Part 5

“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as she challenged them.

The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in answer, a laugh rippled out.

I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective soul.

“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she, too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.

“One talks,” she said, “among friends.”

Miss Howe made a wry face.

“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”

“You’ve all of you been awfully good to me,” said the Baxter girl. But her gratitude was too general to be acceptable. Even I could have told her that.

“Oh, we do our best for you,” said Mr. Flood.

She looked at him from under her lashes.

“Yes, and she’s thinking this minute what a nice little scene this would make for her new book—touched up, of course,” said the woman behind him.

“Art—selection—Jimmy Whistler——” Mr. Flood was one indistinct murmur.

“With herself her own heroine again, eh?” Miss Howe baited her.

“I didn’t. I wasn’t.”

“Better folk than you do it, child! Anita says so. Don’t they, Anita?”

“Oh,” said Anita heavily, “I wish Madala Grey were here. I wish she hadn’t died. If she were here she wouldn’t—you’d never—she wouldn’t let you laugh at me.”

Miss Howe looked at her intently. There was a quick little run of expression across her large handsome face, like a hand playing a scale. It showed, that easily moved, easily read face, surprise, interest, concern, and, in the end, the sentimental impulse of your kind fur-clad woman to the beggar on the curb. ‘Why! I believe she’s cold! I don’t like it! Give her tuppence, quick!’ She was out of her chair, overwhelming Anita, in one impetuous heave of drapery.

“You’re right, Nita! We’re pigs! Something’s wrong with us. ’Pologize. You know we don’t mean it.”

Anita endured her right-and-left kisses.

“You do mean it,” was all she said.

She was shrunk to such a small grey creature again. I thought to myself—‘Fire? It’s not even diamond-sparkle. She’s as dull as stone.’

Miss Howe was eagerly remorseful.

“We don’t. I don’t know what’s got into us tonight. It’s the fog. There’s something evil about a fog. Distorting. It yellows over one’s soul.”

“It isn’t only tonight,” said the Baxter girl, with her sidelong, ‘can-I-risk-it?’ look at them. “The fog’s been coming on for months.”

“And you mean——?” The blonde lady never snubbed the Baxter girl. It struck me suddenly, as their eyes met, that there was the beginning of a likeness between them. The Baxter girl at fifty—with dyed hair——? But it was only an idea of mine. I’m always seeing imaginary likenesses. I remember that those Academy pictures of Kent Rehan’s always set me to work wondering—‘That woman with the face turned away—I’ve seen her somewhere—of whom does she remind me?—where have I seen her?’ And yet, of course, in those days I knew nothing of Madala Grey.

But the Baxter girl was answering—

“It—it’s cheek, I know, but it’s true. When I first came—” then, with a swift propitiatory glance at Anita—“when you first let me come—the Nights weren’t like this. You weren’t like this, any of you——”

“Upon—my—word!” said Miss Howe with her benevolent chuckle. “Nita! Listen to the infant!”

“Like what?” Mr. Flood moved uneasily.

The Baxter girl turned to him enthusiastically.

“Oh, I used to think you such wonderful people——”

“Did you now?” Miss Howe teased her.

“Let be! let be!” said Mr. Flood impatiently. “Well, dear lady?”

“Oh, I did! I’d read all your stuff. I believe I could write out _The Orchid House_ from memory still.”

His eyes lit up as he challenged her—

“‘Sour!’ said the fox at her feet, ‘How can she ripen windy-high? Sour!’ said the fox with his nose to the sky—”

He was as pleased as a child with a toy when she capped it—

“Then a grape dropped off. It was rotten sweet.

There!” she flushed at him triumphantly. And then—“Now did you mean——? Who was in your mind? Were they anyone we know? I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

But before he could answer her the blonde lady leaned forward and whispered in his ear. He turned to her with a glance of interest and amusement, but with his lips still moving and his mind still running on an answer to the Baxter girl. The blonde lady whispered again, and then he turned right round to answer her, shelving his arms on her knees. I couldn’t hear what they said, but it was just as if she had beckoned him into another room. He was withdrawn from the conversation and from the Baxter girl for as long as that blonde lady chose.

