Chapter 4

MATURITY (1879-1900)

XX

I.

The scent of hay came through the open window of her room. Clearer and finer than the hay smell of the Essex fields.

She shut her eyes to live purely in that one sweet sense; and opened them to look at the hill, the great hill heaved up against the east.

You had to lean far out of the window to see it all. It came on from the hidden north, its top straight as a wall against the sky. Then the long shoulder, falling and falling. Then the thick trees. A further hill cut the trees off from the sky.

Roddy was saying something. Sprawling out from the corner of the window-seat, he stared with sulky, unseeing eyes into the little room.

"Roddy, what did you say that hill was?"

"Greffington Edge. You aren't listening."

His voice made a jagged tear in the soft, quiet evening.

"And the one beyond it?"

"Sarrack. Why can't you listen?"

Greffington Edge. Sarrack. Sarrack.

Green fields coming on from the north, going up and up, netted in with the strong net of the low grey walls that held them together, that kept them safe. Above them thin grass, a green bloom on the grey face of the hill. Above the thin grass a rampart of grey cliffs.

Roddy wouldn't look at the hill.

"I tell you," he said, "you'll loathe the place when you've lived a week in it."

The thick, rich trees were trying to climb the Edge, but they couldn't get higher than the netted fields.

The lean, ragged firs had succeeded. No. Not quite. They stood out against the sky, adventurous mountaineers, roped together, leaning forward with the effort.

"It's Mamma's fault," Roddy was saying. "Papa would have gone anywhere, but she _would_ come to this damned Morfe."

"Don't. Don't--" Her mind beat him off, defending her happiness. He would kill it if she let him. Coming up from Reyburn on the front seat of the Morfe bus, he had sulked. He smiled disagreeable smiles while the driver pointed with his whip and told her the names of the places. Renton Moor. Renton Church. Morfe, the grey village, stuck up on its green platform under the high, purple mound of Karva Hill.

Garthdale in front of it, Rathdale at its side, meeting in the fields below its bridge.

Morfe was beautiful. She loved it with love at first sight, faithless to Ilford.

Straight, naked houses. Grey walls of houses, enclosing the wide oblong Green. Dark grey stone roofs, close-clipped lest the wind should lift them. On the Green two grey stone pillar fountains; a few wooden benches; telegraph poles. Under her window a white road curling up to the platform. Straight, naked houses, zigzagging up beside it. Down below, where the white road came from, the long grey raking bridge, guarded by a tall ash-tree.

Roddy's jabbing voice went on and on:

"I used to think Mamma was holy and unselfish. I don't think so any more. She says she wants to do what Papa wants and what we want; but she always ends by doing what she wants herself. It's all very well for her. As long as she's got a garden to poke about in she doesn't care how awful it is for us."

She hated Roddy when he said things like that about Mamma.

"I don't suppose the little lamb thought about it at all. Or if she did she thought we'd like it."

She didn't want to listen to Roddy's grumbling. She wanted to look and look, to sniff up the clear, sweet, exciting smell of the fields.

The roofs went criss-crossing up the road--straight--slant--straight. They threw delicate violet-green shadows on to the sage-green field below. That long violet-green pillar was the shadow of the ash-tree by the bridge.

The light came from somewhere behind the village, from a sunset you couldn't see. It made the smooth hill fields shine like thin velvet, stretched out, clinging to the hills.

"Oh, Roddy, the light's different. Different from Ilford. Look--"

"I've been looking for five weeks," Roddy said. "You haven't, that's all. _I_ was excited at first."

He got up. He stared out of the window, not seeing anything.

"I didn't mean what I said about Mamma. Morfe _makes_ you say things. Soon it'll make you mean them. You wait."

She was glad when he had left her.

The cliffs of Greffington Edge were violet now.

II.

At night, when she lay in bed in the strange room, the Essex fields began to haunt her; the five trees, the little flying trees, low down, low down; the straight, narrow paths through the corn, where she walked with Mark, with Jimmy, with Mr. Jourdain; Mr. Jourdain, standing in the path and saying: "Talk to me. I'm alive. I'm here. I'll listen."

Mark and Mamma planting the sumach tree by the front door; Papa saying it wouldn't grow. It had grown up to the dining-room window-sill.

Aunt Bella and Uncle Edward; the Proparts and the Farmers and Mr. Batty, all stiff and disapproving; not nearly so nice to you as they used to be and making you believe it was your fault.

The old, beautiful drawing-room. The piano by the door.

Dan staggering down the room at Mark's party. Mark holding her there, in his arms.

Dawn, and Dr. Draper's carriage waiting in the road beside the mangold fields. And Aunt Charlotte carried out, her feet brushing the flagstones.

She mustn't tell them. Mamma couldn't bear it. Roddy couldn't bear it. Aunt Charlotte was Papa's sister. He must never know.

The sound of the brushing feet made her heart ache.

She was glad to wake in the small, strange room. It had taken a snip off Mamma's and Papa's room on one side of the window, and a snip off the spare room on the other. That made it a funny T shape. She slept in the tail of the T, in a narrow bed pushed against the wall. When you sat up you saw the fat trees trying to get up the hill between the washstand and the chest of drawers.

This room would never be taken from her, because she was the only one who was small enough to fit the bed.

She would be safe there with her hill.

III.

The strange houses fascinated her. They had the simplicity and the precision of houses in a very old engraving. On the west side of the Green they made a long straight wall. Morfe High Row. An open space of cobblestones stretched in front of it. The market-place.

Sharp morning light picked out the small black panes of the windows in the white criss-cross of their frames, and the long narrow signs of the King's Head and the Farmer's Arms, black on grey. The plaster joints of the walls and the dark net of earth between the cobbles showed thick and clear as in a very old engraving. The west side had the sky behind it and the east side had the hill.

Grey-white cart roads slanted across the Green, cutting it into vivid triangular grass-plots. You went in and out of Morfe through the open corners of its Green. Her father's house stood at the south-west corner, by itself. A projecting wing at that end of the High Row screened it from the market-place.

The strange houses excited her.

Wonderful, unknown people lived in them. You would see them and know what they were like: the people in the tall house with the rusty stones, in the bright green ivy house with the white doors, in the small grey, humble houses, in the big, important house set at the top of the Green, with the three long rows of windows, the front garden and the iron gate.

People you didn't know. You would be strange and exciting to them as they were strange and exciting to you. They might say interesting things. There might be somebody who cared about Plato and Spinoza.

Things would happen that you didn't know. Anything might happen any minute.

If you knew what was happening in the houses _now_--some of them had hard, frightening faces. Dreadful things might have happened in them. Her father's house had a good, simple face. You could trust it.

Five windows in the rough grey wall, one on each side of the white door, three above. A garden at the side, an orchard at the back. In front a cobbled square marked off by a line of thin stones set in edgeways.

A strange house, innocent of unhappy memories.

Catty stood at the door, looking for her. She called to her to come in to breakfast.

IV.

Papa was moving restlessly about the house. His loose slippers shuffled on the stone flags of the passages.

Catty stopped gathering up the breakfast cups to listen.

Catty was not what she used to be. Her plump cheeks were sunk and flattened. Some day she would look like Jenny.

Papa stood in the doorway. He looked round the small dining-room as if he were still puzzled by its strangeness. Papa was not what he used to be. A streak of grey hair showed above each ear. Grey patches in his brown beard. Scarlet smears in the veined sallow of his eyes. His bursting, violent life had gone. He went stooping and shuffling. The house was too small for Papa. He turned in it as a dog turns in his kennel, feeling for a place to stretch himself.

He said, "Where's your mother? I want her."

Mary went to find her.

She knew the house: the flagged passage from the front door. The dining-room on the right. The drawing-room on the left. In there the chairs and tables drew together to complain of Morfe. View of the blacksmith's house and yard from the front window. From the side window Mamma's garden. Green grass-plot. Trees at the far end. Flowers in the borders: red roses, cream roses, Canterbury bells, white and purple, under the high walls. In a corner an elder bush frothing greenish white on green.

Behind the dining-room Papa's tight den. Stairs where the passage turned to the left behind the drawing-room. Glass door at the end, holding the green of the garden, splashed with purple, white and red. The kitchen here in a back wing like a rough barn run out into the orchard.

Upstairs Catty's and Cook's room in the wing; Papa's dressing-room above the side passage; Roddy's room above Papa's den. Then the three rooms in front. The one above the drawing-room was nearly filled with the yellow birch-wood wardrobe and bed. The emerald green of the damask was fading into the grey.

Her mother was there, sitting in the window-seat, reading the fourteenth chapter of St. John.

"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions--"

Mamma was different, too, as if she had shrunk through living in the cramped rooms. She raised her head. The head of a wounded bird, very gentle.

"Why are you sitting up here all alone?"

"Because sometimes I want to be alone."

"Shall I spoil the aloneness?"

"Not if you're a good girl and keep quiet."

Mary sat on the bed and waited till the chapter should be ended.

She thought: "She talks to me still as though I were a child. What would she say if I told her about Aunt Charlotte? She wouldn't know what it was really like. She wasn't there.

"I shall never tell her."

She was thrilled at the thought of her grown-up hardness, her grown-up silence, keeping her mother safe.

Mamma looked up and smiled; the chapter was ended; they went downstairs.

Papa stood in the doorway of his den and called to Mamma in a queer low voice.

The letters--

She went into the dining-room and waited--ten minutes--twenty.

Her mother came to her there. She sat down in her armchair by the window-seat where the old work-basket stood piled with socks ready for darning. She took a sock and drew it over her hand, stretching it to find the worn places. Mary took its fellow and began to darn it. The coarse wool, scraping her finger-tips, sent through her a little light, creeping, disagreeable shock.

She was afraid to look at her mother's face.

"Well, Mary--poor Aunt Charlotte might have been carried away in her coffin, and we shouldn't have known if it had been left to you to tell us."

"I didn't because I thought it would frighten you."

Mamma was not frightened. They couldn't have told her what it was really like.

Papa's slippers shuffled in the passage. Mamma left off darning to listen as Catty had listened.

V.

On Greffington Edge.

Roddy was looking like Mark, with his eyes very steady and his mouth firm and proud. His face was red as if he were angry. That was when he saw the tall man coming towards them down the hill road.

Roddy walked slowly, trying not to meet him at the cattle-gate. The tall man walked faster, and they met. Roddy opened the gate.

The tall man thanked him, said "Good day," looked at her as he passed through, then stopped.

"My sister--Mr. Sutcliffe."

Mr. Sutcliffe, handsome with his boney, high-jointed nose and narrow jaw, thrust out, incongruously fierce, under his calm, clean upper lip, shaved to show how beautiful it was. His black blue eyes were set as carefully in their lids as a woman's. He wore his hair rather long. One lock had got loose and hung before his ear like a high whisker.

He was asking Roddy when he was coming to play tennis, and whether his sister played. They might turn up tomorrow.

The light played on his curling, handsome smile. He hoped she liked Rathdale.

"She only came yesterday," Roddy said.

"Well--come along to-morrow. About four o'clock. I'll tell my wife."

And Roddy said, "Thanks," as if it choked him.

Mr. Sutcliffe went on down the hill.

"We can't go," Roddy said.

"Why not?"

"Well--"

"Let's. He looked so nice, and he sounded as if he really wanted us."

"He doesn't. He can't. You don't know what's happened."

"_Has_ anything happened?"

"Yes. I don't want to tell you, but you'll have to know. It happened at the Sutcliffes'."

"Who _are_ the Sutcliffes?"

"Greffington Hall. The people who own the whole ghastly place. We were dining there. And Papa was funny."

"Funny? Funny what way?"

"Oh, I don't know.--Like Dan was at Mark's party.'

"Oh Roddy--" She was listening now.

"Not quite so awful; but that sort of thing. We had to come away."

"I didn't know he did."

"No more did I. Mamma always said it wasn't that. But it was this time. And he chose that evening."

"Does Mamma mind frightfully?" she said.

"Yes. But she's angry with the Sutcliffes."

"Why?"

"Because they've _seen_ him."

"How many Sutcliffes are there?"

"Only him and Mrs. Sutcliffe. The son's in India.

"They'll never ask him again, and Mamma won't go without him. She says we can go if we like, but you can see she'll think us skunks if we do."

"Well--then we can't."

She had wanted something to happen, and something had happened, something that would bring unhappiness. Unhappiness. Her will rose up, hard and stubborn, pushing it off.

"Will it matter so very much? Do the Sutcliffes matter?"

"They matter this much, that there won't be anything to do. They've got all the shooting and fishing and the only decent tennis court in the place. You little know what you're in for."

"I don't care, Roddy. I don't care a bit as long as I have you."

"Me? Me?"

He had stopped on the steep of the road; her feet had been lagging to keep pace with him. He breathed hard through white-edged lips. She had seen him look like that before. The day they had walked to the Thames, to look at the ships, over the windy Flats.

He looked at her. A look she hadn't seen before. A look of passionate unbelief.

"I didn't think you cared about me. I thought it was Mark you cared about. Like Mamma."

"Can't you care about more than one person?"

"Mamma can't--"

"Oh Roddy--"

"What's the good of saying 'Oh Roddy' when you know it?"

They were sitting on a ledge of stone and turf. Roddy had ceased to struggle with the hill.

"We're all the same," he said. "I'd give you and Dan up any day for Mark. Dan would give up you and me. Mark would give up all of us for Mamma. And Mamma would give up all of us for Mark."

Roddy had never said anything like that before.

"I'll stick to you, anyhow," she said.

"It's no use your sticking. I shan't be here. I shall have to clear out and do something," he said.

On his face there was a look of fear.

VI.

She was excited because they were going to the ivy house for tea. It looked so pretty and so happy with its green face shining in the sun. Nothing could take from her her belief in happiness hiding behind certain unknown doors. It hid behind the white doors of the ivy house. When you went in something wonderful would happen.

The ivy house belonged to Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin.

The photographs in Mamma's old album showed how they looked when they and Mamma were young. Modest pose of dropped arms, holding mushroom hats in front of them as a protection, the narrow ribbons dangling innocently. Ellen Frewin, small and upright, slender back curved in to the set of shawl and crinoline, prim head fixed in the composure of gentle disdain, small mouth saying always "Oh," Meta, the younger sister, very tall, head bent in tranquil meditation, her mantle slanting out from the fall of the thin shoulders.

They rose up in the small, green lighted drawing-room. Their heads bent forward to kiss.

Ellen Waugh: the photographed face still keeping its lifted posture of gentle disdain, the skin stretched like a pale tight glove, a slight downward swelling of the prim oval, like the last bulge of a sucked peppermint ball, the faded mouth still making its small "oh." She was the widow of a clergyman.

Meta, a beautiful nose leaping out at you in a high curve; narrow, delicate cheeks thinned away so that they seemed part of the nose; sweet rodent mouth smiling up under its tip; blurred violet eyes arching vaguely.

