Part 7

“Built over. When were you here last? Thirty years? My word, you’ll find changes! I notice it, even in five. Very full it’s getting. Good train service. My husband can get to his office under the hour.”

She said dazedly—

“It was—it is—a little village.”

The woman laughed.

“I daresay. But how long ago?”

“There were fields,” she said under her breath. “There were flowers——”

“Here’s the Town Hall. Didn’t you want the Town Hall?”

Unsteadily she rose and got out. The tram clanged forward.

She stood on an island where four roads met and looked about her. The sun stared down at her, a brazen city sun. The asphalt was hot and soft under her feet. Road-menders were at work in the fair-way. They struck alternately at the chisel between them and it was as if the rain of blows fell upon her. She felt stupid and dizzy. She did not know where to turn. There was nothing left of her village, and yet the place was familiar. There were drab houses and rows of shops and a stream of traffic, and the figures of women and men—menacing, impersonal figures of men—that hurried towards her down the endless streets.

“Well?” said the Baxter girl.

“But that’s not the _end_?” I said.

The Baxter girl looked at me oddly.

“Why not?” And then—“How else could it end? How would you make it end?”

“Oh, I don’t mean——” I began. I hesitated. “I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.

That was the truth. At the time I couldn’t follow it. It moved me. It swept me along. But whether it was good or bad I didn’t know. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was driving at. I felt in a vague way that the people at home wouldn’t have liked it.

“What does it mean?” I said to the Baxter girl.

“That you can’t eat your cake and have it, I suppose. You can get out of Eden, but you can’t get back.”

Anita answered her contemptuously—

“Is that all it means to you?”

And yet we had spoken very softly. But Anita had eyes that ate up every movement in a room, and her small pretty ears never seemed to miss a significant word though ten people were talking. I had seen her glance uneasily at us and again at the two in the other room. I knew Great-aunt’s mutter was too low even for her, and Kent Rehan only nodded now and then, but even that annoyed her. She lifted her own voice to be sure that they should hear all that she said, as if afraid lest, even for a moment, she should be left out of their thoughts.

“Oh!” she said loudly and contemptuously, “I tell you what _I_ see.”

She succeeded, if that pleased her. Kent Rehan raised his head and stared across at her with that impersonal expression of attention that, I was beginning to realize, could always anger her on any face. She had said a little while ago that she only cared for Miss Grey as an artist, and I believe that she believed it. But I don’t think—I shall never think it true. I think Anita depended—depends, on other people more than she dreams. Poor Anita! I can see her now, her whole personality challenging those dark abstracted eyes. But she spoke to the Baxter girl—

“When Madala Grey chose _Eden Walls_ for her title—when she flung it in the public face——”

I saw him give a shrug of fatigue or distaste—I couldn’t tell which. Great-aunt, who had been sitting, her head on one side, with her sharp poll-parrot expression, crooked her finger at me. I went across to her and behind me I heard the Baxter girl—

“You talk as if she were in a passion——”

And Anita—

“So she was. I’m telling you. It’s the wrongs, not of one woman, but of all women, of all ages of women, that burn behind it.”

“Votes for Women!” It was Mr. Flood’s voice.

There was a laugh and I lost an answer. I caught only a vehement blur of words, because Great-aunt had me by the wrist.

“Chatter, chatter! I can’t hear ’em. What’s my daughter talking about?”

I hesitated.

“About books, Auntie.”

“Whose books?” she pounced.

“Some writer, Auntie.”

“What’s she saying about her, eh?” She held me bent down to her. I glanced at Kent Rehan. He was listening to us. I felt harried.

“About—oh—whether a genius—whether she was a genius——”

“Madala, eh?”

“Yes, Auntie.”

I thought I heard him sigh. And at that—why, I don’t know—I turned on him. I was rude, I believe. I sounded silly and cruel, I know. Yet, heaven knows, that that was the last thing I wanted to be.

I said angrily to him—

“Oh, why do you stand there and listen? Don’t you see that I can’t help myself? Why don’t you go away? What good can it do you to stay here, to stay and listen to it all?”

Then I stopped because he looked at me for a moment, and flushed, and then did turn away, back again to his old dreary post at the street window.

Great-aunt chuckled.

“That’s right, little Jenny. Take your own way with them, Jenny!”