Miss Howe looked at them with her broad smile.

“Tell us, Beryl! We’re listening, anyhow!” she said invitingly.

But the Baxter girl’s chin went up. The touch of annoyance in her voice made it twang, made her commonness suddenly noticeable. She was bearable when she was in awe of them, but now she was asserting herself, and that meant that she was inclined to be noisy.

“Oh, my opinion doesn’t count, of course! But”—she swung like a pendulum between her two manners—“oh, I _did_ enjoy myself at first. It was the way you all talked. You knew everyone. You’d read everything. You frothed adventures. Like champagne it was, meeting all the people. I used to write my head off, the week after. And you were all kind to me from the first. I suppose it was Madala. She never let one feel out of it. But I thought it was all of you. I had the feeling—‘the gods _aren’t_ jealous gods.’ But now it’s” —she looked at them pertly—“it’s fog on Olympus.”

“You needn’t—honour us, you know, Beryl,” said Anita sharply.

She answered with her furtive look.

“I know. And I don’t think—I don’t want to come as much as I did.”

“In that case——” Anita ruffled up.

“Fog! Fog!” cried Miss Howe clapping her hands. And then—“All the same, Nita, people are dropping off. The Whitneys haven’t been for weeks. When did Roy Huth come last? And the Golding crowd? I marvel that _he_ turns up still.” She nodded towards Kent Rehan. “Oh, you know, we’re like a row of beads when the string’s been pulled out. We lie in a line for a time, but a touch will send us rolling in all directions.”

“Yes,” said the Baxter girl vehemently, “the heart’s out of it somehow. I’m not ungrateful. It’s just because I used to love coming so.”

Miss Howe looked down at Anita, not unkindly.

“Give it up, Nita! The Nights have served their turn. It sounds ungracious, but things have to end sometime or other. Hasn’t the time come? Hasn’t it come tonight?”

“But you’ve been coming all this year just the same,” said Anita stubbornly.

Miss Howe shrugged her shoulders. It was the Baxter girl who answered—

“Ah, but there was always just a chance of seeing Madala.”

At that Anita, who had been sitting as steely stiff as a needle in a pin-cushion, got up, shaking off Miss Howe’s persuasive, detaining hand and the overflow of her skirts. The cushions tumbled after her on to the floor.

“As to that,” she said, “and don’t imagine that I haven’t known what you came for, all of you——”

“Eh?”

Her voice was sharp enough to have recalled anyone and it recalled Mr. Flood. He returned to the conversation with the air of dragging the blonde lady after him. She had the manner of one hanging back and protesting, and laughing still over some secret understanding. “Eh?” said he. “What’s that about Madala?”

Anita looked from one to another.

“I’m telling you,” she said. “I’ve told you already, I can give you Madala Grey. Come here and I’ll give you Madala Grey still. That’s what you want, isn’t it, to be amused? She amused you.”

“She did, bless her!” said Miss Howe.

“It was her brains,” said the Baxter girl.

“A beautiful creature,” said Mr. Flood slowly.

“Not she!” The lady behind him was smiling. “She made you think so. She made men think so. But how? That intrigued me. Oh, she was prettyish: but that was all. I used to watch her——”

“Envy?” said he.

“No, not envy,” said that woman slowly. “She was too—innocent—how could one envy? She didn’t know her own strength. She said—‘Don’t hurt me,’ with a sword at her side.”

“Excalibur.” It came from Mr. Flood. “Magic.”

“No, Madala—just Madala.” Miss Howe sighed. “It’s no good, Anita, you can’t give us back Madala.”

But my cousin, looking at them, laughed in her turn.

“Madala? You fools! You’ve never had her. But you shall! Oh, wait! My books are dull, aren’t they? Yet you’ll be here, you know, every month, thick as bees, to listen to me. A chapter a month, that’s all I’ll give to you. _I_ don’t write three novels a year. But you’ll come, you’ll come. Proof? There’s plenty of proof. See here.”

She went swiftly across to the outer room. There was a large carved desk standing on the little table by the window. She picked it up. It was too big for her. It filled her arms so that she staggered under the weight.

