made her name twice over by then. She was already casting about for her third plot. I think it was that that made her so restless. She’d grown very restless. But she certainly didn’t come home for Carey.”

“Then why?”

“Homesick.”

“That’s absurd.”

“I’m telling you what she said. She insisted on it. She used a queer phrase. She said—‘I longed for home till my lips ached.’”

The lady with Mr. Flood stirred in her shadows.

“She didn’t imagine that. That happens. That is how one longs——” She broke off.

“For home?” he said, with that smile of his that ended at his mouth and left his eyes like chips of quartz.

She answered him slowly, him only—

“I suppose, with some women, it could be for home. If she says so——That is what confounds one in her. She knows—she proves that she knows, in a phrase like that, things that (when one thinks of her personality) she _can’t_ know—couldn’t know. It’s inexplicable. ‘Till one’s lips ache’——Oh, Lord!” She laughed harshly.

Anita looked at them uncertainly.

“Well, that’s what she said. And to judge from her description Westering was something to be homesick for. I expected a paradise.”

“Westering? That’s quite a town.”

“Yes, I know. There’s a summer colony. Madala mourned over it. She was absurd. She raced me out of the station and up the hill, and would scarcely let me look about me till we were at the top, because the lower end of the village had been built over. It might have been the sack of Rome to hear her—‘Asphalt paths! Disgraceful! The grocer used to have _blue_ blinds. They’ve spoiled the village green.’ And so it went on until we reached Upper Westering.”

“Oh, where they live now?”

“Yes. And then she turned to me and beamed—‘_This is_ my _country_.’ It certainly is a pretty place. There’s a fine view over the downs; but too hilly for me. We climbed up and down lanes and picked ridiculous bits of twig and green stuff till I protested. Then she took me into the churchyard. We wandered about: very pleasant it was: such a hot spring day, and pretty pinkish flowers—what did she call the stuff?—cuckoo-pint, springing from the graves—and daffodils. Then we sat down in the shadow of the church to eat our lunch. We began to discuss architecture and I was growing interested, really beginning to enjoy myself—some of it was pre-Norman—when a man climbed over the stile from the field behind the church, and came down the path towards us. As he passed, Madala looked up and he looked down, and up she jumped in a moment. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I do believe—I _do_ believe—’ You know that little chuckly rise in her voice when she’s pleased—‘I do believe it’s you!’ ‘Oh, Madala,’ I said, ‘the sandwiches!’ They were in a paper on her lap, you know. She had scattered them right and left. But I might have talked to the wind. I must say he had perfectly respectable manners. He turned back at once, and smiled at her, and hesitated, and began to pick up the sandwiches, though he evidently didn’t know her. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember? Aren’t you Dr. Carey? You mended my camel when I was little. I’m Madala!’ She was literally brimming over with pleasure. But, you know, such a silly way to put it! If she had said ‘Madala Grey’ he would have known in a moment. There were a couple of _Eden Walls_ on the bookstall as we went through. I saw them. However, he remembered her then. He certainly seemed pleased to see her, in his awkward way. He stood looking down at her, amused and interested. People always got so interested in Madala. Haven’t you noticed it? Even people in trams. Though I thought to myself at the time—‘How absurd Madala is! What can they have in common?’ Yes, I thought it even then.”

“Well, what had they in common?”

“Heaven knew! She was ten and he was twenty-five when they last met. He knew her grand-people: he had mended her dolls for her: he lived in her old home: that, according to her, was all that mattered. She said to me afterwards, I remember, ‘Just imagine seeing him! I _was_ pleased to see him. He belongs in, you know.’ ‘No, Madala,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Such a fuss about a man you haven’t seen since you were a child! I call it affectation. It’s a slight on your real friends.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but he belongs in.’ She looked quite chastened. She said—‘Nita, it wasn’t affectation. I believe he was pleased too—honestly!’ He was. Who wouldn’t be? You know the effect she used to make.”

“What did he say?” asked the Baxter girl.