Princess gowns stiffened their shawl and crinoline gestures.

"So this is Mary. She's not like her mother, Caroline. Meta, can you see any likeness?"

Miss Frewin arched her eyes and smiled, without looking at you.

"I can't say I do."

Their heads made little nodding bows as they talked. Miss Frewin's bow was sidelong and slow, Mrs. Waugh's straight and decisive.

"She's not like Rodney," Mrs. Waugh said. "And she's not like Emilius. Who is she like?"

Mary answered. "I'm rather like Dan and a good bit like Mark. But I'm most of all like myself."

Mrs. Waugh said "Oh." Her mouth went on saying it while she looked at you.

"She is not in the least like Mark," Mamma said.

They settled down, one on each side of Mamma, smiling at her with their small, faded mouths as you smile at people you love and are happy with. You could see that Mamma was happy, too, sitting between them, safe.

Mrs. Waugh said, "I see you've got Blenkiron in again?"

"Well, he's left his ladder in the yard. I suppose that means he'll mend the kitchen chimney some time before winter."

"The Yorkshire workmen are very independent," Mrs. Waugh said.

"They scamp their work like the rest. You'd need a resident carpenter, and a resident glazier, and a resident plumber--"

"Yes, Caroline, you would indeed."

Gentle voices saying things you had heard before in the drawing-room at Five Elms.

Miss Frewin had opened a black silk bag that hung on her arm, and taken out a minute pair of scissors and a long strip of white stuff with a stitched pattern on it. She nicked out the pattern into little holes outlined by the stitches. Mary watched her, fascinated by the delicate movements of the thin fingers and the slanted, drooping postures of the head.

"Do you _like_ doing it?"

"Yes."

She thought: "What a fool she must think me. As if she'd do it if she didn't like it."

The arching eyes and twitching mouth smiled at your foolishness.

Mrs. Waugh's voice went on. It came smoothly, hardly moving her small, round mouth. That was her natural voice. Then suddenly it rose, like a voice that calls to you to get up in the morning.

"Well, Mary--so you've left school. Come home to be a help to your mother."

A high, false cheerfulness, covering disapproval and reproach.

Their gentleness was cold to her and secretly inimical. They had asked her because of Mamma. They didn't really want her.

Half-past six. It was all over. They were going home across the Green.

"Mary, I wish you could learn to talk without affectation. Telling Mrs. Waugh you 'looked like yourself'! If you could only manage to forget yourself."

Your self? Your self? Why should you forget it? You had to remember. They would kill it if you let them.

What had it done? What _was_ it that they should hate it so? It had been happy and excited about _them_, wondering what they would be like. And quiet, looking on and listening, in the strange, green-lighted, green-dark room, crushed by the gentle, hostile voices.

Would it always have to stoop and cringe before people, hushing its own voice, hiding its own gesture?

It crouched now, stung and beaten, hiding in her body that walked beside her mother with proud feet, and small lifted head.

VII.

Her mother turned at her bedroom door and signed to her to come in.

She sat down in her low chair at the head of the curtained bed. Mary sat in the window-seat.

"There's something I want to say to you."

"Yes, Mamma."

Mamma was annoyed. She tap-tapped with her foot on the floor.

"Have you given up those absurd ideas of yours?"

"What absurd ideas?"

"You know what I mean. Calling yourself an unbeliever."

"I _can't_ say I believe things I don't believe."

"Have you tried?"

"Tried?"

"Have you ever asked God to help your unbelief?"

"No. I could only do that if I didn't believe in my unbelief."

"You mean if you didn't glory in it. Then it's simply your self-will and your pride. Self-will has been your besetting sin ever since you were a little baby crying for something you couldn't have. You kicked before you could talk.

"Goodness knows I've done everything I could to break you of it."

"Yes, Mamma darling."

She remembered. The faded green and grey curtains and the yellow birchwood furniture remembered. Mamma sat on the little chair at the foot of the big yellow bed. You knelt in her lap and played with the gold tassel while Mamma asked you to give up your will.

"I brought you up to care for God and for the truth."

"You did. And I care so awfully for both of them that I won't believe things about God that aren't true."

"And how do you know what's true and what isn't? You set up your little judgment against all the wise and learned people who believe as you were taught to believe. I wonder how you dare."

"It's the risk we're all taking. We may every single one of us be wrong. Still, if some things are true other things can't be. Don't look so unhappy, Mamma."

"How can I be anything else? When I think of you living without God in the world, and of what will happen to you when you die."

"It's your belief that makes you unhappy, not me."

"That's the cruellest thing you've said yet."

"You know I'd rather die than hurt you."

"Die, indeed! When you hurt me every minute of the day. If it had been anything but unbelief. If I even saw you humble and sorry about it. But you seem to be positively enjoying yourself."

"I can't help it if the things I think of make me happy. And you don't know how nice it feels to be free."

"Precious freedom!--to do what you like and think what you like, without caring."

"There's a part of me that doesn't care and there's a part that cares frightfully."

The part that cared was not free. Not free. Prisoned in her mother's bedroom with the yellow furniture that remembered. Her mother's face that remembered. Always the same vexed, disapproving, remembering face. And her own heart, sinking at each beat, dragging remembrance. A dead child, remembering and returning.

"I can't think where you got it from," her mother was saying. "Unless it's those books you're always reading. Or was it that man?"

"What man?"

"Maurice Jourdain."

"No. It wasn't. What made you think of him?"

"Never you mind."

Actually her mother was smiling and trying not to smile, as if she were thinking of something funny and improper.

"There's one thing I must beg of you," she said, "that whatever you choose to think, you'll hold your tongue about it."

"All my life? Like Aunt Lavvy?"

"There was a reason why then; and there's a reason why now. Your father has been very unfortunate. We're here in a new place, and the less we make ourselves conspicuous the better."

"I see."

She thought: "Because Papa drinks Mamma and Roddy go proud and angry; but I must stoop and hide. It isn't fair."

"You surely don't want," her mother said, "to make it harder for me than it is."

Tears. She was beaten.

"I don't want to make it hard for you at all."

"Then promise me you won't talk about religion."

"I won't talk about it to Mrs. Waugh."

"Not to anybody."

"Not to anybody who wouldn't like it. Unless they make me. Will that do?"

"I suppose it'll have to."

Mamma held her face up, like a child, to be kissed.

VIII.

The Sutcliffes' house hid in the thick trees at the foot of Greffington Edge. You couldn't see it. You could pretend it wasn't there. You could pretend that Mr. Sutcliffe and Mrs. Sutcliffe were not there. You could pretend that nothing had happened.

There were other houses.

IX.

The long house at the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs. The poplars in the garden played their play of falling rain.

You waited in the porch, impatient for the opening of the door.

"Mamma--what _will_ it be like?"

Mamma smiled a naughty, pretty smile. She knew what it would be like.

There was a stuffed salmon in a long glass case in the hall. He swam, over a brown plaster river bed, glued to a milk-blue plaster stream.

You waited in the drawing-room. Drab and dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts with an air of anxiety. Stuffed love-birds on a branch under a tall glass shade. On the chimney-piece sand-white pampas grass in clear blood-red vases, and a white marble clock supporting a gilt Cupid astride over a gilt ball.

Above the Cupid, in an oval frame, the tinted crayon portrait of a young girl. A pink and blond young girl with a soft nuzzling mouth and nose. She was dressed in a spencer and a wide straw hat, and carried a basket of flowers on her arm. She looked happy, smiling up at the ceiling.

Across the passage a door opening. Voices in the passage, a smell like rotten apples, a tray that clattered.

Miss Kendal rustled in; tall elegant stiffness girded in black silk.

"How good of you to come, Mrs. Olivier. And to bring Miss Mary."

Her sharp-jointed body was like the high-backed chair it sat on. Yet you saw that she had once been the young girl in the spencer; head carried high with the remembered tilt of the girl's head; jaw pushed out at the chin as if it hung lightly from the edge of the upper lip; the nuzzling mouth composed to prudence and propriety. A lace cap with pink ribbons perched on her smooth, ashy blond hair.

Miss Kendal talked to Mamma about weather and gardens; she asked after the kitchen chimney as if she really cared for it. Every now and then she looked at you and gave you a nod and a smile to show that she remembered you were there.

When she smiled her eyes were happy like the eyes of the young girl.

The garden-gate clicked and fell to with a clang. A bell clamoured suddenly through the quiet house.

Miss Kendal nodded. "The Doctor has come to tea. To see Miss Mary."

She put her arm in yours and led you into the dining-room, gaily, gaily, as if she had known you for a long time, as if she were taking you with her to some brilliant, happy feast.

The smell of rotten apples came towards you through the open door of the dining-room. You saw the shining of pure white damask, the flashing of silver, a flower-bed of blue willow pattern cups, an enormous pink and white cake. You thought it was a party.

Three old men were there.

Old Dr. Kendal, six feet of leanness doubled up in an arm-chair. Old Wellington face, shrunk, cheeks burning in a senile raddle. Glassy blue eyes weeping from red rims.

Dr. Charles Kendal, his son; a hard, blond giant; high cheeks, raw ruddied; high bleak nose jutting out with a steep fall to the long upper lip; savage mouth under a straight blond fringe, a shark's keen tooth pointing at the dropped jaw. Arched forehead drooping to the spread ears, blond eyebrows drooping over slack lids.

And Mr. James.

Mr. James was the only short one. He stood apart, his eyes edging off from his limp hand-shaking. Mr. James had a red face and high bleak nose like his brother; he was clean-shaved except for short auburn whiskers brushed forward in flat curls. His thin Wellington lips went out and in, pressed together, trying hard not to laugh at you.

He held his arms bowed out stiffly, as if the arm-holes of his coat were too tight for him.

The room was light at the far end, where the two windows were, and dark at the door-end where the mahogany sideboard was. The bright, loaded table stretched between.

Old Dr. Kendal sat behind it by the corner of the fireplace. Though it was August the windows were shut and a fire burned in the grate. Two tabby cats sat up by the fender, blinking and nodding with sleep.

"Here's Father," Miss Kendal said. "And here's Johnnie and Minnie."

He had dropped off into a doze. She woke him.

"You know Mrs. Olivier, Father. And this is Miss Olivier."

"Ay. Eh." From a red and yellow pocket-handkerchief he disentangled a stringy claw-like hand and held it up with an effort.

"Ye've come to see the old man, have ye? Ay. Eh."

"He's the oldest in the Dale," Miss Kendal said. "Except Mr. Peacock of Sarrack."

"Don't you forget Mr. Peacock of Sarrack, or he'll be so set-up there'll be no bearing him," Dr. Charles said.

"Miss Mary, will you sit by Father?"

"No, she won't. Miss Mary will sit over here by me."

Though Dr. Charles was not in his own house he gave orders. He took Mr. James's place at the foot of the table. He made her sit at his left hand and Mamma at his right; and he slanted Mamma's chair and fixed a basket screen on its back so that she was shielded both from the fire and from the presence of the old man.

Dr. Charles talked.

"Where did you get that thin face, Miss Mary? Not in Rathdale, I'll be bound."

He looked at you with small grey eyes blinking under weak lids and bared the shark's tooth, smiling. A kind, hungry shark.

"They must have starved you at your school. No? Then they made you study too hard. Kate--what d'you think Bill Acroyd's done now? Turned this year's heifers out along of last year's with the ringworm. And asks me how I think they get it. This child doesn't eat enough to keep a mouse, Mrs. Olivier."

He would leave off talking now and then to eat, and in the silence remarkable noises would come from the armchair. When that happened Miss Kendal would look under the table and pretend that Minnie and Johnnie were fighting. "Oh, those bad pussies," she would say.

When her face kept quiet it looked dead beside the ruddy faces of the three old men; dead and very quietly, very softly decomposing into bleached purple and sallow white. Then her gaiety would come popping up again and jerk it back into life.

Mr. James sat at her corner, beside Mary. He didn't talk, but his Wellington mouth moved perpetually in and out, and his small reddish eyes twinkled, twinkled, with a shrewd, secret mirth. You thought every minute he would burst out laughing, and you wondered what you were doing to amuse him so.

Every now and then Miss Kendal would tell you something about him.

"What do you think Mr. James did to-day? He walked all the way to Garth and back again. Over nine miles!"

And Mr. James would look gratified.

Tea was over with the sacrifice of the pink and white cake. Miss Kendal took your arm again and led you, gaily, gaily back to the old man.

"Here's Miss Mary come to talk to you, Father."

She set a chair for you beside him. He turned his head slowly to you, waking out of his doze.

"What did she say your name was, my dear?"

"Olivier. Mary Olivier."

"I don't call to mind anybody of that name in the Dale. But I suppose I brought you into the world same as the rest of 'em."

Miss Kendal gave a little bound in her chair. "Does anybody know where Pussy is?"

The claw hand stirred in the red and yellow pocket-handkerchief.

"Ye've come to see the old man, have ye? Ay. Eh."

When he talked he coughed. A dreadful sound, as if he dragged up out of himself a long, rattling chain.

It hurt you to look at him. Pity hurt you.

Once he had been young, like Roddy. Then he had been middle-aged, with hanging jaw and weak eyelids, like Dr. Charles. Now he was old, old; he sat doubled up, coughing and weeping, in a chair. But you could see that Miss Kendal was proud of him. She thought him wonderful because he kept on living.

Supposing he was _your_ father and you had to sit with him, all your life, in a room smelling of rotten apples, could you bear it? Could you bear it for a fortnight? Wouldn't you wish--wouldn't you wish--supposing Papa--all your life.

But if you couldn't bear it that would mean--

No. No. She put her hand on the arm of his chair, to protect him, to protect him from her thoughts.

The claw fingers scrabbled, groping for her hand.

"Would ye like to be an old man's bed-fellow?"

"Pussy says it isn't her bed-time yet, Father."

When you went away Miss Kendal stood on the doorstep looking after you. The last you saw of her was a soft grimace of innocent gaiety.

X.

The Vicar of Renton. He wanted to see her.

Mamma had left her in the room with him, going out with an air of self-conscious connivance.

Mr. Spencer Rollitt. Hard and handsome. Large face, square-cut, clean-shaved, bare of any accent except its eyebrows, its mouth a thin straight line hardly visible in its sunburn. Small blue eyes standing still in the sunburn, hard and cold.

When Mr. Rollitt wanted to express heartiness he had to fall back on gesture, on the sudden flash of white teeth; he drew in his breath, sharply, between the straight, close lips, with a sound: "Fivv-vv!"

She watched him. Under his small handsome nose his mouth and chin together made one steep, straight line. This lower face, flat and naked, without lips, stretched like another forehead. At the top of the real forehead, where his hat had saved his skin, a straight band, white, like a scar. Yet Mr. Spencer Rollitt's hair curled and clustered out at the back of his head in perfect innocence.

He was smiling his muscular smile, while his little hard cold eyes held her in their tight stare.