“Oh, Kent!” she called.

He came back to the foggy room with a visible wrench.

“Here, that’s too heavy for you. Let me.” He took it from her.

“The table—here. Thank you, oh, thank you, Kent.” She veiled her voice as she spoke to him. “It’s heavy—it’s so full—books—papers——”

He put it down for her and nodded, and was straying away again when she stopped him.

“Kent! Don’t sit by yourself. We”—her voice was for him alone—“we’re talking about—her. I was going to show them—Kent, stay here with us.”

He waited while she talked to him. And she talked very sweetly and kindly. She was the quiet, chiffony little creature again with the pretty, pure voice. _I_ couldn’t make her out. She looked up at him and said something too low for me to catch, and then—

“There’s your chair. Isn’t that always your chair?” And so left him and turned to the table and the box and the others.

But he did not take the saddle-bag near Anita’s own seat. He looked irresolutely from one to another of the group that watched Anita fumbling with her keys. He looked, and his face softened, at Great-aunt, muttering over her needles. He looked at the empty chair beside me. He looked at me and found me watching him. Then, as I smiled at him just a little, he came to me and sat down. But he said nothing to me, and so I was quiet too.

But Anita was busy, hands and eyes and tongue all busy.

“When she married, you know, in that hole-and-corner fashion——” Then, as if in answer, though nobody had spoken—“Well, what else was it, when nobody knew?—when even I didn’t know——”

There was a movement in the chair beside me, and turning, I caught the ending of a glance towards my cousin. A new look, I found it, on that passive face, a roused and wondering and scornful look that transformed it. But, even as I caught it, it faded again to that other look of bleak indifference, a look to know and dread on any creature’s face, a look that must not stay on any fellow-creature’s face. I knew that well enough. So I said the first words that came, in my lowest voice, lest they should hear.

But they were talking. They did not hear.

“I’m sure that Great-aunt knew.” Indeed I thought so. I think that Great-aunt would always be kind and guessing with a girl. Then I wondered at myself for daring it and thought nervously—‘He’ll snub me. He’ll be right to snub me——’

But he looked across at Great-aunt kindly and said, in just such a withdrawn voice as mine—

“Yes, of course, if ever there was a time when——” Then he half smiled. “Poor old lady! But she’s changed. She used to be so brisk and managing, more like fifty than seventy. But this year’s aged her. She wanted, you know, to give some pearls—her own pearls. But pearls spell sorrow. And Anita would have objected. She told me all about it.”

“She was speaking of them tonight.” We both turned again and looked at her. She had dropped her knitting, or it had slipped from her knee, and she sat in her chair staring down at it with a terrible, comical air of helplessness. Then she caught his eye and forgot the knitting and nodded at him.

“I think—” I said, “I don’t think she understands. She asked me—she forgets I’m a stranger. She asked me——” I broke off. I couldn’t say to him—‘She asked me about Miss Grey and she doesn’t realize that she’s dead.’ One’s afraid of the brutality of words. But he understood. There was a simplicity about him that re-assured one. And he never said—‘It’s Anita’s business. It’s not your business,’ as anyone else might have done. He just said, once again—

“Poor old lady!” and hesitated a minute. Then he got up and went across to her and picked up her wools. I don’t think the others noticed him go. Anita didn’t. She was talking too fast.

“—left a trunk-full of papers and so on. I’d often stored boxes for her. Somehow it never got sent down. I came across it only yesterday. I thought to myself that there was no harm in putting things straight. You know I’m literary executor? Oh yes. She said to me soon after her marriage, half in joke, that she supposed she had got to make a will—and what about her MSS.? ‘I can’t have _him_ worried.’ I offered at once. You see I know so exactly her attitude in literature. There’s a good deal of unpublished stuff—early stuff. But all in hopeless confusion. Tumbled up with bills and programmes and one or two drafts of letters—or so I imagine. She had that annoying habit—that ugly modern habit—of beginning without any invocation, and never a date. But there’s one letter—there’s the draft of a letter that’s important from my point of view.” She broke off with a half laugh. “It sounds a ridiculous statement to make about Madala Grey of all people, but do you know that she couldn’t express herself at all easily on paper?”

