Part 6

“It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal experience. Not in _Eden Walls_, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re discussing _Eden Walls_. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest rootlet of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing. But the older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less he trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination flags and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—as the recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions. It’s only the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do you think that Madala did? Look at _Eden Walls_. Remember what we know about her. Can’t you see that the skeleton of _Eden Walls_ is Madala’s own life? Consider her history. She leaves what seems to have been a happy childhood behind her and sets out on adventure—very young. So does the woman in _Eden Walls_. The parallel’s exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the _Breckonridge_ of the novel are the same place. The house, the lane, the country-side, she doesn’t trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s adventure is ushered in by calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist transmuting the mere physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to the woman in _Eden Walls_. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the sense of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that show that she was depending on her experience rather than on her imagination, fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case? Then, in America, she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere existence. So does the woman in _Eden Walls_. Madala does not go under. The woman in _Eden Walls_ does. It’s the first real difference. But I maintain that in reality the parallel still continues, that, in imagination, Madala did go under over and over again: that she had ever in front of her the ‘suppose, suppose,’ that, in drawing the woman in _Eden Walls_, she is saying to herself—‘Here, but for the grace of God, go I.’ And then, you know, when you think of her, hating that big city, saving up her pennies, and coming home at last in a passion of homesickness (if it was homesickness—sickness anyhow), can’t you see how it makes her write of that other woman? It’s the gift, the genius, stirring in her: born, not immaculately, but of her own literal experience. Jasper’s right—you can always make facts fit if you think them out: and because I possess that underlying shadow-work (I admit it’s no more) of fact to guide me in deciphering her method in the first book, therefore, in the second book and the third book, I find it safe to _deduce_ facts to cover the stories, even when I don’t possess them. I consider that I’m justified, that _Eden Walls_ justifies me. Don’t you?”

“It’s plausible,” said Mr. Flood thoughtfully.

“Oh, it’s convincing,” said the Baxter girl reverently. “I feel I’ve never known Madala Grey before. What it will be when you get it into shape, Miss Serle——”

“In fact,” said Miss Howe, “there’s only one drawback——”

“And that?” said Anita swiftly.

“Only Madala’s own account.”

“She never discussed her methods,” said Anita sharply.

“Just so! You’re not the only person who’s—pumped. I remember seeing her once surrounded, in her lion days. I remember her ingenuous explanations. She did her best to oblige them—‘Honestly, I don’t know. One just sits down and imagines.’ And then—‘That’s quite easy. But it’s awfully difficult writing it down.’ That’s the explanation, Nita. A deliberate, even unconscious self-exploitation is all nonsense. Madala’s not clever enough.”

“Not clever enough!”

“No. You’re much cleverer than she was. You have twice her brains. You can’t think, Anita, what brains you’ve got. You’ve got far too many to understand a simple person. I don’t agree, you know, with ‘genius.’ I can’t throw a word like that about so lightly. But as far as it went with Madala, it was the same sort of genius that makes a crocus push in the spring. Your theory—oh, it’s plausible, as Jasper says, but don’t you see that it destroys all the charm of her work? It’s the innocence of her knowledge, the simplicity of her attitude to her own insight that to me is moving. She touches pitch, yet her fingers are clean. It’s her view of her story that arrests one, not her story, not her facts, not her mere plot.”

“No, the plot is conventional, I’ll grant you that. She was always content with old bottles.”

“Yes, and when the new wine burst them and made a mess on the carpet, Madala was always so surprised and indignant.”

Mr. Flood giggled.

“Pained is the word, dear lady—surprised and pained. Do you remember when _Eden Walls_ was banned?”

“I don’t suppose she talked to you about it, Jasper,” said Miss Howe sharply.

“I? I was never of her counsels. But I got my amusement out of the affair. Dear, delightful woman? She behaved like a schoolgirl sent to Coventry. I remember congratulating her on the advertisement, and she would hardly speak to me. But it suited her, the blush.”

“_Wasn’t_ it an advertisement!” said the Baxter girl longingly.