“Oh, he looked down at her as if he were shy. Then he said—‘You’ve a long memory, Madala!’ Yes, he called her Madala from the first. It annoyed me. She said—‘Oh, do you remember when Mother was so ill once? You were very kind to me then.’ Then she said something which amazed me. I’d known her for two years before she told me anything about that _Sylvania_ tragedy, but to him she spoke at once. ‘They’re dead,’ she said, ‘Mother and Father. They’re drowned. There isn’t anyone.’ But her voice! It made me quite nervous. I thought she was going to break down. He said, with a stiff sort of effort—‘Yes. I heard.’ That was all. Nothing sympathetic. He just stood and looked at her.”

“Well?” said Miss Howe impatiently.

“Oh—nothing else. I finished picking up the sandwiches. She introduced me, but I don’t think he realized who I was. It annoyed me very much that she insisted on his eating lunch with us. As I said to her afterwards, it wasn’t suitable. Buns in a bag! But there he sat on a damp stone (he gave Madala his overcoat to sit upon) perfectly contented. I confess I wasn’t cordial. But he noticed nothing. Obtuse! That was how I summed him up from the first—obtuse! And no conversation whatever. Madala did the talking. I believe she asked after every cat and dog for twenty miles round. And her lack of reticence to a comparative stranger was amazing. She told him more about herself in half an hour than she had told me in four years. But she was an unaccountable creature.”

“Yes, that’s just it. One never knew what Madala would do next, and yet when she’d done it, one said—‘Of course! Just what Madala _would_ do!’ But it wasn’t like her to neglect you, Nita!”

“Oh, she noticed after a time. She began to be uncomfortable. I—withdrew myself, as it were. You know my way. She didn’t like that. She tried—I will say that for her—she did try to direct the conversation towards my subjects. Useless, of course. He was, not illiterate—no, you can’t say illiterate—but curiously unintellectual. Socialism now—somehow we got on to socialism. That roused him. I must say, though he expressed himself clumsily, that he had ideas. But so limited. He had never heard of Marx. Bernard Shaw was barely a name to him. Socialism—his socialism—when we disentangled it, was only another word for the proper feeding of the local infants—drains—measles—the village schools. Beyond that he was mute. But Madala chimed in with details of American slum life, and roused him at once. They grew quite eloquent. But not one word, if you please, of her own work. Anything and everything but her work. He did ask her what she was doing. ‘Oh,’ said she in an offhand way, ‘I scribble. Stories.’ And then—‘It earns money, and it kills time.’ Yes, that’s exactly how she put it. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘that’s not the spirit—’ I’d never heard her use such a tone before. She had such high ideals of art. It jarred me. I thought that she ought to have known better. But she looked at me in such a curious way—defiant almost. She said—‘It’s my own spirit, Nita. Oh, let me have a holiday!’ And at that up she jumped and left us sitting there, and wandered off to the stile and was over it in a second. We sat still. The hedge hid her. Then we heard her call—‘Cowslips! Oh, cowslips!’ I thought he would go when she called, but he sat where he was, listening. It was one of those hot, still days, you know. There was a sort of spell on things. There were bees about. We heard a cart roll up the road. I wanted to get up and talk, make some kind of diversion, and yet I couldn’t. We heard her call again—‘Hundreds of cowslips! I’m going to make a cowslip ball.’ Her voice sounded far away, but very clear. And there was a scent of may in the air, and dust—an intoxicating smell. It made me quite sleepy. It was just as if time stood still. Three o’clock’s a drowsy time, I suppose. And he never stirred—just sat there stupidly. But I was too sleepy to be bored with him. Presently back she came. She had picked up her skirt and her petticoat showed—it was that lavender silk you gave her, Lila. So unsuitable, you know, on those dirty roads. And her skirt was full of cowslips. She was just a dark figure against the sky until she was close to us; but then, I thought that she looked pretty, extremely pretty. Bright cheeks, you know, and her eyes so blue——”

“Grey—” said Mr. Flood, “the grey eyes of a goddess.”