I said—

“Let me go, Auntie dear,” and I loosed her hand from my wrist and went after him; for of course the instant the words were out of my mouth I was ashamed of myself. I couldn’t think what had possessed me. I was badly ashamed of myself.

I came to him and said—

“Mr. Rehan—I don’t mean to be rude. Great-aunt—she doesn’t understand. She made me talk. It wasn’t rudeness; but you stood there, and I knew—I thought I knew, what you must think, must be thinking—” (but ‘feeling’ was the word I meant) “and I was sorry. I was angry because I was sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

He said—

“It’s all right. I didn’t think you rude.”

Then I said—

“But I meant it. Why do you stay? What good can it do you? Why don’t you go away from it all?”

And he—

“Where is there to go? I’ve been tramping all day.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Up and down streets. It’s—it’s blinding, it’s stifling——”

“The fog is,” I said quickly. But we didn’t mean the fog.

He let himself down into the low wicker chair. I stood leaning against the sill, watching him.

“You’re just dead tired,” I said.

He nodded. Then, as if something in my words had stung him—

“Where else? I’ve always come here. Every month. It was natural to come.”

“But now” I said (and I was so urgent with him because of all their talk that drummed still in my mind like a wasps’ nest)—“I’d go away if I were you. What good does it do you? They talk. It’s—it’s rather hateful. I’ve been listening. I’d go.”

“Where?” he said again. And I—

“Haven’t you anyone—at home?”

But as I asked I knew that he hadn’t. He had the look. Oh, he wore good clothes and I knew he wasn’t poor. But it was written all over him that he looked after himself and did it expensively and badly. He had, too, that other look that goes with it—of a man who has never found anyone more interesting to him than himself. And the queer part was that it didn’t seem selfish in him—and I’m sure it wasn’t. It was just like the way a child takes you for granted, and tells you about its own big affairs, and never guesses that you have your own little affairs too. I suppose it was a fault in him; but it made me like him. And he talked to me simply and almost as if he needed helping out; as if he’d been just anybody. I never had to help out anyone before: it had always been the other way round. I’d thought, too, that celebrated people were always superior and brilliant and overwhelming, like Anita and Mr. Flood. But he wasn’t. He was as simple as A, B, C. I liked him. I did like him. I felt happier, more at peace, standing there with him than I had felt since I had been in Anita’s house. I think he would have gone on talking to me too, if it hadn’t been for the Baxter girl. She spoilt it. She tilted back her chair, yawning, and so caught sight of us, and laughed, and leaning over to Miss Howe, whispered in her ear. She was a crazy girl. At once I got up and came across to them, panic-stricken, hating her. I had to. I didn’t want him worried, and you never knew what hateful thing the Baxter girl wouldn’t say, and think that she was pleasing you.

But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising excitedly in answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter girl.

“Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of her promise in _Ploughed Fields_. It’s as good as _Eden Walls_ in matter and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been her master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of pearls, and she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth solving? Won’t people read the _Life_ for that if for nothing else? Am I the only person who has asked what happened to her between her second and her third books?”

“I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of romance.”

“I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we mean the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She has been walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in her case, the all-obscuring fact?”

“She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one thing. Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.”

“Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief. “Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was announced——”

“As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.

“—and she’d been so absent-minded I couldn’t get anything out of her. I thought I knew her well enough to tease her. I had told her all _my_ affairs. So—‘I believe you’re in love,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll get over it. It’s a phase.’ Was there any harm in that? It was only repeating what you had said to me about her, you know,” she reminded the blonde lady. “But she froze instantly. She made no comment. She just changed the subject. But I felt as if I had been introduced to a new Madala. I wished I hadn’t said it.”

“You are a little fool, Beryl,” said the blonde lady tolerantly.

“But she _was_ altered,” insisted the Baxter girl. “The old Madala would have laughed.”