“If one could have got her to see it,” said Anita. “But no, she insisted on being ashamed of herself. She said to me once that the critics had ‘read in’ things that she had never dreamed of—that it made her doubt her own motives—that she felt dirtied and miserable. And yet she wouldn’t alter one of those scenes. Obstinate! She could be very obstinate.”

“Oh, which scenes?” The Baxter girl stuck her elbows on the table and her chin in her fists. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, then, Miss Serle, did you—? did she come to you in the early days? Did you help her too?”

“My daughter—very kind to young people!”

It was a mere mutter, but I recognized the swing of the phrase. Anita didn’t. She was busy with the Baxter girl.

“I don’t say that there would be no Madala Grey today if I——”

“_But_——” said Mr. Flood.

“_But_—” said Miss Howe, “she’s Anita’s discovery. We’re never to forget that, are we, darling?”

“Oh, I knew that,” said the Baxter girl, trying to be tactful. “But _Eden Walls_ was written before you knew her, wasn’t it? I understood—I didn’t know, I mean,” she explained to them, “that Miss Serle had—blue-pencilled——”

“I did and I didn’t.” Anita laughed, as if in spite of herself. “I confess I thought at the time that it needed revision. Mind you, I never questioned the quality, but I knew what the public would stand and what it wouldn’t. Of course, I didn’t want the essentials altered. But there were certain cuts——However, nothing would move her.”

“That’s funny. She never gave me the impression that she believed in herself so strongly.”

“Oh, her _pose_ was diffidence,” said the blonde lady.

“But she didn’t believe in herself. It was obvious. When I went through her MS. and blue-pencilled, she was most grateful. She agreed to everything and took the MS. away to remodel.”

“And then?”

“I heard nothing more of her—for weeks. Finally I wrote and asked her to come and see me. She came. She was delightful. I had told her, you know, about the _Anthology_ the first time I met her. I remember that I was annoyed with myself afterwards. I’m not often indiscreet. But she had a—a knack—a way with her. I hardly know how to describe it.”

“One told her things,” said the Baxter girl.

“Just so. One told her things. And she had brought me a mass of material—some charming American verse (you remember? in the last section but one) that I had never come across. She had been reading for me at the British Museum in her spare time. I confess I was touched. We talked, I remember——” She sighed reminiscently. “It was not until she made a move to go that I recollected myself. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘and how about _Eden Walls_?’ She fidgeted. She looked thoroughly guilty. At last it came out. She hadn’t altered a line. She had tried her utmost. She had drafted and re-drafted. She had finally given it up in despair and just got work in some obscure newspaper office—‘a most absorbing office!’ But there—you know Madala when she’s interested—was interested——”

“Don’t,” said Miss Howe softly.

But Anita went on—

“‘Well but—’ I said to her—‘that’s all very well. But you’re not going to abandon _Eden Walls_, are you?’ Then it all came out. Yes, she was. She knew I was right. She wasn’t conceited. She quite saw that the book was useless. It just meant that she couldn’t write novels and that she mustn’t waste any more time. ‘But, my dear Miss Grey,’ I said, ‘you mean to say that you’d rather leave the book unpublished than alter a couple of chapters, remodel a couple of characters?’ ‘But I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t. They happened that way.’ ‘Then make them happen differently,’ I said. But no, she couldn’t. ‘Oh well,’ I said at last—‘if you’re so absolutely sure of yourself, if you’re prepared to set up your judgment——’ That distressed her. I can hear her now. ‘But I don’t set up my judgment. I’ll burn the wretched stuff tomorrow if you say it’s trash. I knew it would be, in my heart. But—I can’t alter it, because—because it happened that way.’ Then I had an idea. ‘To you?’ I said. She looked at me. She laughed. She said—‘Miss Serle, you’ve written ten books to my one. Don’t pretend you don’t know how a story happens.’” Anita nodded at us. “You see? Evasive. I think it was from that moment that I began to have my theory of her.”

“Well—and what next?” demanded Miss Howe.