“They looked blue, and she didn’t look like a goddess. She looked like a little girl. Well, there she stood, with her grey skirt and her lavender silk, and her cowslips—you know they have a sweet smell, cowslips, a very sweet smell—and tumbled them all down on the tombstone. Then she wanted string. Carey seemed to wake up at that. He’d been looking at her as if he had dreamed her. He produced string. He was that sort of man. Then she made her cowslip ball. I held one end of the string and he held the other, and she nipped the stalks off the flowers and strung them athwart it. That is the way to make a cowslip ball.”

“Nita, I love you!” cried Miss Howe for the second time, and the others laughed.

She stopped. She stiffened.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ne’ mind! Go on!”

She said offendedly—

“There’s nothing more to tell. We got up and came away.”

But as we sat silently by, still waiting, the storyteller crept back into her face.

“Oh, yes—” up went her forefinger. “It was then that it happened. We went stumbling over the graves, round to the east end, to see the lepers’ window, a particularly interesting one. Ruskin mentions it. Yes, Carey came with us. There’s a little bit of bare lawn under the window before the stones begin again, and as we crossed it Madala gave a kind of shuddering start. He said—‘Cold?’ smiling at her. She shivered again, in spite of herself as it were, for she’d been joking and laughing, and said—‘Someone must be walking over my grave.’ And at that he gave her such a look, and said loudly in a great rough voice—‘Rubbish! don’t talk such rubbish!’ Really, you know, the tone! And I thought to myself then as I’ve thought many times since—‘At heart the man’s a bully—that’s what the man is.’ But Madala laughed. We didn’t stay long after that. The window was a disappointment—restored. There was nothing further to see and Madala was quite right—it was chilly. The sky had clouded over and there was a wind. I thought it time to go. Madala made no objection. She had grown curiously quiet. She tired easily, you know. And he didn’t say another word. Quite time to go. I thought we might try for the earlier train, so we went off at last in a hurry. No, he didn’t come with us: we shook hands at the gate. And when I looked back a minute later he had turned away. We caught our train.”

There was a little pause that Miss Howe ended.

“Queer!” she said.

Anita stared at them. Her hands twitched.

“Oh, I’m a practical person, but—‘You’re walking on my grave,’ she said. And there or thereabouts, I suppose, she’ll lie.”

“Coincidence,” said Mr. Flood quickly.

“Of course. I never thought of it again. Nor did Madala for that matter, though she was quiet enough in the train. There she sat, looking out of the window and smiling to herself. But then she was always like that after any little excitement, very quiet for an hour, re-living it—literally. I think, you know,” she hesitated, “that that was the secret of her genius. Her genius was her memory. _She liked whate’er she looked on_——”

“And her looks were certainly everywhere,” said the blonde lady in her drawling voice.

“Just so. But it didn’t end there. She remembered. She remembered uncannily. She was like a child picking up pebbles from the beach every holiday, and spending all the rest of its year polishing. She turned them into jewels. The process used to fascinate me—professionally, you know. You could see her mind at work on some trifling incident, fidgeting with it, twisting it, dropping it, picking it up again, till one wearied. And then a year later, or two years, or three years, or ten years maybe, you’ll pick up a novel or a story, and there you’ll find it, cut, graved, polished, set in diamonds, but—the same pebble, if one has the wit to see.”

“Well, what did she say?” Miss Howe cut through the theory impatiently.

Anita frowned. She disliked being hurried.

“Oh, that day? Very little. I was surprised. She usually enjoyed pouring herself out to me. But no, she just sat and smiled. It irritated me. ‘What is it, Madala?’ I said at last. She stared at me as if she had never seen me before. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in her vague way. And then—‘Wasn’t it a lovely day?’ I waited. I knew she would go on sooner or later. Presently she said—‘That stone we sat on _was_ damp. He was quite right.’ Then she said, thinking aloud as it were—‘You know, if a man has a really pleasant voice, I like it better than women’s voices. It’s so steady.’ And then—‘What did you think of him, Anita?’”