Miss Howe nodded.

“Do I know? I’ve known her re-write a letter half a dozen times before she got it to her liking—no, not business letters, letters to her intimates. A most comical trick. Scribble, scribble, scribble—slash! and then crunch goes the sheet into a ball, into the grate, or near it, till it looked as if she were playing snow-balls, and then Madala begins again—and again—and again. Yet she talked well. She talked easily.”

“Isn’t that in keeping?” Mr. Flood struck in. “She didn’t express so much herself in her speech as the mood of the moment.”

“As the mood of the companion of the moment more likely,” the blonde lady corrected.

He nodded agreement.

“But for herself—go to her books.”

“Or her letters—her careful, conscientious letters. But she was careless about her drafts,” said Anita significantly.

Mr. Flood looked at her curiously.

“What’s up that sleeve of yours, Anita?”

She was quick.

“You shall read it, in its place. But the trouble is——” She hesitated. She gave the little nervous cough that always ushered in her public lectures. “We’ve all written books,” she said, “all except you, Blanche——”

The blonde lady blinked her sleepy eyes.

“You’re all so strenuous,” she purred. “I love to watch you being strenuous. So soothing.”

“Well, I was going to say, it’s easy enough to end a book, but have you ever got to the beginning? I never have. One steps backward, and backward again——”

“I know,” cried the Baxter girl. “Till you get tired of it at last and begin writing from where you are, but you never really get your foot on the starting-point, on the spring-board, as you might say.”

“That’s it. Yes, Jasper, I’ve got material up my sleeve, but frankly, I don’t know how to place it. I don’t know where to begin. The facts of her life, her conversation, her literary work, her letters—I go on adding to my material till I am overwhelmed with all that I have got to say about her. But I don’t want to begin with facts. Facts are well enough, but think how one can twist them! I want the woman behind the facts. I want the answer to the question that is the cause of a biography such as mine is to be—the question—‘What was Madala Grey?’ Not who, mark you, but further back, deeper into herself—‘_What_ was Madala Grey?’”

“Why, a genius,” said the Baxter girl glibly.

Anita neither assented nor dissented.

“Ah—” she said, frowning, “but that’s not the beginning either. At once we take our step backward again—‘What is genius?’”

“Isn’t talent good enough?” said Mr. Flood acidly.

“But does one mean talent?” She was still frowning. “Everyone’s got talent. I’m sick of talent. But she—she mayn’t be a great one—how she’d have laughed at being called a great one!—but she makes her dolls live. And isn’t that the blood-link between the greatest gods and the littlest gods? Life-givers? Life-makers? Oh, I only speak for myself; but she made her book-world real to me, therefore for me she had genius. Whether or not I convince you is the test of whether my life-work, my _Life_ of her—fails or succeeds.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t trust it to Madala?” said Miss Howe softly.

“Trust what?”

“To convince us.”

She answered, suspicious rather than comprehending, for indeed Miss Howe’s tone was very smooth—

“What do you mean? _I_’m writing her life.”

Miss Howe was inscrutable.

“Of course you are. Fire ahead. Genius, wasn’t it?”

Anita shrugged her shoulders.

“What’s in a name? It’s the quality itself that fascinates me. I want to account for it. I want to trace it to its source. Worth doing, isn’t it? But do you realize the difficulties? Sometimes I feel hopeless. I’ve known her five years, and her books I know by heart, and I’m only just beginning to decide whether to call her a romantic or a realist.”

“A realist. Look at _Eden Walls_,” said the Baxter girl.

“A romantic. Look at _The Resting-place_,” said Miss Howe.

Mr. Flood over-rode them.