“She would have said good-bye if I had let her. I stopped her. ‘Reconsider it,’ I said. She beamed at me, chastened but quite cheerful. ‘Oh, I’ll try another some day,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m not old enough. I was a fool to think I could.’ At that, of course, I gave in. I wasn’t going to lose sight of _Eden Walls_. I told her to bring it as it was and I’d see what I could do. As you know, Mitchell and Bent jumped at it.”

“But it was banned,” said the Baxter girl.

“Yes, but everybody read it. You can get it anywhere now. And I can say now—‘Thank the gods she didn’t touch it.’”

“Then she was right?”

“Of course she was right. I knew it all the time.”

“And she didn’t?”

“Of course she didn’t. Mine was critical knowledge. Hers the mere instinct of—whatever you choose to call it. I was afraid of the critics. She didn’t know enough to be afraid.”

“There’s something big about you, Anita!” said Miss Howe suddenly.

Mr. Flood gave the oblique flicker of eyes and mouth that was his smile.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “it fits her quite well.”

“What?” said Anita sharply.

“The mantle, dear lady.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Ah—_Gentle dullness ever loves a joke_. What, Beryl?”

“I don’t see,” the Baxter girl had harked back, “how you can call a book that has been banned conventional.”

“Only the plot——”

“Ah, that plot!” Nobody could snub Mr. Flood. “Think, dear lady! Village maiden—faithless lover—lights o’ London—unfortunate female—what more do you want?”

“Of course.” Anita resumed the reins. “It’s as old as _The Vicar of Wakefield_.”

“Oh, _that_!” The Baxter girl looked interested. “Do you know, I’ve never seen it. One of Irving’s shows, wasn’t it?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But they were all quite solemn, even Anita. But then she never did listen to the Baxter girl. She had talked straight through her sentences.

“But it’s not the material. It’s the way it’s handled. It’s never been done quite so thoroughly, from the woman’s point of view—so unadornedly. People are afraid of their ‘_poor girls_.’ There’s a formula that even the Immortals follow. They are all young and beautiful, and they all die. They must. They wouldn’t be tragic in continuation. But Madala’s woman doesn’t. That’s the point. There’s no pretence at making her a heroine. She’s just the ordinary stupidish sheep of a creature, ‘gone wrong.’ There’s no romantic halo, no love-glamour, no pity and terror, just the chronicle of a sordid life. And yet you can’t put the book down. At least I couldn’t put it down.”

“Do _you_ like it?” I said to Kent Rehan, as he paused beside me in his eternal pacing from room to room.

He looked at me oddly.

“I respect it,” he said. “I don’t like it. People misjudged——”

“If it had been the recognized love story”—Mr. Flood’s high voice silenced him—“the regularized irregularity, so to speak, it wouldn’t have been banned. It was the absence of a love story that the British public couldn’t forgive. It was cheated. It was shocked.”

“But there is a love story at the beginning, isn’t there?” I said. “I haven’t read far.”

Instantly the Baxter girl exhibited me—

“Yes, imagine! She hasn’t read it!”

“I’ve read _The Vicar of Wakefield_,” I said. And then I was annoyed that I had shown I was annoyed. But at once Miss Howe helped me. Miss Howe was always nice to me.

“How far have you got? Where the man tires of her? Ah, yes! Well, after that it’s just her struggle. She—she earns her living—in the inevitable way. She grows into a miser. She hoards.”

Mr. Flood looked acute.

“That’s what upset them. They don’t mind a Magdalen; but Magdalen unaware, unrepentant, Magdalen preserving her ill-gotten gains—no, that’s not quite nice.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe. “If anyone can’t feel the spirit it’s written in, the passion of pity—I think it’s the most pitiful thing I’ve ever read. It made me shiver. That wretched creature, saving and sparing——” And then to me, for I suppose I showed I was interested—“She wants to get away, you know, to get back into the country. It’s her dream. The homesickness——”

“I suppose such a woman could——?” said the Baxter girl.