“Yes, she was altered,” said Anita. “Her whole attitude to herself and her work changed that spring. How she horrified me one day. It was soon after _Ploughed Fields_ came out, and we were talking about her new book, at least I was, pumping a little, I confess, and suddenly she said—‘Anita, I don’t think I’ll write any more. This stuff—’ she had her hands on _Eden Walls_, ‘it’s harsh, it’s ugly; and so’s _Ploughed Fields_. Isn’t it?’ ‘It’s true to life,’ I said, ‘that’s the triumph of it.’ ‘Is it?’ she said. She looked at me in an uneasy sort of way. And then—‘I’d like to write a kind book, a beautiful book.’ I told her that she couldn’t, that she was a realist. ‘That’s why,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll write any more.’ I laughed, of course. Anybody would have laughed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I mean it. I haven’t an idea in my head. I’m tired and empty. I think I shall go away for a wander. There’s always the country, anyhow.’ ‘Well, Madala,’ I said, ‘I think you’re ungrateful. You’re a made woman. You’ve got your name: you’ve got your line: you’ve got your own gift——’ ‘Oh, that!’ she said, as if she were flicking off a fly. I was irritated. It was so arrogant. ‘What more do you want?’ I asked her. ‘What more _can_ you want?’ She said—‘I don’t know,’ looking at me, you know, as if she expected me to tell her. I disliked that mood of hers. One did expect, with a woman of her capacity, to be entertained as it were, to have ideas presented, not to be asked to provide them. Then she began, à propos of nothing at all—‘If I ever marry——’ That startled me. We’d never touched on the subject before. ‘Oh, my dear Madala,’ I said, ‘you must never think of anything so—so unnecessary. For you, of all people, it would be fatal. It would waste your time, it would distract your thoughts, it would narrow your outlook, it would end by spoiling your work altogether. I’ve seen it happen so often. It’s terrible to me even to think of a woman with a future like yours, throwing it away just for the——’ She interrupted me. ‘I wouldn’t marry for the sake of getting married, if you mean that. Not even for children.’”

“You didn’t mean that, did you, Anita?” said Miss Howe smiling a little.

“Certainly not. But I had always been afraid that she might be tempted to marry for the adventure’s sake, for the mere experience, for the——”

“Copy,” said Mr. Flood. “I always said so. Yes?”

“‘Oh well, Madala,’ I said to her, ‘you know what I think. I’m not one to quote Kipling, but—_He travels fastest who travels alone_.’ She looked at me so strangely. ‘Alone?’ she said. ‘Alone. Its the cruellest word in the language. There’s drowning in it.’ ‘Well, without conceit, Madala,’ I said, ‘I can affirm that I have been alone, spiritually, all my life.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘but you’re different.’ And that,” Anita broke off, “was what I liked in Madala. She did recognize differences. She could appreciate. She wasn’t absorbed in herself. She said to me quite humbly—‘I’m not strong, I suppose; but I don’t suffice myself. I can’t bear myself sometimes. I can’t bear the burden of myself. Can’t you understand?’ ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m a modern woman, and the modern woman is a pioneer. She’s the Columbus of her own individuality. She must be. It’s her career. It’s her destiny.’ She answered me pettishly, like a naughty child—‘I don’t want to be a pioneer.’ ‘You’re that,’ I said, ‘already, whether you want to be or not.’ Then she said to me, with that dancing, impish look that her eyes and her lips and her white teeth used to manage between them—‘All right! If I’ve got to be, I will. But I’ll be a pioneer in my own way. I swear I’ll shock the lot of you.’”

“_Oho!_” said Mr. Flood with exaggerated unction.

“Exactly!” Anita gave his agreement such eager welcome. “That put me on the qui-vive. Knowing her as I did, it was a very strong hint. I awaited developments. Frankly, I was prepared for a scandal, a romance, anything you please in the way of extravagance. That’s why the Carey marriage, that tameness, upset me so. It was not what I was expecting. Really, I don’t know which was more of a shock to me, _The Resting-place_ or the marriage. Hardly had I recovered from the one when——”

“Oh, _The Resting-place_ was the shock of my life too.” He giggled. “I mourned, I assure you that I mourned over it. That opening, you know—‘There was once’—And the end again—‘So they were married and had children and lived happily ever after.’ Pastiche! And then to be invited to wade through a conscientious account of how they achieved it! Too bad of Madala! As if the poor but virtuous artist’s model weren’t a drug on the market already! And the impecunious artist himself—_stooping_, you know! Oh, I sat in ashes.”

Miss Howe clapped her hands.

“Jasper, I love you. I _do_ love you. Did she pull your leg too? Both legs? She did! She did! Oh, there’s only one Madala!”