Miss Howe chuckled.

“And you said?”

“Oh, I said what I could. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. It was so obvious that the place and everyone in it was beglamoured for her. I said that he seemed a worthy, harmless person, or something to that effect. I forget exactly how I phrased it—I was tactful, of course. Oh, I remember, I said that she ought to put him into a book—that the old country doctors were disappearing, like the farmers and the parsons. I’m sure I appeared interested. But all she said was—‘Old? He’s not old. Would you call him old?’ ‘That was a figure of speech,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of the type. But all the same you can’t describe him as young, Madala.’ ‘Oh, he’s not a boy,’ she said. ‘No one ever said he was a _boy_.’ She didn’t say any more. But just as we were getting out at Victoria she cried—‘My cowslips! Anita, my cowslips! I’ve forgotten my cowslip ball.’ I told her that it wouldn’t have lasted anyway, with the stalks nipped off so short. But she looked as if she had lost a kingdom.”

“I believe I know that cowslip ball.” Miss Howe looked amused. “_A_ cowslip ball, anyway. She had one sent to her once when I was there. I thought it was from her slum children.”

“Yes, he sent it on.” My cousin went on quickly with her own story. “How he knew the address puzzled me. Her publishers wouldn’t have given it and I know she didn’t.”

“Telephone book,” said the Baxter girl, as one experienced.

“Ah, possibly. I went round to her that morning, and—yes, you were there, Lila,” she conceded, “for I remember I wondered how Madala could compose herself to work with anyone else in the room. I always left her to herself when she stayed with me.”

“She didn’t mind me,” said Miss Howe firmly.

“She always said that she didn’t, I know. And of course I know that it is possible to withdraw oneself as it were, but I confess I disapproved. Her room was a regular clearing-house in those days. Oh, not you particularly, Lila, but——”

“You came in yourself that morning, didn’t you?” said Miss Howe very softly and sweetly.

“I was telling you so. And what did I find? Her desk littered over with string and paper and moss and damp cardboard, and that story Hooper published (it had been freshly typed only the day before) watering into purple under my eyes, while she sat and gloated over those wretched flowers. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘your manuscript! Really, Madala!’”

“And Madala—” Miss Howe began to laugh—“Oh, I remember now.”

“What did Madala say?” demanded the Baxter girl.

“It wasn’t like her.” Anita fidgeted. “She knew how I disliked the modern manner.”

“But she said,” Miss Howe caught it up—

“I don’t know what possessed her,” said my cousin with a rush. “She actually stamped her foot at me. Yes, she did, and then held out her wretched posy and said—‘Oh, damn the manuscript, Nita! Smell!’”

“What did Nita do?” enquired the blonde lady softly of Miss Howe.

“Sniffed,” Mr. Flood struck in. “Obviously! Satisfied Madala and relieved her own feelings. That is called tact.”

“And just then, you know,” Miss Howe glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice, “_he_ came in.”

“Kent?” The lady with Mr. Flood did not lower her voice. I believe she wanted him to hear. She was like a curious child poking at a hurt beastie. Her smile was infantine as she looked across at him. But the man at the window never stirred.

“Sh!” Miss Howe frowned at her. And then, still whispering—“Yes, don’t you remember? he had his studio in the same block all that year. He always came across to Madala when he wanted a sardine tin opened, or change for his gas, or someone to sit to him.”

“Someone was saying that he couldn’t keep a model.” Mr. Flood glanced at them in turn.

Miss Howe flushed surprisingly.

“It’s not that. You ought to know better, Jasper. It’s only that he’s exigeant—never knows how the time goes, and” (she lowered her voice still more), “and Madala spoilt him. She could sit by the hour looking like a Madonna, and getting all her own head-work done, and never stirring a hair. Of course he doesn’t like the shilling an hour type after her.”

“I know, I know! The explanation is quite unnecessary.” He smiled and waved his hand.

“Then why——?” She was still flushed and annoyed.