“I used to argue it with Madala. Madala always said that, with some people, that animal craving for some special place was like love—a passion that could waste you. She said that every woman must have some devouring passion, for a man, or a child, or a place—_every_ woman. And that for a beaten creature like that, it would be _place_—the homing instinct of a cat or a bird. And mixed up with it, religion—the vague shadowy ideal of peace and cleanly beauty—all that the wretched creature tries to express in her phrase—‘getting out and living quiet’—that Madala typifies in the word ‘Eden.’ It meant much to Madala. Don’t you remember that passage towards the end of the book where she meets the man, the first man, and brings him home with her—and he doesn’t even recognize her, and she doesn’t even care.” She picked up a bundle of tattered proofs and turned them over. “Where is it? What an appalling hand she had!” She stood a moment, reading a page and pursing her lips. “Oh, well, what’s the use of reading it? We all know it.” She flung it down.

“Let me see,” I said to the Baxter girl. She drew it towards me. It was the first proof I’d ever seen. It was corrected till it was difficult to read. But I made it out at last.

With the closing of the door she dismissed him with one phrase for ever from her mind—

“And that’s that!”

She had long been accustomed thus to summarize her clients, dispassionately, as one classes beasts at a show; and she judged them, not by their clothing or their speech, not by the dark endured hours of their love or by the ticklish after-moment of the reckoning, but rather, as she hovered at the door with her provocative night smile dulled to a business friendliness, by their manner of leaving her.

Always there was the fever to be gone; but some went furtively, with cautious, tiptoe feet that set the stairs a-squeak with mockery. Her smile did not change for the swaggerer who stayed long and took his luck-kiss twice, but her eyes would harden. Mean, cheating mean, to kiss again and never pay again! And some she watched and smiled upon who left her in a brutal silence. For them she had no resentment, rather the sullenness beneath her smile reached out to the revulsion of their bearing as to something welcomed and akin. And some gave back her smile with kindly words—and those she hated.

But when, after his manner, the man had gone, she had, as always, her ritual.

She locked her easy door and pulling out the key, put it before her on the table at the bedside. Left and right of it she laid her money down, adding to the night’s gains the meagre leavings of her purse. Left and right the little piles grew, one heaped high for the needs of her day and her night, for food and roof and livery, and one a thin scatter of coppers and small silver that took long weeks to change into the dear, the exquisite, the Eden-opening gold. It was the bigger pile that she thrust so carelessly back into her bag, and the scattered ha’pence that she warmed in the cup of her two hands, holding them, jingle-jingle, at her ears, dropping them to her lap again to count anew, piling them before her to a little, narrowing tower, before she opened the child’s jewel-case beside her, and, lifting the sheaf of letters that she never read but kept still and would always keep, for the savage pain they gave her when her eyes saw them and her fingers touched them, she poured out the new treasure upon the sacred hoard beneath.

Tenpence saved—and yesterday a shilling! Five shillings last week. Fifty pounds! She would soon have fifty pounds!

She put away the box of money, and so, surrendering at last to the awful bodily fatigue, lay down again upon the tousled bed, not to sleep—her sleeping time was later in the day—but to shut her eyes.

For, by the amazing pity of God, a secret that is not every man’s, was hers—the secret of the refuge appointed, behind shut eyes, of the return into eternity that is the shutting down of lids upon the eyes. The window glare, the screaming street below, the blank soiled ceiling with the flies, the walls, the unending pattern of the hateful walls, the clock, the finery, the beastly scents, the loathed familiars of stuff and wood and brass that blinked and creaked at her like voices crying—“Misery! misery! misery!”—these were her world. Yet not her only world. She, who was so dim and blunted a woman-thing, could pass, with the warm dark velvet touch of dropping lids, not into the nullity of sleep, but into the grey place, limitless, timeless, where consciousness knows nothing of the flesh.

She shut her eyes with the sigh of a tired dog, and instantly her soul lay back and floated, resting.

There was no time, no thought, no feeling. There was peace—quiet—greyness. At unmeasured intervals realization washed over her like waves, waves of peace—quiet—greyness. Greyness—she worshipped the blessed greyness. She wanted to give it a beloved name and knew none. ‘When I am dead!’—‘For ever and ever, Amen!’—So she came nearest to ‘Eternity.’