"Don't you think you would like to take a class in my Sunday School?"

"I'm afraid I wouldn't like it at all."

"Nothing to be afraid of. I should give you the infants' school."

For a long time he sat there, explaining that there was nothing to be afraid of, and that he would give her the infants' school. You felt him filling the room, crushing you back and back, forcing his will on you. There was too much of his will, too much of his face. Her will rose up against his will and against his face, and its false, muscular smile.

"I'm sure my mother didn't say I'd like to teach in a Sunday School."

"She said she'd be very glad if I could persuade you."

"She'd say _that_. But she knows perfectly well I wouldn't really do it."

"It was not Mrs. Olivier's idea."

He got up. When he stood his eyes stared at nothing away over your head. He wouldn't lower them to look at you.

"It was Mrs. Sutcliffe's."

"How funny of Mrs. Sutcliffe. She doesn't know me, either."

"My dear young lady, you were at school when your father and mother dined at Greffington Hall."

He was looking down at her now, and she could feel herself blushing; hot, red waves of shame, rushing up, tingling in the roots of her hair.

"Mrs. Sutcliffe," he said, "is very kind."

She saw it now. He had been at the Sutcliffes that evening. He had seen Papa. He was trying to say, "Your father was drunk at Greffington Hall. He will never be asked there again. He will not be particularly welcome at the Vicarage. But you are very young. We do not wish you to suffer. This is our kindness to you. Take it. You are not in a position to refuse."

"And what am I to say to Mrs. Sutcliffe?"

"Oh, anything you like that wouldn't sound too rude."

"Shall I say that you're a very independent young lady, and that she had better not ask you to join her sewing-class? Would that sound too rude?"

"Not a bit. If you put it nicely. But you would, wouldn't you?"

He looked down at her again. His thick eyes had thawed slightly; they let out a twinkle. But he was holding his lips so tight that they had disappeared. A loud, surprising laugh forced them open.

He held out his hand with a gesture, drawing back his laugh in a tremendous "Fiv-v-v-v."

When he had gone she opened the piano and played, and played. Through the window of the room Chopin's Fontana Polonaise went out after him, joyous, triumphant and defiant, driving him before it. She exulted in her power over the Polonaise. Nothing could touch you, nothing could hurt you while you played. If only you could go on playing for ever--

Her mother came in from the garden.

"Mary," she said, "if you _will_ play, you must play gently."

"But Mamma--I can't. It goes like that."

"Then," said her mother, "don't play it. You can be heard all over the village."

"Bother the village. I don't care. I don't care if I'm heard all over everywhere!"

She went on playing.

But it was no use. She struck a wrong note. Her hands trembled and lost their grip. They stiffened, dropped from the keys. She sat and stared idiotically at the white page, at the black dots nodding on their stems, at the black bars swaying.

She had forgotten how to play Chopin's Fontana Polonaise.

XI.

Stone walls. A wild country, caught in the net of the stone walls.

Stone walls following the planes of the land, running straight along the valleys, switchbacking up and down the slopes. Humped-up, grey spines of the green mounds.

Stone walls, piled loosely, with the brute skill of earth-men, building centuries ago. They bulged, they toppled, yet they stood firm, holding the wild country in their mesh, knitting the grey villages to the grey farms, and the farms to the grey byres. Where you thought the net had ended it flung out a grey rope over the purple back of Renton, the green shoulder of Greffington.

Outside the village, the schoolhouse lane, a green trench sunk between stone walls, went up and up, turning three times. At the top of the last turn a gate.

When you had got through the gate you were free.

It led on to the wide, flat half-ring of moor that lay under Karva. The moor and the high mound of the hill were free; they had slipped from the net of the walls.

Broad sheep-drives cut through the moor. Inlets of green grass forked into purple heather. Green streamed through purple, lapped against purple, lay on purple in pools and splashes.

Burnt patches. Tongues of heather, twisted and pointed, picked clean by fire, flickering grey over black earth. Towards evening the black and grey ran together like ink and water, stilled into purple, the black purple of grapes.

If you shut your eyes you could see the flat Essex country spread in a thin film over Karva. Thinner and thinner. But you could remember what it had been like. Low, tilled fields, thin trees; sharp, queer, uncertain beauty. Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness, coming again and again, never twice to the same place in the same way. It hurt you when you remembered it.

The beauty of the hills was not like that. It stayed. It waited for you, keeping faith. Day after day, night after night, it was there.

Happiness was there. You were sure of it every time. Roddy's uneasy eyes, Papa's feet, shuffling in the passage, Mamma's disapproving, remembering face, the Kendals' house, smelling of rotten apples, the old man, coughing and weeping in his chair, they couldn't kill it; they couldn't take it away.

The mountain sheep waited for you. They stood back as you passed, staring at you with their look of wonder and sadness.

Grouse shot up from your feet with a "Rek-ek-ek-kek!" in sudden, explosive flight.

Plovers rose, wheeling round and round you with sharper and sharper cries of agitation. "_Pee_-vit--_pee_-vit--_pee_-vit! Pee-_vitt_!" They swooped, suddenly close, close to your eyes; you heard the drumming vibration of their wings.

Away in front a line of sheep went slowly up and up Karva. The hill made their bleating mournful and musical.

You slipped back into the house. In the lamp-lighted drawing-room the others sat, bored and tired, waiting for prayer-time. They hadn't noticed how long you had been gone.

XII.

"Roddy, I wish you'd go and see where your father is."

Roddy looked up from his sketch-book. He had filled it with pictures of cavalry on plunging chargers, trains of artillery rushing into battle, sailing ships in heavy seas.

Roddy's mind was possessed by images of danger and adventure.

He flourished off the last wave of battle-smoke, and shut the sketch-book with a snap.

Mamma knew perfectly well where Papa was. Roddy knew. Catty and Maggie the cook knew. Everybody in the village knew. Regularly, about six o'clock in the evening, he shuffled out of the house and along the High Row to the Buck Hotel, and towards dinner-time Roddy had to go and bring him back. Everybody knew what he went for.

He would have to hold Papa tight by the arm and lead him over the cobblestones. They would pass the long bench at the corner under the Kendals' wall; and Mr. Oldshaw, the banker, and Mr. Horn, the grocer, and Mr. Acroyd, the shoemaker, would be sitting there talking to Mr. Belk, who was justice of the peace. And they would see Papa. The young men squatting on the flagstones outside the "Farmer's Arms" and the "King's Head" would see him. And Papa would stiffen and draw himself up, trying to look dignified and sober.

When he was very bad Mamma would cry, quietly, all through dinner-time. But she would never admit that he went to the Buck Hotel. He had just gone off nobody knew where and Roddy had got to find him.

August, September and October passed.

XIII.

"Didn't I tell you to wait? You know them all now. You see what they're like."

In Roddy's voice there was a sort of tired, bitter triumph.

She knew them all now: Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin, and the Kendals; Mr. Spencer Rollitt, and Miss Louisa Wright who had had a disappointment; and old Mrs. Heron. They were all old.

Oh, and there was Dorsy Heron, Mrs. Heron's niece. But Dorsy was old too, twenty-seven. She was no good; she couldn't talk to Roddy; she could only look at him with bright, shy eyes, like a hare.

Roddy and Mary were going up the Garthdale road. At the first turn they saw Mrs. Waugh and her son coming towards them. (She had forgotten Norman Waugh.)

Rodney groaned. "_He's_ here again. I say, let's go back."

"We can't. They've seen us."

"Everybody sees us," Roddy said.

He began to walk with a queer, defiant, self-conscious jerk.

Mrs. Waugh came on, buoyantly, as if the hoop of a crinoline still held her up.

"Well, Mary, going for another walk?"

She stopped, in a gracious mood to show off her son. When she looked at Roddy her raised eyebrows said, "Still here, doing nothing?"

"Norman's going back to work on Monday," she said.

The son stood aside, uninterested, impatient, staring past them, beating the road with his stick. He was thickset and square. He had the stooping head and heavy eyes of a bull. Black hair and eyebrows grew bushily from his dull-white Frewin skin.

He would be an engineer. Mr. Belk's brother had taken him into his works at Durlingham. He wasn't seventeen, yet he knew how to make engines. He had a strong, lumbering body. His heart would go on thump-thumping with regular strokes, like a stupid piston, not like Roddy's heart, excited, quivering, hurrying, suddenly checking. His eyes drew his mother away. You were glad when they were gone.

"You can see what they think," Roddy said. "Everybody thinks it."

"Everybody thinks what?"

"That I'm a cad to be sticking here, doing nothing, living on Mamma's money."

"It doesn't matter. They've no business to think."

"No. But Mamma thinks it. She says I ought to get something to do. She talks about Mark and Dan. She can't see--" He stopped, biting his lip.

"If I were like Mark--if I could do things. That beast Norman Waugh can do things. He doesn't live on his mother's money. She sees that....

"She doesn't know what's the matter with me. She thinks it's only my heart. And it isn't. It's me. I'm an idiot. I can't even do office work like Dan.... She thinks I'll be all right if I go away far enough, where she won't see me. Mind you, I _should_ be all right if I'd gone into the Navy. She knows if I hadn't had that beastly rheumatic fever I'd have been in the Navy or the Merchant Service now. It's all rot not passing you. As if walking about on a ship's deck was worse for your heart than digging in a garden. It certainly couldn't be worse than farming in Canada."

"Farming? In Canada?"

"That's her idea. It'll kill me to do what _I_ want. It won't kill me to do what _she_ wants."

He brooded.

"Mark did what he wanted. He went away and left her. Brute as I am, I wouldn't have done that. She doesn't know that's why I'm sticking here. I _can't_ leave her. I'd rather die."

Roddy too. He had always seemed to go his own way without caring, living his secret life, running, jumping, grinning at you. And he, too, was compelled to adore Mark and yet to cling helplessly, hopelessly, to Mamma. When he said things about her he was struggling against her, trying to free himself. He flung himself off and came back, to cling harder. And he was nineteen.

"After all," he said, "why shouldn't I stay? It's not as if I didn't dig in the garden and look after Papa. If I went she'd have to get somebody."

"I thought you wanted to go?" she said.

"So I did. So I do, for some things. But when it comes to the point--"

"When it comes to the point?"

"I funk it."

"Because of Mamma?"

"Because of me. That idiocy. Supposing I _had_ to do something I couldn't do?... That's why I shall have to go away somewhere where it won't matter, where she won't know anything about it."

The frightened look was in his eyes again.

In her heart a choking, breathless voice talked of unhappiness, coming, coming. Unhappiness that no beauty could assuage. Her will hardened to shut it out.

When the road turned again they met Mr. James. He walked with queer, jerky steps, his arms bowed out stiffly.

As he passed he edged away from you. His mouth moved as if he were trying not to laugh.

They knew about Mr. James now. His mind hadn't grown since he was five years old. He could do nothing but walk. Martha, the old servant, dressed and undressed him.

"I shall have to go," Roddy said. "If I stay here I shall look like Mr. James. I shall walk with my arms bowed out, Catty'll dress and undress me."

XXI

I.

They hated the piano. They had pushed it away against the dark outside wall. Its strings were stiff with cold, and when the rain came its wooden hammers swelled so that two notes struck together in the bass.

The piano-tuner made them move it to the inner wall in the large, bright place that belonged to the cabinet. Mamma was annoyed because Mary had taken the piano-tuner's part.

Mamma loved the cabinet. She couldn't bear to see it standing in the piano's dark corner where the green Chinese bowls hardly showed behind the black glimmer of the panes. The light fell full on the ragged, faded silk of the piano, and on the long scar across its lid. It was like a poor, shabby relation.

It stood there in the quiet room, with its lid shut, patient, reproachful, waiting for you to come and play on it.

When Mary thought of the piano her heart beat faster, her fingers twitched, the full, sensitive tips tingled and ached to play. When she couldn't play she lay awake at night thinking of the music.

She was trying to learn the Sonato _Appassionata_, going through it bar by bar, slowly and softly, so that nobody outside the room should hear it. That was better than not playing it at all. But sometimes you would forget, and as soon as you struck the loud chords in the first movement Papa would come in and stop you. And the Sonata would go on sounding inside you, trying to make you play it, giving you no peace.

Towards six o'clock she listened for his feet in the flagged passage. When the front door slammed behind him she rushed to the piano. There might be a whole hour before Roddy fetched him from the Buck Hotel. If you could only reach the last movement, the two thundering chords, and then--the _Presto_.

The music beat on the thick stone walls of the room and was beaten back, its fine, live throbbing blunted by overtones of discord. You longed to open all the doors and windows of the house, to push back the stone walls and let it out.

Terrible minutes to six when Mamma's face watched and listened, when she knew what you were thinking. You kept on looking at the clock, you wondered whether this time Papa would really go. You hoped--

Mamma's eyes hurt you. They said, "She doesn't care what becomes of him so long as she can play."

II.

Sometimes the wounded, mutilated _Allegro_ would cry inside you all day, imploring you to finish it, to let it pour out its life in joy.

When it left off the white sound patterns of poems came instead. They floated down through the dark as she lay on her back in her hard, narrow bed. Out of doors, her feet, muffled in wet moor grass, went to a beat, a clang.

She would never play well. At any minute her father's voice or her mother's eyes would stiffen her fingers and stop them. She knew what she would do; she had always known. She would make poems. They couldn't hear you making poems. They couldn't see your thoughts falling into sound patterns.

Only part of the pattern would appear at once while the rest of it went on sounding from somewhere a long way off. When all the parts came together the poem was made. You felt as if you had made it long ago, and had forgotten it and remembered.

III.

The room held her close, cold and white, a nun's cell. If you counted the window-place it was shaped like a cross. The door at the foot, the window at the head, bookshelves at the end of each arm. A kitchen lamp with a tin reflector, on a table, stood in the breast of the cross. Its flame was so small that she had to turn it on to her work like a lantern.

"Dumpetty, dumpetty dum. Tell them that Bion is dead; he is dead, young Bion, the shepherd. And with him music is dead and Dorian poetry perished--"

She had the conceited, exciting thought: "I am translating Moschus, the Funeral Song for Bion."

Moschus was Bion's friend. She wondered whether he had been happy or unhappy, making his funeral song.

If you could translate it all: if you could only make patterns out of English sounds that had the hardness and stillness of the Greek.

"'Archet', Sikelikai, to pentheos, archet' Moisai, adones hai pukinoisin oduramenai poti phullois.'"

The wind picked at the pane. Through her thick tweed coat she could feel the air of the room soak like cold water to her skin. She curved her aching hands over the hot globe of the lamp.

--Oduromenai. Mourning? No. You thought of black crape, bunched up weepers, red faces.

The wick spluttered; the flame leaned from the burner, gave a skip and went out.

Oduromenai--Grieving; perhaps.

Suddenly she thought of Maurice Jourdain.