Mr. Flood’s vanity was in his cheeks while she rattled on.

“Darling Jasper, I thought better of you! Can’t you see the whole thing’s a skit? Giving the jampot public what they wanted! Why, it’s been out a year and they’re sucking the spoon still. It’s the resting-place! Ask the libraries! Oh, can’t you see?”

“If it is parody,” said Mr. Flood slowly, “then, I admit, it’s unique.”

“What else? You’ll not deny humour to her?”

“I do!” the blonde lady nodded her head. “Once a woman is in love she’s quite hopeless.”

“I don’t see how parody could be in question,” Anita broke in. “Anybody reading the book carefully must see that she’s in earnest. That’s the tragedy of it.”

“The literary tragedy?”

“Not only literary. The psychological value is enormous. It’s not art, it’s record. It’s photography. That happened. That happened, tragically, to Madala. Oh, not the trimmings, of course, not the happy-ever-after. But to me it’s perfectly clear that that lapse into _Family Herald_ romance has had its equivalent in Madala’s own life. I’ve always felt a certain weakness in her character, you know—a certain sentimentalism.”

“In the author of _Eden Walls_?” said Miss Howe contemptuously.

“No, dear lady! But in the author of _The Resting-place_.” Mr. Flood had recovered himself.

“Skit, I tell you, skit!” she insisted. And they continued to bicker in undertones while Anita summed up the situation.

“No, my theory is this—Madala Grey met some man——”

“Carey?” asked Mr. Flood, dividing his allegiance.

“No, Carey comes later. There was—an episode——”

“Episodes?” he amended.

“Possibly. But an episode anyhow, that I place myself at the end of the _Ploughed Fields_ period. It may have been later, it may have been the following summer while she was working at _The Resting-place_. I’m open to conviction there. But an episode there must have been. In _The Resting-place_ she wrote it down as it ought to have happened.”

“Why ought?”

“Well, obviously it didn’t happen or she wouldn’t have become Mrs. Carey.”

“The gentleman loved and rode away, you mean?”

“Something of the sort. Something went wrong.”

“I see.” Miss Howe was interested. “It’s a theory, anyhow. And then in sheer savage irony at her own weakness——”

“Not a bit. In sheer weak longing——”

“I see. If your theory is correct—I don’t know what you base it on——”

“Internal evidence,” said Anita airily.

“Then I can imagine that _The Resting-place_ was a relief to write. Poor Madala!”

“And then,” concluded Anita triumphantly, “then appears Carey, and she’s too worn out, too exhausted with her own frustrated emotions to care what happens. The book’s in her head still, and she her own heroine. He appears to her—I admit that it’s possible that even Carey might appear to her—as a refuge, a resting-place.”

“Yes, but you don’t like Mr. Carey,” said the Baxter girl. “But if Madala did? Isn’t it possible that in Madala’s eyes——? Why shouldn’t the hero be Mr. Carey himself?”

Anita’s eyes were bright with the cold anger that she always showed at the name.

“My good girl, you know nothing about John Carey, or you’d rule that out. Have you ever seen him? I thought not. And yet you _have_ seen him. All day. Every day. When you talk of the man in the street, whom do you mean? What utterly common-place face is in your mind? Shall I tell you what is in mine? John Carey. Ordinary! Ordinary! The apotheosis of the uninspired! Oh, I haven’t any words. Look for yourself.” She rummaged furiously in the half-opened desk and flung out a fading snapshot on a mount. “There he is! That’s the thing she married!”

“What’s he doing in your holy of holies?” Mr. Flood’s eyes seemed to bore into her desk.

Anita, still thrusting down the overflowing papers, answered coldly—

“Madala sent it to Mother. She said that it wasn’t good enough but that it would give her an idea.”

“It certainly gives one an idea,” said the blonde lady languorously.

“And then she put in a post-script that it didn’t do him justice because the sun was in his eyes. Defiantly, as it were. Isn’t that significant? She’d never own to a mistake. Pride! She had the devil’s own pride. Look at the way she took her reviews! And in this case she would be bound to defend him. She’d defend anything she’d once taken under her wing.”

“Well, you know,” drawled the blonde lady, her eyes on the photograph, “according to this he topped her by two inches. I don’t somehow see him _under_ Madala’s wing.” And then—“After all, there’s something rather fascinating in bone and muscle.”