Peace—quiet—greyness: greyness enduring for ever, that could yet be rent asunder like a temple veil and let in misery—the window glare, the reeking room, the clodding footsteps, the fingers tapping at her door—a frail eternity whose walls were slips of flesh.

She called harshly—

“Get out! Get away! Put it down outside then, can’t you?”

There was a mutter and the clank of a scuttle-lid, and a thud. The footsteps shuffled out of hearing.

She shut her eyes again.

Peace—quiet—greyness. The waves were rocking her.

She did not dream. There are, by that same pity of God, no dreams permitted in the place of refuge. But, as she lay in peace, she watched her own memorial thoughts rising about her, one by one, like bubbles in a glass, like cocks crowing in the dark of the dawn.

A white road ... the hill-top wind panting down it like a runner ... dust ... bright blue sky ... sky-blue succory in the gutter ... succory is so difficult to pick ... tough ... it leaves a green cut on one’s finger ... succory in a pink vase on the mantel-piece ... the fire’s too hot for flowers ... hot buttered toast ... the armchair wants mending ... the horsehair tickles one’s ears as one lies back in it and warms one’s toes and watches the rain drowning the fields outside ... empty winter fields, all tousled and tussocky from cow dung ... grey skies ... snow ... not a soul in sight ... and succory in a pink vase on the mantel-piece ... because one’s back in Eden ... summer and winter are all one in Eden ... picking buttercups in Eden as one used to do ... all the fields grown full of buttercups ... fifty buttercups make a bunch ... fifty golden buttercups with the King’s head on them ... hurry up with the buttercups ... one more bunch of buttercups will buy back Eden—Eden—ah!

So, with a long gasping sigh would come the end. “Eden—” and the longing would be upon her, tearing like a wild beast at her eyes and her throat and her heart—“I want to go home. Oh, God, let me go home! Let me out! I want to go home——”

The chapter ended.

“And does she?” I looked up at the Baxter girl. “I’m always afraid of a bad ending. Does she get back in the end?”

The Baxter girl fluttered through the pages.

“The money’s stolen first—a man takes it—while she’s asleep——Oh, it’s beastly, that scene. She has to save it all up again. It takes her years. But—oh, yes, she does go back.”

“The railway journey,” said Miss Howe. “Do you remember?”

“If you want happy endings”—the Baxter girl flattened out the last page with a jerk—“there you are!”

I read over her shoulder. The strong scent that hung about her seemed to float between me and the page.

“Here we are—where she gets to the station. ‘Eden,’ Madala calls it, but the woman calls it ‘Breckonridge.’

At last and at last the station-board with the familiar name flashed past her window. She thrilled. The station lamps repeated it as the train slowed down. She thought—how long the platform’s grown! ... a bookstall! ... a bookstall on each side! ... there used not to be ... wasn’t the station smaller?...

She spoke to the ticket collector shyly, blushing, like a girl going to an assignation and thinking that all the world must know it.

He answered, already catching at the ticket of the traveller behind her—

“How far to Breckonridge? A mile, maybe—but you get the tram at the corner.”

She stared. She would have questioned him again, but the throng of people pressed her forward.

A tram through the village? ... queer! ... not that it mattered to her ... she would take the old short cut through the fields outside the station yard.... There was a stile ... and a wild cherry tree....

She left the yard, the unfamiliar yard with asphalt and motors and a great iron bridge, crossed the road, and stopped bewildered.

There were no fields.

‘Station Road.’ The labelled yellow villas were like a row of faces. Eyes, nose, mouth—windows, porch, steps—steps like teeth. They grinned.

In a sort of panic she ran past them down the road, a lumbering, clumsy woman. She trod on her skirt, and recovered herself with difficulty. She heard a small boy laugh and call after her. She clambered on to the tram.

“I want to go to the village—to Breckonridge——”

“It’s all Breckonridge. ’Ow far?”

She stared.

“I don’t remember. He said a mile.”

“Town ’All, I expect.” He took his toll and passed on.

She turned vaguely to a neighbour.

“Town Hall? I don’t remember. The road’s all different Where are the fields?”

The neighbour nodded.