She saw him standing in the field path. She heard him say "Talk to _me_. I'm alive. I'm here. I'll listen. I'll never misunderstand." She saw his worn eyelids; his narrow, yellowish teeth.

Supposing he was dead--

She would forget about him for months together; then suddenly she would remember him like that. Being happy and excited made you remember. She tried not to see his eyelids and his teeth. They didn't matter.

IV.

The season of ungovernable laughter had begun.

"Roddy, they'll hear us. We m-m-mustn't."

"I'm not. I'm blowing my nose."

"I wish _I_ could make it sound like that."

They stood on the Kendals' doorstep, in the dark, under the snow. Snow powdered the flagstone path swept ready for the New Year's party.

"Think," she said, "their poor party. It would be awful of us."

Roddy rang. As they waited they began to laugh again. Helpless, ruinous, agonising laughter.

"Oh--oh--I can hear Martha coming. _Do_ something. You might be unbuckling my snow-shoes."

The party was waiting for them in the drawing-room. Dr. Charles. Miss Louisa Wright, stiff fragility. A child's face blurred and delicately weathered; features in innocent, low relief. Pale hair rolled into an insubstantial puff above each ear. Speedwell eyes, fading milkily. Hurt eyes, disappointed eyes. Dr. Charles had disappointed her.

Dorsy Heron, tall and straight. Shy hare's face trying to look austere.

Norman Waugh, sulky and superior, in a corner.

As Roddy came in everybody but Norman Waugh turned round and stared at him with sudden, happy smiles. He was so beautiful that it made people happy to look at him. His very name, Rodney Olivier, sounded more beautiful than other people's names.

Dorsy Heron's shy hare's eyes tried to look away and couldn't. Her little high, red nose got redder.

And every now and then Dr. Charles looked at Rodney, a grave, considering look, as if he knew something about him that Rodney didn't know.

V.

"She shall play what she likes," Mr. Sutcliffe said. He had come in late, without his wife.

She was going to play to them. They always asked you to play.

She thought: "It'll be all right. They won't listen; they'll go on talking. I'll play something so soft and slow that they won't hear it. I shall be alone, listening to myself."

She played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. A beating heart, a grieving voice; beautiful, quiet grief; it couldn't disturb them.

Suddenly they all left off talking. They were listening. Each note sounded pure and sweet, as if it went out into an empty room. They came close up, one by one, on tiptoe, with slight creakings and rustlings, Miss Kendal, Louisa Wright, Dorsy Heron. Their eyes were soft and quiet like the music.

Mr. Sutcliffe sat where he could see her. He was far away from the place where she heard herself playing, but she could feel his face turned on her like a light.

The first movement died on its two chords. Somebody was saying "How beautifully she plays." Life and warmth flowed into her. Exquisite, tingling life and warmth. "Go on. Go on." Mr. Sutcliffe's voice sounded miles away beyond the music.

She went on into the lovely _Allegretto_. She could see their hushed faces leaning nearer. You could make them happy by playing to them. They loved you because you made them happy.

Mr. Sutcliffe had got up; he had come closer.

She was playing the _Presto agitato_. It flowed smoothly under her fingers, at an incredible pace, with an incredible certainty.

Something seemed to be happening over there, outside the place where she heard the music. Martha came in and whispered to the Doctor. The Doctor whispered to Roddy. Roddy started up and they went out together.

She thought: "Papa again." But she was too happy to care. Nothing mattered so long as she could listen to herself playing the Moonlight Sonata.

Under the music she was aware of Miss Kendal stooping over her, pressing her shoulder, saying something. She stood up. Everybody was standing up, looking frightened.

Outside, in the hall, she saw Catty, crying. She went past her over the open threshold where the snow lay like a light. She couldn't stay to find her snow-shoes and her coat.

The track across the Green struck hard and cold under her slippers. The tickling and trickling of the snow felt like the play of cold light fingers on her skin. Her fear was a body inside her body; it ached and dragged, stone cold and still.

VI.

The basin kept on slipping from the bed. She could see its pattern--reddish flowers and green leaves and curlykews--under the splashings of mustard and water. She felt as if it must slip from her fingers and be broken. When she pressed it tighter to the edge of the mattress the rim struck against Papa's breast.

He lay stretched out on the big yellow birchwood bed. The curtains were drawn back, holding the sour smell of sickness in their fluted folds.

Papa's body made an enormous mound under the green eiderdown. It didn't move. A little fluff of down that had pricked its way through the cover still lay where it had settled; Papa's head still lay where it had dropped; the forefinger still pointed at the fluff of down.

Papa's head was thrown stiffly back on the high pillows; it sank in, weighted with the blood that flushed his face. Around it on the white linen there was a spatter and splash of mustard and water. His beard clung to his chin, soaked in the yellowish stain. He breathed with a loud, grating and groaning noise.

Her ears were so tired with listening to this noise that sometimes they would go to sleep for a minute or two. Then it would wake them suddenly and she would begin to cry again.

You could stop crying if you looked steadily at the little fluff of down. At each groaning breath it quivered and sank and quivered.

Roddy sat by the dressing-table. He stared, now at his clenched hands, now at his face in the glass, as if he hated it, as if he hated himself.

Mamma was still dressed. She had got up on the bed beside Papa and crouched on the bolster. She had left off crying. Every now and then she stroked his hair with tender, desperate fingers. It struck out between the white ears of the pillow-slip in a thin, pointed crest.

Papa's hair. His poor hair. These alterations of the familiar person, the blood-red flush, the wet, clinging beard, the pointed hair, stirred in her a rising hysteria of pity.

Mamma had given him the mustard and water. She could see the dregs in the tumbler on the night-table, and the brown hen's feather they had tickled his throat with.

They oughtn't to have done it. Dr. Charles would not have let them do it if he had been there. They should have waited. They might have known the choking and the retching would kill him. Catty ought to have known. Somewhere behind his eyes his life was leaking away through the torn net of the blood vessels, bleeding away over his brain, under his hair, under the tender, desperate fingers.

She fixed her eyes on the pattern of the wall-paper. A purplish rose-bud in a white oval on a lavender ground. She clung to it as to some firm, safe centre of being.

VII.

The first day. The first evening.

She went on hushed feet down the passage to let Dan in. The squeak of the latch picked at her taut nerves.

She was glad of the cold air that rushed into the shut-up, soundless house, the sweet, cold air that hung about Dan's face and tingled in the curling frieze of his overcoat.

She took him into the lighted dining-room where Roddy and Mamma waited for him. The callous fire crackled and spurted brightness. The table was set for Dan's supper.

Dan knew that Papa was dead. He betrayed his knowledge by the cramped stare of his heavy, gentle eyes and by the shamed, furtive movements of his hands towards the fire. But that was all. His senses were still uncontaminated by _their_ knowledge. He had not seen Papa. He had not heard him.

"What was it?"

"Apoplexy."

His eyes widened. Innocent, vague eyes that didn't see.

Their minds fastened on Dan, to get immunity for themselves out of his unconsciousness. As long as they could keep him downstairs, in his innocence, their misery receded from them a little way.

But Mamma would not have it so. She looked at Dan. Her eyes were dull and had no more thought in them. Her mouth quivered. They knew that she was going to say something. Their thread of safety tightened. In another minute it would snap.

"Would you like to see him?" she said.

They waited for Dan to come down from the room. He would not be the same Dan. He would have seen the white sheet raised by the high mound of the body and by the stiff, upturned feet, and he would have lifted the handkerchief from the face. He would be like them, and his consciousness would put a sharper edge on theirs. He would be afraid to look at them, as they were afraid to look at each other, because of what he had seen.

VIII.

She lay beside her mother in the strange spare room.

She had got into bed straight from her undressing. On the other side of the mattress she had seen her mother's kneeling body like a dwarfed thing trailed there from the floor, and her hands propped up on the edge of the eiderdown, ivory-white against the red and yellow pattern, and her darling bird's head bowed to her finger-tips.

The wet eyelids had lifted and the drowned eyes had come to life again in a brief glance of horror. Mamma had expected her to kneel down and pray. In bed they had turned their backs on each other, and she had the feeling that her mother shrank from her as from somebody unclean who had omitted to wash herself with prayer. She wanted to take her mother in her arms and hold her tight. But she couldn't. She couldn't.

Suddenly her throat began to jerk with a hysterical spasm. She thought: "I wish I had died instead of Papa."

She forced back the jerk of her hysteria and lay still, listening to her mother's sad, obstructed breathing and her soft, secret blowing of her nose.

Presently these sounds became a meaningless rhythm and ceased. She was a child, dreaming. She stood on the nursery staircase at Five Elms; the coffin came round the turn and crushed her against the banisters; only this time she was not afraid of it; she made herself wake because of something that would happen next. The flagstones of the passage were hard and cold to her naked feet; that was how you could tell you were awake. The door of the Morfe drawing-room opened into Mamma's old bedroom at Five Elms, and when she came to the foot of the bed she saw her father standing there. He looked at her with a mocking, ironic animosity, so that she knew he was alive. She thought:

"It's all right. I only dreamed he was dead. I shall tell Mamma."

When she really woke, two entities, two different and discordant memories, came together with a shock.

Her mother was up and dressed. She leaned over her, tucking the blankets round her shoulders and saying, "Lie still and go to sleep again, there's a good girl."

Her memory cleared and settled, filtering, as the light filtered through the drawn blinds. Mamma and she had slept together because Papa was dead.

IX.

"Mary, do you know why you're crying?"

Roddy's face was fixed in a look of anger and resentment, and of anxiety as if he were afraid that at any minute he would be asked to do something that he couldn't do.

They had come down together from the locked room, and gone into the drawing-room where the yellow blinds let in the same repulsive, greyish, ochreish light.

Her tears did not fall. They covered her eyes each with a shaking lens; the chairs and tables floated up to her as if she stood in an aquarium of thick, greyish, ochreish light.

"You think it's because you care," he said. "But it's because you don't care.... You're not as bad as I am. I don't care a bit."

"Yes, you do, or you wouldn't think you didn't."

"No. None of us really cares. Except Mamma. And even she doesn't as much as she thinks she does. If we cared we'd be glad to sit in there, doing nothing, thinking about him.... That's why we keep on going upstairs to look at him, to make ourselves feel as if we cared."

She wondered. Was that really why they did it? She thought it was because they couldn't bear to leave him there, four days and four nights, alone. She said so. But Roddy went on in his hard, flat voice, beating out his truth.

"We never did anything to make him happy."

"He _was_ happy," she said. "When Mark went. He had Mamma."

"Yes, but he must have known about us. He must have known about us all the time."

"What did he know about us?"

"That we didn't care.

"Don't you remember," he said, "the things we used to say about him?"

She remembered. She could see Dan in the nursery at Five Elms, scowling and swearing he would kill Papa. She could see Roddy, and Mark with his red tight face, laughing at him. She could see herself, a baby, kicking and screaming when he took her in his arms. For months she hadn't thought about him except to wish he wasn't there so that she could go on playing. When he was in the fit she had been playing on the Kendals' piano, conceited and happy, not caring.

Supposing all the time, deep down, in his secret mysterious life, _he_ had cared?

"We must leave off thinking about him," Roddy said. "If we keep on thinking we shall go off our heads."

"We _are_ off our heads," she said.

Their hatred of themselves was a biting, aching madness. She hated the conceited, happy self that hadn't cared. The piano, gleaming sombrely in the hushed light, reminded her of it.

She hated the piano.

They dragged themselves back into the dining-room where Mamma and Dan sat doing nothing, hiding their faces from each other. The afternoon went on. Utter callousness, utter weariness came over them.

Their mother kept looking at the clock. "Uncle Victor will have got to Durlingham," she said. An hour ago she had said, "Uncle Victor will have got to York." Their minds clung to Uncle Victor as they had clung, four days ago, to Dan, because of his unconsciousness.

X.

Uncle Victor had put his arm on her shoulder. He was leaning rather heavily.

He saw what she saw: the immense coffin set up on trestles at the foot of the bed; the sheeted body packed tight in the padded white lining, the hands, curling a little, smooth and stiff, the hands of a wax figure; the firm, sallowish white face; the brown stains, like iodine, about the nostrils; the pale under lip pushed out, proudly.

A cold, thick smell, like earth damped with stagnant water, came up to them, mixed with the sharp, piercing smell of the coffin. The vigilant, upright coffin-lid leaned with its sloping shoulders against the chimney-piece, ready.

In spite of his heavy hand she was aware that Uncle Victor's consciousness of these things was different from hers. He did not appear to be in the least sorry for Papa. On his face, wistful, absorbed, there was a faint, incongruous smile. He might have been watching a child playing some mysterious game.

He sighed. His eyes turned from the coffin to the coffin-lid. He stared at the black letters on the shining brass plate.

Emilius Olivier. Born November 13th, 1827. Died January 2nd, 1881.

The grip on her shoulder tightened.

"He was faithful, Mary."

He said it as if he were telling her something she couldn't possibly have known.

XI.

The funeral woke her. A line of light slid through the chink of the door, crooked itself and staggered across the ceiling, a blond triangle throwing the shadows askew. That was Catty, carrying the lamp for the bearers.

It came again. There was a shuffling of feet in the passage, a secret muttering at the head of the stairs, the crack of a banister, a thud as the shoulder of the coffin butted against the wall at the turn. Then the grinding scream of the brakes on the hill, the long "Shr-issh" of the checked wheels ploughing through the snow.

She could see her mother's face on the pillow, glimmering, with shut eyes. At each sound she could hear her draw a shaking, sobbing breath. She turned to her and took her in her arms. The small, stiff body yielded to her, helpless, like a child's.

"Oh Mary, what shall I do? To send him away like that--in a train--all the way.... Your Grandmamma Olivier tried to keep him from me, and now he's gone back to her."

"You've got Mark."

"What's that you say?"

"Mark. Mark. Nobody can keep Mark from you. He'll never want anybody but you. He said so."

How small she was. You could feel her little shoulder-blades, weak and fine under your fingers, like a child's; you could break them. To be happy with her either you or she had to be broken, to be helpless and little like a child. It was a sort of happiness to lie there, holding her, hiding her from the dreadful funeral dawn.

Five o'clock.

The funeral would last till three, going along the road to Reyburn Station, going in the train from Reyburn to Durlingham, from Durlingham to King's Cross. She wondered whether Dan and Roddy would keep on feeling the funeral all the time. The train was part of it. Not the worst part. Not so bad as going through the East End to the City of London Cemetery.

When it came to the City of London Cemetery her mind stopped with a jerk and refused to follow the funeral any further.

Ten o'clock. Eleven.

They had shut themselves up in the dining-room, in the yellow-ochreish light. Mamma sat in her arm-chair, tired and patient, holding her Bible and her Church Service on her knees, ready. Every now and then she dozed. When this happened Mary took the Bible from her and read where it opened: "And he made the candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work made he the candlestick; his shaft, and his branch, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, were of the same.... And in the candlestick were four bowls made like almonds, his knops and his flowers: And a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the same, according to the six branches going out of it. Their knops and their branches were of the same: all of it was one beaten work of pure gold."