“Dear ladies, you confuse the terms. It amazes me how people always confuse the terms. Your so-called realist, your writer who depicts what we call reality, the outward life, that is, of flesh and dirt and misery—don’t you see that he is in truth a romantic—a man (or woman) who lives in a fair world of his own, a paradise of the imagination? Out of that secure world of his he peers curiously at ours, and writes of it as we dare not write, writes down every sordid, garish, tragic-comic detail. Your so-called realist can afford the humour of Rabelais, the horror of Dostoevsky, the cheerful flesh and blood of Fielding. Why shouldn’t he be truthful? It’s not his world. Don’t you see? But your so-called romantic, he lives in this real world. He knows it so well that he has to shut his eyes or he would die of its reality. So he escapes into the world of romance, the world of beauty within his own mind—nowhere but in his own mind. Who is our dreamer of dreams? Shelley, the realist! Blake jogged elbows with poverty and squalor all his life, and he was the prophet and the king of all spirits. Don’t you see? And Goethe—the biographers will tell you that Goethe began as a realist and ended as a romantic. I say it was the other way round. What did he know of reality in the twenties? Its discovery was the romantic adventure of his young genius. But when he was old and worldly and wise—then he wrote his romances, to escape from his own knowledge. Oh, I tell you, you should turn the words round. Now take Shakespeare——”

“It’s not fair to take Shakespeare,” said Miss Howe. “It’s the Elephant and the Crawfishes over again. Let’s keep to the crawfishes! Let’s keep to our own generation!”

“Well, if I were Anita I should begin by showing Madala as a romantic—as the young romantic producing the most startlingly realistic book we’ve had for a decade. Indeed to me, you know, her development is marked by her books in the sharpest way. It’s the young, the curious, the observant Madala in _Eden Walls_. The whole book is a shout of discovery, of young, horrified discovery, of the ugliness of life. It’s as if she said—‘Listen! Listen! These things actually happen to some people. Isn’t it awful?’ She dwells on it. She insists on every detail. She can’t get away from it. And yet she can hardly believe it, that young Madala. But in _Ploughed Fields_ already the tone’s changing. It’s a pleasanter book, a more sophisticated book. It interests profoundly, but it’s careful not to upset one—an advance, of course. Yet I, you know, hear our Madala’s voice in it still, an uneasy voice—‘Hush! Hush! These things happen to most people. Pretend not to notice.’ And in the last book, in the pretty, impossible romance, there you have your realist full-fledged—‘Shut your eyes! Come away quickly! These things are happening to _me_!’” He leant back again, folding his arms and dropping his chin. And then, because Miss Howe was looking at him as if she were amused—“I tell you I know. I recognize the symptoms. I’m a realist myself. That’s why I write romantic poetry. Have to. It’s that or drugs. How else shall one get through life?”

“Jasper!” said the blonde lady. But for once he didn’t turn to her. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t worry. Who’ll believe me?”

The Baxter girl was breathless.

“Oh, but I do. It’s a new Madala, of course. But I believe it explains her.”

“But the facts of her life don’t agree,” began Miss Howe.

“Ah, Anita’s got to make ’em,” said Mr. Flood languidly. “Isn’t that the art of biography?”

But Anita was deadly serious.

“You don’t begin far enough back. My spring-board is not—what is Madala? but—what is genius? How does it happen? Is it immaculate birth? or is it begotten of accident upon environment? That is to say—is it inspiration or is it experience? I speak of the divine fire, you understand, not of the capacity for resolving it into words or paint or stone. That’s craft, a very different thing. You say that Madala was not a genius in the big sense—yes, I’ll admit that even, for the argument’s sake—but even you will concede her the beginnings of it. So my difficulty is just the same. I’ve never believed in instinctive genius. Yet how can she, at twenty, have had the experience (that she had the craft is amazing enough) to cope with _Eden Walls_? Romantic curiosity isn’t enough explanation, Jasper! Look at her certainty of touch. Look at her detail. Look how she gets inside that woman’s mind. That’s the fascination of it. It’s such a document. Now how does she know it? That’s what intrigues me. Madala and a street woman! Where’s the connection? How does she get inside her? Because she does get inside her.”

“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady.

“It must be. You should have seen the letters she received! Amazing, some of them.”

“Anita, they amazed _her_. I remember her getting one while she was staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said—‘But, Lila, I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing, she says it’s true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’ You know, she was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who had read the book. But Madala always believed in people. I know she wrote to her. I believe she helped her. But she never told you much about her doings.”

“Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself is—how does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her wretched drab of a heroine thought and felt and suffered?”

“Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the explanation.”