“One gets at other people’s views. I merely wondered how the—er—partnership appeared to your—er—intelligence. Now I know.”

“She did spoil him.” Anita disregarded them. “The time she wasted on him! In he came, you know, that day, and she went to meet him with the cowslips still in her hand, and shielding her eyes from the sun. That room of hers got all the morning sun.”

“What did she wear—the blue dress?” The Baxter girl was like a child being told a story.

“I forget. Anyway he stood looking her up and down till she reddened and began to laugh at him. And then he said—‘And cowslips too! What luck! Come along! Come _along_!’ ‘Oh, my good man!’ I said, ‘she’s in the middle of her writing!’ But it was useless to expostulate. He wanted her and so she went. I heard him as he dragged her off. ‘Madala, I’ve got such a notion!’ No, it was the great fault of her character, I consider, that she could never deny anyone, not even for her work’s sake. Still, I suppose one had to forgive it in that case, for that was the beginning, you know, of _The Spring Song_. She is painted just as she stood there that morning, literally gilded over with sunshine, and the flowers in her hands.”

“It’s the best thing he’s ever done, isn’t it?” said the Baxter girl.

“Best thing? It’s a master-piece. It’s Madala Grey.”

“When is he going to show it?” asked Mr. Flood.

Anita shrugged.

“Heaven knows! He insists that it isn’t finished. I believe he sits and prays over it. He was annoyed that Madala took me there one day. You know how touchy he is.”

“He won’t show it now,” said the blonde lady.

“Why not? Why not?” Anita hovered, on the pounce, like a cat over a bowl of goldfish, and like a fish the blonde lady glided out of reach.

“And _she_ asks!” she appealed to the others.

Anita frowned.

“You’re cryptic.”

“Well, wasn’t there a certain—rivalry? You should have a fellow-feeling.”

“Oh—” she resented quickly, “Kent always wanted to keep her to himself, if you mean that.”

The blonde lady smiled.

“And now he keeps her to himself. I mean just that. I go by your account, of course. _I_ haven’t glimpsed _The Spring Song_.”

“So that started it.” The Baxter girl mused aloud. “I think that’s romantic now—to make a famous picture and to pick up one’s husband, all in twenty-four hours.”

“‘Pick up!’”

“You know what I mean—fall in love.”

“‘Fall in love!’”

“Nita, don’t trample.” Miss Howe threw the Baxter girl a cigarette.

“I only mean—it was romantic, meeting like that so long ago and nobody knowing a word until just before they were married, except you, Miss Serle. And I don’t believe you guessed?” She questioned her with defiant eyebrows.

“How could I guess what never happened? ‘In love!’ I suppose it deceived some good folks.”

“It wasn’t so long ago,” Miss Howe soothered them. She had a funny little way of slipping people into another subject if she thought that they sounded quarrelsome. ‘Let’s be comfortable!’ was written all over her. And yet she could scratch. I think that a great many women are like Miss Howe.

“Long ago? Of course not!” Anita picked it up at once. “How long is it? A year? Eighteen months? April, wasn’t it? She wrote _The Resting-place_ in the next three months. Scamped. I shall always say so. She was three years over _Ploughed Fields_. Yes, April began it. _The Resting-place_ was out for the Christmas sales. She married him at Easter. And now it’s November. The year’s not gone. But Madala Grey is gone.”

“Where?” said the Baxter girl intensely.

“Don’t!” said Miss Howe.

But the Baxter girl looked as if she couldn’t stop herself.

“We—we put her into the past tense—d’you notice how easily we’re doing it already?—but—is she less alive to you, less lovable, less Madala Grey to you, because of a telegram and a funeral service? is she?”

“No,” said Miss Howe. “If you put it like that—no.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Flood. “When you put it like that—yes.”

“She must be somewhere,” argued the Baxter girl. “She can’t just stop.”

“Why not?” said Mr. Flood, with his bored smile.

“She can’t. I feel it,” she said with her hand at her heart and her large eyes on him.