At two o'clock the bell of Renton Church began to toll. Her mother sat up in a stiff, self-conscious attitude and opened the Church Service. The bell went on tolling. For Papa.

It stopped. Her mother was saying something.

"Mary--I can't see with the blind down. Do you think you could read it to me?"

* * * * *

"'I am the Resurrection and the Life--'"

A queer, jarring voice burst out violently in the dark quiet of the room. It carried each sentence with a rush, making itself steady and hard.

"'...He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live....

"'I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not with my tongue--'"

"Not that one," her mother said.

"'O Lord, Thou hast been our refuge; from one generation to another.

"'Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made--'"

(Too fast. Much too fast. You were supposed to be following Mr. Propart; but if you kept up that pace you would have finished the Service before he had got through the Psalm.)

"'Lord God most holy--'"

"I can't _hear_ you, Mary."

"I'm sorry. 'O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

"'Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts: shut not Thy merciful ears to our prayers: but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most Mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour--'"

(Prayers, abject prayers for themselves. None for him. Not one word. They were cowards, afraid for themselves, afraid of death; their funk had made them forget him. It was as if they didn't believe that he was there. And, after all, it was _his_ funeral.)

"'Suffer us not, at our last hour--'"

The hard voice staggered and dropped, picked itself and continued on a note of defiance.

"'...For on pains of death, to fall from Thee....'"

(They would have come to the grave now, by the black pointed cypresses. There would be a long pit of yellow clay instead of the green grass and the white curb. Dan and Roddy would be standing by it.)

"'Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother--'"

The queer, violent voice stopped.

"I can't--I can't."

Mamma seemed gratified by her inability to finish the Order for the Burial of the Dead.

XII.

"You can say _that_, with your poor father lying in this grave--"

It was the third evening after the funeral. A minute ago they were at perfect peace, and now the everlasting dispute about religion had begun again. There had been no Prayers since Papa died, because Mamma couldn't trust herself to read them without breaking down. At the same time, it was inconceivable to her that there should be no Prayers.

"I should have thought, if you could read the Burial Service--"

"I only did it because you asked me to."

"Then you might do this because I ask you."

"It isn't the same thing. You haven't got to believe in the Burial Service. But either you believe in Prayers or you don't believe in them. If you don't you oughtn't to read them. You oughtn't to be asked to read them."

"How are we going on, I should like to know? Supposing I was to be laid aside, are there to be no Prayers, ever, in this house because you've set yourself up in your silly self-conceit against the truth?"

The truth. The truth about God. As if anybody really knew it; as if it mattered; as if anything mattered except Mamma.

Yet it did matter. It mattered more than anything in the whole world, the truth about God, the truth about anything; just the truth. Papa's death had nothing to do with it. It wasn't fair of Mamma to talk as if it had; to bring it up against you like that.

"Let's go to bed," she said.

Her mother took no notice of the suggestion. She sat bolt upright in her chair; her face had lost its look of bored, weary patience; it flushed and flickered with resentment.

"I shall send for Aunt Bella," she said.

"Why Aunt Bella?"

"Because I must have someone. Someone of my own."

XIII.

It was three weeks now since the funeral.

Mamma and Aunt Bella sat in the dining-room, one on each side of the fireplace. Mamma looked strange and sunken and rather yellow in a widow's cap and a black knitted shawl, but Aunt Bella had turned herself into a large, comfortable sheep by means of a fleece of white shawl and an ice-wool hood peaked over her cap.

There was a sweet, inky smell of black things dyed at Pullar's. Mary picked out the white threads and pretended to listen while Aunt Bella talked to Mamma in a woolly voice about Aunt Lavvy's friendship with the Unitarian minister, and Uncle Edward's lumbago, and the unreasonableness of the working classes.

She thought how clever it was of Aunt Bella to be able to keep it up like that. "I couldn't do it to save my life. As long as I live I shall never be any good to Mamma."

The dining-room looked like Mr. Metcalfe, the undertaker. Funereal hypocrisy. She wondered whether Roddy would see the likeness.

She thought of Roddy's nervous laugh when Catty brought in the first Yorkshire cakes. His eyes had stared at her steadily as he bit into his piece. They had said: "You don't care. You don't care. If you really cared you couldn't eat."

There were no more threads to pick.

She wondered whether she would be thought unfeeling if she were to take a book and read.

Aunt Bella began to talk about Roddy. Uncle Edward said Roddy ought to go away and get something to do.

If Roddy went away there would be no one. No one.

She got up suddenly and left them.

XIV.

The air of the drawing-room braced her like the rigour of a cold bath. Her heartache loosened and lost itself in the long shiver of chilled flesh.

The stone walls were clammy with the sweat of the thaw; they gave out a sour, sickly smell. Grey smears of damp dulled the polished lid of the piano.

They hadn't used the drawing-room since Papa died. It was so bright, so heartlessly cheerful compared with the other rooms, you could see that Mamma would think you unfeeling if you wanted to sit in it when Papa was dead. She had told Catty not to light the fire and to keep the door shut, for fear you should be tempted to sit in it and forget.

The piano. Under the lid the keys were stiffening with the damp. The hammers were swelling, sticking together. She tried not to think of the piano.

She turned her back on it and stood by the side window that looked out on to the garden. Mamma's garden. It mouldered between the high walls blackened by the thaw. On the grass-plot the snow had sunk to a thin crust, black-pitted. The earth was a black ooze through ulcers of grey snow.

She had a sudden terrifying sense of desolation.

Her mind clutched at this feeling and referred it to her father. It sent out towards him, wherever he might be, a convulsive emotional cry.

"You were wrong. I do care. Can't you see that I can never be happy again? Yet, if you could come back I would be happy. I wouldn't mind your--your little funny ways."

It wasn't true. She _would_ mind them. If he were really there he would know it wasn't true.

She turned and looked again at the piano. She went to it. She opened the lid and sat down before it. Her fingers crept along the keyboard; they flickered over the notes of the Sonata _Appassionata_, a ghostly, furtive playing, without pressure, without sound.

And she was ashamed as if the piano were tempting her to some cruel, abominable sin.

XXII

I.

The consultation had lasted more than an hour.

From the cobbled square outside you could see them through the window, Mamma, Uncle Edward, Uncle Victor and Farmer Alderson, sitting round the dining-room table and talking, talking, talking about Roddy.

It was awful to think that things--things that concerned you--could go on and be settled over your head without your knowing anything about it. She only knew that Papa had made Uncle Victor and Uncle Edward the trustees and guardians of his children who should be under age at his death (she and Roddy were under age), and that Mamma had put the idea of farming in Canada into Uncle Edward's head, and that Uncle Victor had said he wouldn't hear of letting Roddy go out by himself, and that the landlord of the Buck Hotel had told Victor that Farmer Alderson's brother Ben had a big farm somewhere near Montreal and young Jem Alderson was going out to him in March and they might come to some arrangement.

They were coming to it now.

Roddy and she, crouching beside each other on the hearthrug in the drawing-room, waited till it should be over. Through the shut doors they could still distinguish Uncle Edward's smooth, fat voice from Uncle Victor's thin one. The booming and baying were the noises made by Farmer Alderson.

"I can't think what they want to drag _him_ in for," Roddy said. "It'll only make it more unpleasant for them."

Roddy's eyes had lost their fear; they were fixed in a wise, mournful stare. He stared at his fate.

"They don't know yet quite _how_ imbecile I am. If I could have gone out quietly by myself they never need have known. Now they'll _have_ to. Alderson'll tell them. He'll tell everybody.... I don't care. It's their own look-out. They'll soon see I was right."

"Listen," she said.

The dining-room door had opened. Uncle Edward's voice came out first, sounding with a sort of complacent finality. They must have settled it. You could hear Farmer Alderson stumping his way to the front door. His voice boomed from the step.

"Ah doan't saay, look ye, 'e'll mak mooch out of en t' farst ye-ear--"

"Damn him, you can hear his beastly voice all over the place."

"Ef yore yoong mon's dead set to larn fa-armin', an' ef 'e've got a head on 'is shoulders our Jem can larn 'en. Ef 'e '_aven't_, ah tall yo stra-aight, Mr. Ollyveer, ye med joost's well tak yore mooney and trow it in t' mistal."

Roddy laughed. "_I_ could have told them that," he said.

"Money?"

"Rather. They can't do it under two hundred pounds. I suppose Victor'll stump up as usual."

"Poor Victor."

"Victor won't mind. He'll do anything for Mamma. They can call it a premium if it makes them any happier, but it simply means that they're paying Alderson to get rid of me."

"No. They've got it into their heads that it's bad for you sticking here doing nothing."

"So it is. But being made to do what I can't do's worse.... I'm not likely to do it any better with that young beast Alderson looking at me all the time and thinking what a bloody fool I am.... They ought to have left it to me. It would have come a lot cheaper. I was going anyhow. I only stayed because of Papa. But I can't tell _them_ that. After all, I was the only one who looked after him. If I'd gone you'd have had to."

"Yes."

"It would even come cheaper," he said, "if I stayed. I can prove it."

He produced his pocket sketch-book. The leaves were scribbled over with sums, sums desperately begun and left unfinished, sums that were not quite sure of themselves, sums scratched out and begun again. He crossed them all out and started on a fresh page.

"Premium, two hundred. Passage, twenty. Outfit, say thirty. Two hundred and fifty.

"Land cheap, lumber cheap. Labour expensive. Still, Alderson would be so pleased he might do the job himself for a nominal sum and only charge you for the wood. Funeral expenses, say ten dollars.

"How much does it cost to keep me here?"

"I haven't an idea."

"No, but think."

"I can't think."

"Well, say I eat ten shillings' worth of food per week, that's twenty-six pounds a year. Say thirty. Clothes, five. Thirty-five. Sundries, perhaps five. Forty. But I do the garden. What's a gardener's wages? Twenty? Fifteen?

"Say fifteen. Fifteen from forty, fifteen from forty--twenty-five. How much did Papa's funeral come to?"

"Oh--Roddy--I don't know."

"Say thirty. Twenty-five from two hundred and fifty, two hundred and twenty-five. Deduct funeral. One hundred and ninety-five.

"There you are. One hundred and ninety-five pounds for carting me to Canada."

"If you feel like that about it you ought to tell them. They can't make you go if you don't want to."

"They're not making me go. I'm going. I couldn't possibly stay after the beastly things they've said."

"What sort of things?"

"About my keep and my being no good and making work in the house."

"They didn't--they couldn't."

"Edward did. He said if it wasn't for me Mamma wouldn't have to have Maggie. Catty could do all the work. And when Victor sat on him and said Mamma was to have Maggie whatever happened, he jawed back and said she couldn't afford both Maggie and me."

"Catty could do Maggie's work and I could do Catty's, if you'd stop. It would be only cleaning things. That's nothing. I'd rather clean the whole house and _have_ you."

"You wouldn't. You only think you would."

"I would, really. I'll tell them."

"It's no use," he said. "They won't let you."

"I'll make them. I'll go and tell Edward and Victor now."

She had shot up from the floor with sudden energy, and stood looking down at Roddy as he still crouched there. Her heart ached for him. He didn't want to go to Canada; he wanted to stay with Mamma, and Mamma was driving him away from her, for no reason except that Uncle Edward said he ought to go.

She could hear the dining-room door open and shut again. They were coming.

Roddy rose from the floor. He drew himself up, stretching out his arms in a crucified attitude, and grinned at her.

"Do you suppose," he said, "I'd let you?"

He grinned at Uncle Edward and Uncle Victor as they came in.

"Uncle Victor," she said, "Why should Roddy go away? If it's Maggie, we don't really want her. I'll do Catty's work and he'll do the garden. So he can stay, can't he?"

"He _can_, Mary, but I don't think he will."

"Of course I won't. If you hadn't waited to mix me up with Alderson I could have cleared out and got there by this time. You don't suppose I was going to sponge on my mother for ever, do you?"

He stood there, defying Uncle Edward and Uncle Victor, defying their thoughts of him. She wondered whether he had forgotten the two hundred pounds and whether they were thinking of it. They didn't answer, and Roddy, after fixing on them a look they couldn't meet, strode out of the room.

She thought: How like Mark he is, with his tight, squared shoulders, holding his head high. His hair was like Mark's hair, golden brown, close clipped to the nape of his neck. When he had gone it would be like Mark's going.

"It's better he should go," Uncle Victor said. "For his own sake."

Uncle Edward said, "Of course it is."

His little blue eyes glanced up from the side of his nose, twinkling. His mouth stretched from white whisker to white whisker in a smile of righteous benevolence. But Uncle Victor's eyes slunk away as if he were ashamed of himself.

It was Uncle Victor who had paid the two hundred pounds.

II.

"Supposing there's something the matter with him, will he still have to go?"

"I don't see why you should suppose there's anything the matter with him," her mother said. "Is it likely your Uncle Victor would be paying all that money to send him out if he wasn't fit to go?"

It didn't seem likely that Victor would have done anything of the sort; any more than Uncle Edward would have let Aunt Bella give him an overcoat lined with black jennet.

They were waiting for Roddy to come back from the doctor's. Before Uncle Victor left Morfe he had made Roddy promise that for Mamma's satisfaction he would go and be overhauled. And it was as if he had said "You'll see then how much need there is to worry."

You might have kept on hoping that something would happen to prevent Roddy's going but for the size and solidity and expensiveness of the preparations. You might forget that his passage was booked for the first Saturday in March, that to-day was the first Wednesday, that Victor's two hundred pounds had been paid to Jem Alderson's account at the bank in Montreal, and still the black jennet lining of the overcoat shouted at you that nothing _could_ stop Roddy's going now. Uncle Victor might be reckless, but Uncle Edward and Aunt Bella took no risks.

Unless, after all, Dr. Kendal stopped it--if he said Roddy mustn't go.

She could hear Roddy's feet coming back. They sounded like Mark's feet on the flagged path outside.

He came into the room quickly. His eyes shone, he looked pleased and excited.

Mamma stirred in her chair.

"That's a bright face. We needn't ask if you've got your passport," she said.

He looked at her, a light, unresting look.

"How right you are," he said. "And wise."

"Well, I didn't suppose there was much the matter with you."

"There isn't."

He went to the bookshelf where he kept his drawing-blocks.

"I wouldn't sit down and draw if I were you. There isn't time."

"There'll be less after Saturday."

He sat down and began to draw. He was as absorbed and happy as if none of them had ever heard of Canada.

He chanted:

"'Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volleyed and thundered.'"

The pencil moved excitedly. Volumes of smoke curled and rolled and writhed on the left-hand side of the sheet. The guns of Balaclava.

"'Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell, Rode the six hundred.'"

A rush of hoofs and heads and lifted blades on the right hand. The horses and swords of the Light Brigade.