“Yes, and I don’t see,” the Baxter girl hurried into defiance, “honestly I don’t see, Miss Serle, why she shouldn’t have been in love with him. Of course, it’s not a clever face, but it’s good-tempered, and it’s good-looking, and there’s a twinkle. Madala loved a twinkle. And I don’t see——”

Anita crushed her.

“We’re discussing the standards of Madala Grey.”

“That’s not the point either, Anita.” Mr. Flood would sometimes rouse himself to defend the Baxter girl. “You know something. You own to it. What do you know?”

“Simply that she was in love with someone else. I’ve papers that prove it. Now it was either some man whom none of us know, whom for some reason she wouldn’t let us know, or——” she hesitated. Then she began again—“Mind you, I don’t commit myself, but—has the likeness never struck you? _Hugh Barrington_ in _The Resting-place_ and——?” Her eyes flickered towards Kent Rehan.

Mr. Flood whistled.

“Be careful, Anita.”

“He?” Miss Howe laughed, but kindly. “He’s lost to the world. He’ll be worse than ever now.”

“There!” Anita dropped upon the sentence like a hawk upon a heather bird. “You see! You say that! And yet you tell me there was nothing—nothing—between them? Didn’t she rave about him? his talents? his personality? his charm? And then she goes and writes the story of an artist’s model!”

Miss Howe laughed again.

“When a thing’s as obvious as that, it probably isn’t so. Besides, the artist’s model marries the artist.”

“Exactly. She leaves them, and us, cloyed with love in a cottage. I repeat, the artist’s model marries the artist because Madala Grey didn’t. It’s the merest shadow of a solution as yet, but—isn’t that a living portrait in _The Resting-place_? Oh, I know it by heart—

“Maybe it was his height that gave you the impression, less of weakness than of vagueness, as if his high forehead touched cloud-land, and were obscured by dreams; for his cold eyes guarded his mind from you, and his dark beard hid his mouth.”

“You _do_ know it by heart!” said Miss Howe.

“Of course I know it by heart. It was the first clue. Can anybody read those lines without recognizing him?”

The Baxter girl persisted—

“But I don’t see it. Oh, of course it is like him—but because she borrowed his face, the story needn’t be about him. Why couldn’t she just imagine the story? If she was a genius?”

“That remains the point,” said Mr. Flood.

“She was,” insisted Anita stubbornly.

Miss Howe smiled and said nothing.

He continued—

“The mere fact that she was a genius would prevent such a descent into milk and sugar, unless she were money-making or love-sick.”

The blonde lady spoke—

“Just so! Love-sick—sick of love—savage with love—savaging her holy of holies. A parody. Lila’s right.”

But Miss Howe shook her head.

“No, no. I didn’t mean that sort of parody. Madala may have had her emotions, but she’d always be good-tempered about them. She’s laughing at herself in _The Resting-place_ as well as at us.”

“But why do you cavil at it so?” said the Baxter girl slowly.

“Only at its plain meaning. Grant the parody and——”

“But why can’t you just read it as it stands? Why do you say sentimental? I—I liked it.”

Anita took the book from her hand.

“But, my dear child, _any_body can write this sort of thing. Where’s the passage the ladies’ papers rave about, where they have a day on the river together?” She whipped over the pages while I said to the Baxter girl—

“What is it? What’s it about? What’s the plot?”

“Oh, there isn’t any. That’s what they complain of. It’s just a little artist’s model who sits to an elderly, broken-down dreamer, and thinks him a god. The duke and door-mat touch. It’s just how two people fall in love and find it out. It’s as simple as A, B, C. But people ate it when it came out.”

“Treacle, I tell you,” insisted Mr. Flood.

Anita overheard him.

“Exactly! Listen to this—

... and they landed at last in a meadow of brilliant, brook-fed grass.

She had no words in which to say a thousand times ‘How beautiful!’ Words? She had never known a country June. She had never seen whole hedges clotted with bloom, she had never in all her life breathed the perfume of the may or heard a lark’s ecstasy. She had never—and to her simplicity there was no break in the chain of thought—she had never before been alone with him, unpaid, not his servant but his equal and companion. How should she have words?