"'Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die'"--

"You ought to be a soldier, Roddy, like Mark, not a farmer."

"Oh wise! Oh right!

"'Forward, the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew Someone had blundered.'"

III.

She was going up the schoolhouse lane towards Karva, because Roddy and she had gone that way together on Friday, his last evening.

It was Sunday now; six o'clock: the time he used to bring Papa home. His ship would have left Queenstown, it would be steering to the west.

She wondered how much he had really minded going. Perhaps he had only been afraid he wouldn't be strong enough; for after he had seen the doctor he had been different. Pleased and excited. Perhaps he didn't mind so very much.

If she could only remember how he had looked and what he had said. He had talked about the big Atlantic liner, and the Canadian forests. With luck the voyage might last eleven or twelve clear days. You could shoot moose and wapiti. Wapiti and elk. Elk. With his eyes shining. He was not quite sure about the elk. He wished he had written to the High Commissioner for Canada about the elk. That was what the Commissioner was there for, to answer questions, to encourage you to go to his beastly country.

She could hear Roddy's voice saying these things as they walked over Karva. He was turning it all into an adventure, his imagination playing round and round it. And on Saturday morning he had been sick and couldn't eat his breakfast. Mamma had been sorry, and at the same time vexed and irritable as if she were afraid that the arrangements might, after all, be upset. But in the end he had gone off, pleased and excited, with Jem Alderson in the train.

She could see Jem's wide shoulders pushing through the carriage door after Roddy. He had a gentle, reddish face and long, hanging moustaches like a dying Gladiator. Little eyes that screwed up to look at you. He would be good to Roddy.

It would be all right.

She stood still in the dark lane. A disturbing memory gnawed its way through her thoughts that covered it: the way Roddy had looked at Mamma, that Wednesday, the way he had spoken to her. "Oh wise. Oh right!"

That was because he believed she wanted him to go away. He couldn't believe that she really cared for him; that Mamma really cared for anybody but Mark; he couldn't believe that anybody cared for him.

"'Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell, Rode the six hundred.'"

Roddy's chant pursued her up the lane.

The gate at the top fell to behind her. Moor grass showed grey among black heather. She half saw, half felt her way along the sheep tracks. There, where the edge of the round pit broke away, was the place where Roddy had stopped suddenly in front of her.

"I wouldn't mind a bit if I hadn't been such a brute to little Mamma. Why _are_ we such brutes to her?" He had turned in the narrow moor-track and faced her with his question: "Why?"

"'Forward, the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew Someone had blundered'"--

Hunderd--blundered. Did Tennyson really call hundred hunderd?

The grey curve of the high road glimmered alongside the moor. From the point where her track joined it she could see three lights, two moving, one still. The still light at the turn came from the Aldersons' house. The moving lights went with the klomp-klomp of hoofs on the road.

Down in the darkness beyond the fields Garthdale lay like a ditch under the immense wall of Greffington Edge. Roddy hated Greffington Edge. He hated Morfe. He _wanted_ to get away.

It would be all right.

The klomp-klomping sounded close behind her. Two shafts of light shot out in front, white on the grey road. Dr. Kendal drove past in his dog-cart. He leaned out over the side, peering. She heard him say something to himself.

The wheels slowed down with a grating noise. The lights stood still. He had pulled up. He was waiting for her.

She turned suddenly and went back up the moor by the way she had come. She didn't want to see Dr. Kendal. She was afraid he would say something about Roddy.

XXIII

I.

The books stood piled on the table by her window, the books Miss Wray of Clevehead had procured for her, had given and lent her. Now Roddy had gone she had time enough to read them: Hume's _Essays_, the fat maroon Schwegler, the two volumes of Kant in the hedgesparrow-green paper covers.

"_Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kritik der reinen Vernunft_." She said it over and over to herself. It sounded nicer than "_The Critique of Pure Reason_." At the sight of the thick black letters on the hedgesparrow-green ground her heart jumped up and down with excitement. Lucky it was in German, so that Mamma couldn't find out what Kant was driving at. The secret was hidden behind the thick black bars of the letters.

In Schwegler, as you went on you went deeper. You saw thought folding and unfolding, thought moving on and on, thought drawing the universe to itself, pushing the universe away from itself to draw it back again, closer than close.

Space and Time were forms of thought. They were infinite. So thought was infinite; it went on and on for ever, carrying Space, carrying Time.

If only you knew what the Thing-in-itself was.

II.

"Mamma--"

The letter lay between them on the hall table by the study door. Her mother put her hand over it, quick. A black, long-tailed M showed between her forefinger and her thumb.

They looked at each other, and her mother's mouth began to pout and smile as it used to when Papa said something improper. She took the letter and went, with soft feet and swinging haunches like a cat carrying a mouse, into the study. Mary stared at the shut door.

Maurice Jourdain. Maurice Jourdain. What on earth was he writing to Mamma for?

Five minutes ago she had been quiet and happy, reading Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_. Now her heart beat like a hammer, staggering with its own blows. The blood raced in her brain.

III.

"Mamma, if you don't tell me I shall write and ask him." Her mother looked up, frightened.

"You wouldn't do that, Mary?"

"Oh, wouldn't I though! I'd do it like a shot."

She wondered why she hadn't thought of it an hour ago.

"Well--If there's no other way to stop you--"

Her mother gave her the letter, picking it up by one corner, as though it had been a dirty pocket-handkerchief.

"It'll show you," she said, "the sort of man he is."

Mary held the letter in both her hands, gently. Her heart beat gently now with a quiet feeling of happiness and satisfaction. She looked a long time at the characters, the long-tailed M's, the close, sharp v's, the t's crossed with a savage, downward stab. She was quiet as long as she only looked. When she read the blood in her brain raced faster and confused her. She stopped at the bottom of the first page.

"I can't think what he means."

"It's pretty plain what he means," her mother said.

"About all those letters. What letters?"

"Letters he's been writing to your father and me and your Uncle Victor."

"When?"

"Ever since you left school. You were sent to school to keep you out of his way; and you weren't back before he began his persecuting. If you want to know why we left Ilford, _that's_ why. He persecuted your poor father. He persecuted your Uncle Victor. And now he's persecuting me."

"Persecuting?"

"What is it but persecuting? Threatening that he won't answer for the consequences if he doesn't get what he wants. He's mistaken if he thinks that's the way to get it."

"What--_does_ he want?"

"I suppose," her mother said, "he thinks he wants to marry you."

"Me? He doesn't say that. He only says he wants to come and see me. Why shouldn't he?"

"Because your father didn't wish it, and your uncle and I don't wish it."

"You don't like him."

"Do _you_?"

"I--love him."

"Nonsense. You don't know what you're talking about. You'd have forgotten all about him if you hadn't seen that letter."

"I thought he'd forgotten me. You ought to have told me. It was cruel not to tell me. He must have loved me all the time. He said I was to wait three years and I didn't know what he meant. He must have loved me then and I didn't know it."

The sound of her voice surprised her. It came from her whole body; it vibrated like a violin.

"How could he love you? You were a child then."

"I'm not a child now. You'll have to let him marry me."

"I'd rather see you in your coffin. I'd rather see you married to poor Norman Waugh. And goodness knows I wouldn't like that."

"Your mother didn't like your marrying Papa."

"You surely don't compare Maurice Jourdain with your father?"

"He's faithful. Papa was faithful. I'm faithful too."

"Faithful! To a horrid man like that!"

"He isn't horrid. He's kind and clever and good. He's brave, like Mark. He'd have been a soldier if he hadn't had to help his mother. And he's honourable. He said he wouldn't see me or write to me unless you let him. And he hasn't seen me and he hasn't written. You can't say he isn't honourable."

"I suppose," her mother said, "he's honourable enough."

"You'll have to let him come. If you don't, I _shall go to him_."

"I declare if you're not as bad as your Aunt Charlotte."

IV.

Incredible; impossible; but it had happened.

And it was as if she had known it--all the time, known that she would come downstairs that morning and see Maurice Jourdain's letter lying on the table. She always had known that something, some wonderful, beautiful, tremendous thing would happen to her. This was it.

It had been hidden in all her happiness. Her happiness was it. Maurice Jourdain.

When she said "Maurice Jourdain" she could feel her voice throb in her body like the string of a violin. When she thought of Maurice Jourdain the stir renewed itself in a vague, exquisite vibration. The edges of her mouth curled out with faint throbbing movements, suddenly sensitive, like eyelids, like finger-tips.

Odd memories darted out at her. The plantation at Ilford. Jimmy's mouth crushing her face. Jimmy's arms crushing her chest. A scarlet frock. The white bridge-rail by the ford. Bertha Mitchison, saying things, things you wouldn't think of if you could help it. But she was mainly aware of a surpassing tenderness and a desire to immolate herself, in some remarkable and noble fashion, for Maurice Jourdain. If only she could see him, for ten minutes, five minutes, and tell him that she hadn't forgotten him. He belonged to her real life. Her self had a secret place where people couldn't get at it, where its real life went on. He was the only person she could think of as having a real life at all like her own. She had thought of him as mixed up for ever with her real life, so that whether she saw him or not, whether she remembered him or not, he would be there. He was in the songs she made, he was in the Sonata _Appassionata_; he was in the solemn beauty of Karva under the moon. In the _Critique of Pure Reason_ she caught the bright passing of his mind.

Perhaps she had forgotten a little what he looked like. Smoky black eyes. Tired eyelids. A crystal mind, shining and flashing. A mind like a big room, filled from end to end with light. Maurice Jourdain.

V.

"I don't think I should have known you, Mary."

Maurice Jourdain had come. In the end Uncle Victor had let him. He was sitting there, all by himself, on the sofa in the middle of the room.

It was his third evening. She had thought it was going to pass exactly like the other two, and then her mother had got up, with an incredible suddenness, and left them.

Through the open window you could hear the rain falling in the garden; you could see the garden grey and wet with rain.

She sat on the edge of the fender, and without looking up she knew that he was watching her from under half-shut eyelids.

His eyelids were so old, so tired, so very tired and old.

"What did you cut it all off for?"

"Oh, just for fun."

Without looking at him she knew that he had moved, that his chin had dropped to his chest; there would be a sort of puffiness in his cheeks and about his jaw under the black, close-clipped beard. When she saw it she felt a little creeping chill at her heart.

But that was unfaithfulness, that was cruelty. If he knew it--poor thing--how it would hurt him! But he never would know. She would behave as though she hadn't seen any difference in him at all.

If only she could set his mind moving; turn the crystal about; make it flash and shine.

"What have they been doing to you?" he said. "You used to be clever. I wonder if you're clever still."

"I don't think I am, very."

She thought: "I'm stupid. I'm as stupid as an owl. I never felt so stupid in all my life. If only I could _think_ of something to say to him."

"Did they tell you what I've come for?"

"Yes."

"Are you glad?"

"Very glad."

"Why do you sit on the fender?"

"I'm cold."

"Cold and glad."

A long pause.

"Do you know why your mother hates me, Mary?"

"She doesn't. She only thought you'd killed Papa."

"I didn't kill him. It wasn't my fault if he couldn't control his temper.... That isn't what she hates me for.... Do you know why you were sent to school--the school my aunt found for you?"

"Well--to keep me from seeing you."

"Yes. And because I asked your father to let me educate you, since he wasn't doing it himself. I wanted to send you to a school in Paris for two years."

"I didn't know. They never told me. What made you want to do all that for me?"

"It wasn't for you. It was for the little girl who used to go for walks with me.... She was the nicest little girl. She said the jolliest things in the dearest little voice. 'How can a man like _you_ care to talk to a child like _me_?'"

"Did I say that? I don't remember."

"_She_ said it."

"It sounds rather silly of her."

"She wasn't silly. She was clever as they make them. And she was pretty too. She had lots of hair, hanging down her back. Curling.... And they take her away from me and I wait three years for her. She knew I was waiting. And when I come back to her she won't look at me. She sits on the fender and stares at the fire. She wears horrible black clothes."

"Because Papa's dead."

"She goes and cuts her hair all off. That isn't because your father's dead."

"It'll grow again."

"Not for another three years. And I believe I hear your mother coming back."

His chin dropped to his chest again. He brooded morosely. Presently Catty came in with the coffee.

The next day he was gone.

VI.

"It seems to me," her mother said, "you only care for him when he isn't there."

He had come again, twice, in July, in August. Each time her mother had said, "Are you sure you want him to come again? You know you weren't very happy the last time." And she had answered, "I know I'm going to be this time."

"You see," she said, "when he _isn't_ there you remember, and when he _is_ there he makes you forget."

"Forget what?"

"What it used to feel like."

Mamma had smiled a funny, contented smile. Mamma was different. Her face had left off being reproachful and disapproving. It had got back the tender, adorable look it used to have when you were little. She hated Maurice Jourdain, yet you felt that in some queer way she loved you because of him. You loved her more because of Maurice Jourdain.

The engagement happened suddenly at the end of August. You knew it would happen some day; but you thought of it as happening to-morrow or the day after rather than to-day. At three o'clock you started for a walk, never knowing how you might come back, and at five you found yourself sitting at tea in the orchard, safe. He would slouch along beside you, for miles, morosely. You thought of his mind swinging off by itself, shining where you couldn't see it. You broke loose from him to run tearing along the road, to jump water-courses, to climb trees and grin down at him through the branches. Then he would wake up from his sulking. Sometimes he would be pleased and sometimes he wouldn't. The engagement happened just after he had not been pleased at all.

She could still hear his voice saying "What do you _do_ it for?" and her own answering.

"You must do _something_."

"You needn't dance jigs on the parapets of bridges."

They slid through the gap into the fields. In the narrow path he stopped suddenly and turned.

"How can a child like _you_ care for a man like _me_?" Mocking her sing-song.

He stooped and kissed her. She shut her eyes so as not to see the puffiness.

"Will you marry me, Mary?"

VII.

After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the schoolhouse lane.

"I _do_ care for you, I do, really."

"You don't know what you're talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself--what you're feeling and thinking--and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?"

"You used to like it."

"I don't like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn't cut her hair off."

"How was I to know you'd mind so awfully? And how do you know what women do or don't do?"

"Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know men? That I might have women friends?"

"I don't think I've thought about it very much."

"Haven't you? Men don't live to be thirty-seven without getting to know women; they can't go about the world without meeting them.... There's a little girl down in Sussex. A dear little girl. She's everything a man wants a woman to be."

"Lots of hair?"

"Lots of hair. Stacks of it. And she's clever. She can cook and sew and make her own clothes and her sisters'. She's kept her father's house since she was fifteen. Without a servant."

"How awful for her. And you like her?"

"Yes, Mary."

"I'm glad you like her. Who else?"

"A Frenchwoman in Paris. And a German woman in Hamburg. And an Englishwoman in London; the cleverest woman I know. She's unhappy, Mary. Her husband behaves to her like a perfect brute."

"Poor thing. I hope you're nice to her."

"She thinks I am."

Silence. He peered into her face.

"Are you jealous of her, Mary?"

"I'm not jealous of any of them. You can marry them all if you want to."

"I was going to marry one of them."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because the little girl in Essex wouldn't let me."

"Little beast!"

"So you're jealous of _her_, are you? You needn't be. She's gone. She tried to swallow the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ and it disagreed with her and she died.

"'Nur einmal doch mächt' ich dich sehen, Und sinken vor dir auf's Knie, Und sterbend zu dir sprechen, Madam, ich liebe Sie!'"

"What's that? Oh, what's that?"

"_That_--Madam--is Heine."

VIII.

"My dearest Maurice--"

It was her turn for writing. She wondered whether he would like to hear about the tennis party at the Vicarage. Mr. Spencer Rollitt's nephew, Harry Craven, had been there, and the two Acroyd girls from Renton Lodge, and Norman Waugh.

Harry Craven's fawn face with pointed chin; dust-white face with black accents. Small fawn's mouth lifting upwards. Narrow nostrils slanting upwards. Two lobes of white forehead. Half-moons of parted, brushed-back hair.

He smiled: a blunt V opening suddenly on white teeth, black eyes fluttering. He laughed: all his features made sudden, upward movements like raised wings.

The Acroyds. Plump girls with pink, blown cheeks and sulky mouths. You thought of sullen, milk-fed babies, of trumpeting cherubs disgusted with their trumpets. They were showing their racquets to Harry Craven, bending their heads. You could see the backs of their privet-white necks, fat, with no groove in the nape, where their hair curled in springy wires, Minna's dark, Sophy's golden. They turned their backs when you spoke and pretended not to hear you.

She thought she would like Maurice to know that Harry Craven and she had beaten Minna Ackroyd and Norman Waugh. A love set.

Afterwards--Harry Craven playing hide-and-seek in the dark. The tennis net, coiled like a grey snake on the black lawn. "Let's hide together." Harry Craven, hiding, crouching beside you under the currant bushes. The scramble together up the water-butt and along the scullery roof. The last rush across the lawn.

"I say, you run like the wind."

He took your hand. You ran faster and faster. You stood together, under the ash tree, panting, and laughing, safe. He still held your hand.

Funny that you should remember it when you hadn't noticed it at the time. Hands were funny things. His hand had felt like Mark's hand, or Roddy's. You didn't think of it as belonging to him. It made you want to have Mark and Roddy back again. To play with them.

Perhaps, after all, it wouldn't be kind to tell Maurice about the tennis party. He couldn't have played like that. He couldn't have scrambled up the water-butt and run with you along the scullery roof.

"My dearest Maurice: Nothing has happened since you left, except that there was a tennis party at the Vicarage yesterday. You know what tennis parties are like. You'll be shocked to hear that I wore my old black jersey--the one you hated so--"

IX.

"'Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder.'"

She shut her eyes. She wanted nothing but his voice. His voice was alive. It remembered. It hadn't grown old and tired. "My child, we once were children, two children happy and small; we crept in the little hen-house and hid ourselves under the straw."

"Kikeriküh! sie glaubten Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."

"...It's all very well, Mary, I can't go on reading Heine to you for ever. And--_après_?"

He had taken her on his knees. That happened sometimes. She kept one foot on the floor so as not to press on him with her whole weight. And she played with his watch chain. She liked to touch the things he wore. It made her feel that she cared for him; it staved off the creeping, sickening fear that came when their hands and faces touched.

"Do you know," he said, "what it will be like--afterwards?"

She began, slowly, to count the buttons of his waistcoat.

"Have you ever tried to think what it will be like?"

"Yes."

Last night, lying awake in the dark, she had tried to think. She had thought of shoulders heaving over her, of arms holding her, of a face looking into hers, a honey-white, beardless face, blue eyes, black eyebrows drawn close down on to the blue. Jimmy's face, not Maurice Jourdain's.

That was in September. October passed. She began to wonder when he would come again.

He came on the last day of November.

X.

"Maurice, you're keeping something from me. Something's happened. Something's made you unhappy."

"Yes. Something's made me unhappy."

The Garthdale road. Before them, on the rise, the white highway showed like a sickle curving into the moor. At the horn of the sickle a tall ash tree in the wall of the Aldersons' farm. Where the road dipped they turned.

He slouched slowly, his head hung forward, loosening the fold of flesh about his jaw. His eyes blinked in the soft November sunshine. His eyelids were tight as though they had been tied with string.

"Supposing I asked you to release me from our engagement?"

"For always?"

"Perhaps for always. Perhaps only for a short time. Till I've settled something. Till I've found out something I want to know. Would you, Mary?"

"Of course I would. Like a shot."

"And supposing--I never settled it?"

"That would be all right. I can go on being engaged to you; but you needn't be engaged to me."

"You dear little thing.... I'm afraid, I'm afraid that wouldn't do."

"It would do beautifully. Unless you're really keeping something back from me."

"I am keeping something back from you.... I've no right to worry you with my unpleasant affairs. I was fairly well off when I asked you to marry me, but, the fact is, it looks as if my business was going to bits. I may be able to pull it together again. I may not--"

"Is _that_ all? I'm glad you've told me. If you'd told me before it would have saved a lot of bother."

"What sort of bother?"

"Well, you see, I wasn't quite sure whether I really wanted to marry you--just yet. Sometimes I thought I did, sometimes I thought I didn't. And now I know I do."

"That's it. I may not be in a position to marry you. I can't ask you to share my poverty."

"I shan't mind that. I'm used to it."

"I may not be able to keep a wife at all."

"Of course you will. You're keeping a housekeeper now. And a cook and a housemaid."

"I may have to send two of them away."

"Send them all away. I'll work for you all my life. I shall never want to do anything else. It's what I always wanted. When I was a child I used to imagine myself doing it for you. It was a sort of game I played."

"It's a sort of game you're playing now, my poor Mary.... No. No. It won't do."

"What do you think I'm made of? No woman who cared for a man could give him up for a thing like that."

"There are other things. Complications.... I think I'd better write to your mother. Or your brother."

"Write to them--write to them. They won't care a rap about your business. We're not like that, Maurice."

XI.

"You'd better let me see what he says, Mamma."

Her mother had called to her to come into the study. She had Maurice Jourdain's letter in her hand. She looked sad and at the same time happy.

"My darling, he doesn't want you to see it."

"Is it as bad as all that?"

"Yes. If I'd had my way you should never have had anything to do with him. I'd have forbidden him the house if your Uncle Victor hadn't said that was the way to make you mad about him. He seemed to think that seeing him would cure you. And so it ought to have done....

"He says you know he wants to break off the engagement, but he doesn't think he has made you understand why."

"Oh, yes, he did. It's because of his business."

"He doesn't say a word about his business. I'm to break it to you that he doesn't care for you as he thought he cared. As if he wasn't old enough to know what he wanted. He might have made up his mind before he drove your father into his grave."

"Tell me what he says."

"He just says that. He says he's in an awful position, and whatever he does he must behave dishonourably.... I admit he's sorry enough. And he's doing the only honourable thing."

"He _would_ do that."

She fixed her mind on his honour. You could love that. You could love that always.

"He _says_ he asked you to release him. Did he?"

"Yes."

"Then why on earth didn't you?"

"I did. But I couldn't release myself."

"But that's what you ought to have done. Instead of leaving him to do it."

"Oh, no. That would have been dishonourable to myself."

"You'd rather be jilted?"

"Much rather. It's more honourable to be jilted than to jilt."

"That's not the world's idea of honour."

"It's my idea of it.... And, after all, he _was_ Maurice Jourdain."

XII.

The pain hung on to the left side of her head, clawing. When she left off reading she could feel it beat like a hammer, driving in a warm nail.

Aunt Lavvy sat on the parrot chair, with her feet on the fender. Her fingers had left off embroidering brown birds on drab linen.

In the dying light of the room things showed fuzzy, headachy outlines. It made you feel sick to look at them.

Mamma had left her alone with Aunt Lavvy.

"I suppose you think that nobody was ever so unhappy as you are," Aunt Lavvy said.

"I hope nobody is. I hope nobody ever will be."

"Should you say _I_ was unhappy?"

"You don't look it. I hope you're not."

"Thirty-three years ago I was miserable, because I couldn't have my own way. I couldn't marry the man I cared for."

"Oh--_that_. Why didn't you?"

"My mother and your father and your Uncle Victor wouldn't let me."

"I suppose he was a Unitarian?"

"Yes. He was a Unitarian. But whatever he'd been I couldn't have married him. I couldn't do anything I liked. I couldn't go where I liked or stay where I liked. I wanted to be a teacher, but I had to give it up."

"_Why_?"

"Because your Uncle Victor and I had to look after your Aunt Charlotte."

"You could have got somebody else to look after Aunt Charlotte. Somebody else has to look after her now."

"Your Grandmamma made us promise never to send her away as long as it was possible to keep her. That's why your Uncle Victor never married."

"And all the time Aunt Charlotte would have been better and happier with Dr. Draper. Aunt Lavvy--t's too horrible."

"It wasn't as bad as you think. Your Uncle Victor couldn't have married in any case."

"Didn't he love anybody?"

"Yes, Mary; he loved your mother."

"I see. And she didn't love him."

"He wouldn't have married her if she had loved him. He was afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Afraid of going like your Aunt Charlotte. Afraid of what he might hand on to his children."

"Papa wasn't afraid. He grabbed. It was poor little Victor and you who got nothing."

"Victor has got a great deal."

"And you--you?"

"I've got all I want. I've got all there is. When everything's taken away, then God's there."

"If he's there, he's there anyhow."

"Until everything's taken away there isn't room to _see_ that he's there."

When Catty came in with the lamp Aunt Lavvy went out quickly.

Mary got up and stretched herself. The pain had left off hammering. She could think.

Aunt Lavvy--to live like that for thirty-three years and to be happy at the end. She wondered what happiness there could be in that dull surrender and acquiescence, that cold, meek love of God.

"Kikeriküh! sie glaubten Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."

XXIV

I.

Everybody in the village knew you had been jilted. Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin knew it, and Mr. Horn, the grocer, and Mr. Oldshaw at the bank. And Mr. Belk, the Justice of the Peace--little pink and flaxen gentleman, carrying himself with an air of pompous levity--eyes slewing round as you passed; and Mrs. Belk--hard, tight rotundity, little iron-grey eyes twinkling busily in a snub face, putty-skinned with a bilious gleam; curious eyes, busy eyes saying, "I'd like to know what she did to be jilted."

Minna and Sophy Acroyd, with their blown faces and small, disgusted mouths: you could see them look at each other; they were saying, "Here's that awful girl again." They were glad you were jilted.

Mr. Spencer Rollitt looked at you with his hard, blue eyes. His mouth closed tight with a snap when he saw you coming. He had disapproved of you ever since you played hide-and-seek in his garden with his nephew. He thought it served you right to be jilted.

And there was Dr. Charles's kind look under his savage, shaggy eyebrows, and Miss Kendal's squeeze of your hand when you left her, and the sudden start in Dorsy Heron's black hare's eyes. They were sorry for you because you had been jilted.

Miss Louisa Wright was sorry for you. She would ask you to tea in her little green-dark drawing-room; she lived in the ivy house next door to Mrs. Waugh; the piano would be open, the yellow keys shining; from the white title page enormous black letters would call to you across the room: "Cleansing Fires." That was the song she sang when she was thinking about Dr. Charles. First you played for her the Moonlight Sonata, and then she sang for you with a feverish exaltation:

"For as gold is refined in the _fi_-yer, So a heart is tried by pain."

She sang it to comfort you.

Her head quivered slightly as she shook the notes out of her throat in ecstasy.

She was sorry for you; but she was like Aunt Lavvy; she thought it was a good thing to be jilted; for then you were purified; your soul was set free; it went up, writhing and aspiring, in a white flame to God.

II.

"Mary, why are you always admiring yourself in the glass?"

"I'm not admiring myself. I only wanted to see if I was better-looking than last time."

"Why are you worrying about it? You never used to."

"Because I used to think I was pretty."

Her mother smiled. "You were pretty." And took back her smile. "You'd be pretty always if you were happy, and you'd be happy if you were good. There's no happiness for any of us without Christ."

She ignored the dexterous application.

"Do you mean I'm not, then, really, so very ugly?"

"Nobody said you were ugly."

"Maurice Jourdain did."

"You don't mean to say you're still thinking of that man?"

"Not thinking exactly. Only wondering. Wondering what it was he hated so."

"You wouldn't wonder if you knew the sort of man he is. A man who could threaten you with his infidelity."

"He never threatened me."

"I suppose it was me he threatened, then."

"What did he say?"

"He said that if his wife didn't take care to please him there were other women who would."

"He ought to have said that to me. It was horrible of him to say it to you."

She didn't know why she felt that it was horrible.

"I can tell you _one_ thing," said her mother, as if she had not told her anything. "It was those books you read. That everlasting philosophy. He said it was answerable for the whole thing."

"Then it was the--_the whole thing_ he hated."

"I suppose so," her mother said, dismissing a matter of small interest. "You'd better change that skirt if you're going with me to Mrs. Waugh's."

"Do you mind if I go for a walk instead?"

"Not if it makes you any more contented."

"It might. Are you sure you don't mind?"

"Oh, go along with you!"

Her mother was pleased. She was always pleased when she scored a point against philosophy.

III.

Mr. and Mrs. Belk were coming along High Row. She avoided them by turning down the narrow passage into Mr. Horn's yard and the Back Lane. From the Back Lane you could get up through the fields to the school-house lane without seeing people.

She hated seeing them. They all thought the same thing: that you wanted Maurice Jourdain and that you were unhappy because you hadn't got him. They thought it was awful of you. Mamma thought it was awful, like--like Aunt Charlotte wanting to marry the piano-tuner, or poor Jenny wanting to marry Mr. Spall.

Maurice Jourdain knew better than that. He knew you didn't want to marry him any more than he wanted to marry you. He nagged at you about your hair, about philosophy--she could hear his voice nag-nagging now as she went up the lane--he could nag worse than a woman, but he knew. _She_ knew. As far as she could see through the working of his dark mind, first he had cared for her, cared violently. Then he had not cared.

That would be because he cared for some other woman. There were two of them. The girl and the married woman. She felt no jealousy and no interest in them beyond wondering which of them it would be and what they would be like. There had been two Mary Oliviers; long-haired-- short-haired, and she had been jealous of the long-haired one. Jealous of herself.

There had been two Maurice Jourdains, the one who said, "I'll understand. I'll never lose my temper"; the one with the crystal mind, shining and flashing, the mind like a big room filled from end to end with light. But he had never existed.

Maurice Jourdain was only a name. A name for intellectual beauty. You could love that. Love was "the cle-eansing _fi_-yer!" There was the love of the body and the love of the soul. Perhaps she had loved Maurice Jourdain with her soul and not with her body. No. She had _not_ loved him with her soul, either. Body and soul; soul and body. Spinoza said they were two aspects of the same thing. _What_ thing? Perhaps it was silly to ask what thing; it would be just body _and_ soul. Somebody talked about a soul dragging a corpse. Her body wasn't a corpse; it was strong and active; it could play games and jump; it could pick Dan up and carry him round the table; it could run a mile straight on end. It could excite itself with its own activity and strength. It dragged a corpse-like soul, dull and heavy; a soul that would never be excited again, never lift itself up again in any ecstasy.

If only he had let her alone. If only she could go back to her real life. But she couldn't. She couldn't feel any more her sudden, secret happiness. Maurice Jourdain had driven it away. It had nothing to do with Maurice Jourdain. He ought not to have been able to take it from you.

She might go up to Karva Hill to look for it; but it would not be there. She couldn't even remember what it had been like.

IV.

New Year's night. She was lying awake in her white cell.

She hated Maurice Jourdain. His wearily searching eyes made her restless. His man's voice made her restless with its questions. "Do you know what it will be like--afterwards?" "Do you really want me?"

She didn't want him. But she wanted Somebody. Somebody. Somebody. He had left her with this ungovernable want.

Somebody. If you lay very still and shut your eyes he would come to you. You would see him. You knew what he was like. He had Jimmy's body and Jimmy's face, and Mark's ways. He had the soul of Shelley and the mind of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.

They talked to each other. Her reverie ran first into long, fascinating conversations about Space and Time and the Thing-in-itself, and the Transcendental Ego. He could tell you whether you were right or wrong; whether Substance and the Thing-in-itself were the same thing or different.

"Die--If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek." He wrote that. He wrote all Shelley's poems except the bad ones. He wrote Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_. He could understand your wanting to know what the Thing-in-itself was. If by dying to-morrow, to-night, this minute, you could know what it was, you would be glad to die. Wouldn't you?

The world was built up in Space and Time. Time and Space were forms of thought--ways of thinking. If there was thinking there would be a thinker. Supposing--supposing the Transcendental Ego was the Thing-in-itself?

That was _his_ idea. She was content to let him have the best ones. You could keep him going for quite a long time that way before you got tired.

The nicest way of all, though, was not to be yourself, but to be him; to live his exciting, adventurous, dangerous life. Then you could raise an army and free Ireland from the English, and Armenia from the Turks. You could go away to beautiful golden cities, melting in sunshine. You could sail in the China Sea; you could get into Central Africa among savage people with queer, bloody gods. You could find out all sorts of things.

You were he, and at the same time you were yourself, going about with him. You loved him with a passionate, self-immolating love. There wasn't room for both of you on the raft, you sat cramped up, huddled together. Not enough hard tack. While he was sleeping you slipped off. A shark got you. It had a face like Dr. Charles. The lunatic was running after him like mad, with a revolver. You ran like mad. Morfe Bridge. When he raised his arm you jerked it up and the revolver went off into the air. The fire was between his bed and the door. It curled and broke along the floor like surf. You waded through it. You picked him up and carried him out as Sister Dora carried the corpses with the small-pox. A screw loose somewhere. A tap turned on. Your mind dribbled imbecilities.

She kicked. "I won't think. I won't think about it any more!"

Restlessness. It ached. It gnawed, stopping a minute, beginning again, only to be appeased by reverie, by the running tap.

Restlessness. That was desire. It must be.

Desire: imeros. Eros. There was the chorus in the Antigone:

"Eros anikate machan, Eros os en ktaemasi pipteis."

There was Swinburne:

"...swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire, Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire."

There was the song Minna Acroyd sang at the Sutcliffes' party. "Sigh-ing and sad for des-ire of the bee." How could anybody sing such a silly song?

Through the wide open window she could smell the frost; she could hear it tingle. She put up her mouth above the bedclothes and drank down the clear, cold air. She thought with pleasure of the ice in her bath in the morning. It would break under her feet, splintering and tinkling like glass. If you kept on thinking about it you would sleep.

V.

Passion Week.

Her mother was reading the Lessons for the Day. Mary waited till she had finished.

"Mamma--what was the matter with Aunt Charlotte?"

"I'm sure I don't know. Except that she was always thinking about getting married. Whatever put Aunt Charlotte in your head?"

Her mother looked up from the Prayer Book as she closed it. Sweet and pretty; sweet and pretty; young almost, as she used to look, and tranquil.

"It's my belief," she said, "there wouldn't have been anything the matter with her if your Grandmamma Olivier hadn't spoiled her. Charlotte was as vain as a little peacock, and your Grandmamma was always petting and praising her and letting her have her own way."

"If she'd had her own way she'd have been married, and then perhaps she wouldn't have gone mad."

"She might have gone madder," said her mother. "It was a good thing for you, my dear, you didn't get your way. I'd rather have seen you in your coffin than married to Maurice Jourdain."

"Whoever it had been, you'd have said that."

"Perhaps I should. I don't want my only daughter to go away and leave me. It would be different if there were six or seven of you."

Her mother's complacence and tranquillity annoyed her. She hated her mother. She adored her and hated her. Mamma had married for her own pleasure, for her passion. She had brought you into the world, without asking your leave, for her own pleasure. She had brought you into the world to be unhappy. She had planned for you to do the things that she did. She cared for you only as long as you were doing them. When you left off and did other things she left off caring.

"I shall never go away and leave you," she said.

She hated her mother and she adored her.

An hour later, when she found her in the garden kneeling by the violet bed, weeding it, she knelt down beside her, and weeded too.

VI.

April, May, June.

One afternoon before post-time her mother called her into the study to show her Mrs. Draper's letter.

Mrs. Draper wrote about Dora's engagement and Effie's wedding. Dora was engaged to Hubert Manisty who would have Vinings. Effie had broken off her engagement to young Tom Manisty; she was married last week to Mr. Stuart-Gore, the banker. Mrs. Draper thought Effie had been very wise to give up young Manisty for Mr. Stuart-Gore. She wrote in a postscript: "Maurice Jourdain has just called to ask if I have any news of Mary. I think he would like to know that that wretched affair has not made her unhappy."

Mamma was smiling in a nervous way. "What am I to say to Mrs. Draper?"

"Tell her that Mr. Jourdain was right and that I am not at all unhappy."

She was glad to take the letter to the post and set his mind at rest.

It was in June last year that Maurice Jourdain had come to her: June the twenty-fourth. To-day was the twenty-fifth. He must have remembered.

The hayfields shone, ready for mowing. Under the wind the shimmering hay grass moved like waves of hot air, up and up the hill.

She slipped through the gap by Morfe Bridge and went up the fields to the road on Greffington Edge. She lay down among the bracken in the place where Roddy and she had sat two years ago when they had met Mr. Sutcliffe coming down the road.

The bracken hid her. It made a green sunshade above her head. She shut her eyes.

"Kikeriküh! sie glaubten Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."

That was all nonsense. Maurice Jourdain would never have crept in the little hen-house and hidden himself under the straw. He would never have crowed like a cock. Mark and Roddy would. And Harry Craven and Jimmy. Jimmy would certainly have hidden himself under the straw.

Supposing Jimmy had had a crystal mind. Shining and flashing. Supposing he had never done that awful thing they said he did. Supposing he had had Mark's ways, had been noble and honourable like Mark--

The interminable reverie began. He was there beside her in the bracken. She didn't know what his name would be. It couldn't be Jimmy or Harry or any of those names. Not Mark. Mark's name was sacred.

Cecil, perhaps.

_Why_ Cecil? _Cecil_?--You ape! You drivelling, dribbling idiot! That was the sort of thing Aunt Charlotte would have thought of.

She got up with a jump and stretched herself. She would have to run if she was to be home in time for tea.

From the top hayfield she could see the Sutcliffes' tennis court; an emerald green space set in thick grey walls. She drew her left hand slowly down her right forearm. The muscle was hardening and thickening.

Mamma didn't like it when you went by yourself to play singles with Mr. Sutcliffe. But if Mr. Sutcliffe asked you you would simply have to go. You would have to play a great many singles against Mr. Sutcliffe if you were to be in good form next year when Mark came home.

VII.

She was always going to the Sutcliffes' now. Her mother shook her head when she saw her in her short white skirt and white jersey, slashing at nothing with her racquet, ready. Mamma didn't like the Sutcliffes. She said they hadn't been nice to poor Papa. They had never asked him again. You could see she thought you a beast to like them.

"But, Mamma darling, I can't help liking them."

And Mamma would look disgusted and go back to her pansy bed and dig her trowel in with little savage thrusts, and say she supposed you would always have your own way.

You would go down to Greffington Hall and find Mr. Sutcliffe sitting under the beech tree on the lawn, in white flannels, looking rather tired and bored. And Mrs. Sutcliffe, a long-faced, delicate-nosed Beauty of Victorian Albums, growing stout, wearing full skirts and white cashmere shawls and wide mushroomy hats when nobody else did. She had an air of doing it on purpose, to be different, like royalty. She would take your hand and press it gently and smile her downward, dragging smile, and she would say, "How is your mother? Does she mind the hot weather? She must come and see me when it's cooler." That was the nice way she had, so that you mightn't think it was Mamma's fault, or Papa's, if they didn't see each other often. And she would look down at her shawl and gather it about her, as if in spirit she had got up and gone away.

And Mr. Sutcliffe would be standing in front of you, looking suddenly years younger, with his eyes shining and clean as though he had just washed them.

And after tea you would play singles furiously. For two hours you would try to beat him. When you jumped the net Mrs. Sutcliffe would wave her hand and nod to you and smile. You had done something that pleased her.

To-day, when it was all over, Mr. Sutcliffe took her back into the house, and there on the hall table were the books he had got for her from the London Library: The Heine, the Goethe's _Faust_, the Sappho, the Darwin's _Origin of Species_, the Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_.

"Five? All at once?"

"I get fifteen. As long as we're here you shall have your five."

He walked home with her, carrying the books. Five. Five. And when you had finished them there would be five more. It was unbelievable.

"Why are you so nice to me? Why? _Why_?"

"I think it must be because I like you, Mary."

Utterly unbelievable.

"Do--you--_really_--like me?"

"I liked you the first day I saw you. With your brother. On Greffington Edge."

"I wonder why." She wondered what he was thinking, what, deep down inside him, he was really thinking.

"Perhaps it was because you wanted something I could give you.... Tennis.... You wanted it so badly. Everything you want you want so badly."

"And I never knew we were going to be such friends."

"No more did I. And I don't know now how long it's going to last."

"Why shouldn't it last?"

"Because next year 'Mark' will have come home and you'll have nothing to say to me."

"Mark won't make a scrap of difference."

"Well--if it isn't 'Mark' ... You'll grow up, Mary, and it won't amuse you to talk to me any more. I shan't know you. You'll wear long skirts and long hair done in the fashion."

"I shall always want to talk to you. I shall never do up my hair. I cut it off because I couldn't be bothered with it. But I was sold. I thought it would curl all over my head, and it didn't curl."

"It curls at the tips," Mr. Sutcliffe said. "I like it. Makes you look like a jolly boy, instead of a dreadful, unapproachable young lady. A little San Giovanni. A little San Giovanni."

That was his trick: caressing his own words as if he liked them.

She wondered what, deep down inside him, he was really like.

"Mr. Sutcliffe--if you'd known a girl when she was only fourteen, and you liked her and you never saw her again till she was seventeen, and then you found that she'd gone and cut her hair all off, would it give you an awful shock?"

"Depends on how much I liked her."

"If you'd liked her awfully--would it make you leave off liking her?"

"I think my friendship could stand the strain."

"If it wasn't just friendship? Supposing it was Mrs. Sutcliffe?"

"I shouldn't like my wife to cut her hair off. It wouldn't be at all becoming to her."

"No. But when she was young?"

"Ah--when she was young--"

"Would it have made any difference?"

"No. No. It wouldn't have made any difference at all."

"You'd have married her just the same?"

"Just the same, Mary. Why?"

"Oh, nothing. I thought you'd be like that. I just wanted to make sure."

He smiled to himself. He had funny, secret thoughts that you would never know.

"Well," she said, "I didn't beat you."

"Form not good enough yet--quite."

He promised her it should be perfect by the time Mark came home.

VIII.

"The pale pearl-purple evening--" The words rushed together. She couldn't tell whether they were her own or somebody else's.

There was the queer shock of recognition that came with your own real things. It wasn't remembering though it felt like it.

Shelley--"The pale purple even." Not pearl-purple. Pearl-purple was what you saw. The sky to the east after sunset above Greffington Edge. Take out "pale," and "pearl-purple evening" was your own.

The poem was coming by bits at a time. She could feel the rest throbbing behind it, an unreleased, impatient energy.

Her mother looked in at the door. "What are you doing it for, Mary?"

"Oh--for nothing."

"Then for pity's sake come down into the warm room and do it there. You'll catch cold."

She hated the warm room.

The poem would be made up of many poems. It would last a long time, through the winter and on into the spring. As long as it lasted she would be happy. She would be free from the restlessness and the endless idiotic reverie of desire.

IX.

"From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,

"_Good Lord, deliver us_."

Mary was kneeling beside her mother in church.

"From fornication, and all other deadly sin--"

Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that other people couldn't have, that you couldn't give to them; happiness that was no good to Mamma, no good to anybody but you, secret and selfish; that was your happiness. It was deadly sin.

She felt an immense, intolerable compassion for everybody who was unhappy. A litany of compassion went on inside her: For old Dr. Kendal, sloughing and rotting in his chair; for Miss Kendal; for all women labouring of child; for old Mrs. Heron; for Dorsy Heron; for all prisoners and captives; for Miss Louisa Wright; for all that were desolate and oppressed; for Maggie's sister, dying of cancer; and for Mamma, kneeling there, praying.

Sunday after Sunday.

And she would work in the garden every morning, digging in leaf mould and carrying the big stones for the rockery; she would go to Mrs. Sutcliffe's sewing parties; she would sit for hours with Maggie's sister, trying not to look as if she minded the smell of the cancer. You were no good unless you could do little things like that. You were no good unless you could keep on doing them.

She tried to keep on.

Some people kept on all day, all their lives. Still, it was not you so much as the world that was wrong. It wasn't fair and right that Maggie's sister should have cancer while you had nothing the matter with you. Or even that Maggie had to cook and scrub while you made poems.

Not fair and right.

X.

"Mamma, what is it? Why are you in the dark?"

By the firelight she could see her mother sitting with her eyes shut, and her hands folded in her lap.

"I can't use my eyes. I think there must be something the matter with them."

"Your eyes? ... Do they hurt?"

(You might have known--you might have known that something would happen. While you were upstairs, writing, not thinking of her. You might have known.)

"_Something_ hurts. Just there. When I try to read. I must be going blind."

"Are you sure it isn't your glasses?"

"How can it be my glasses? They never hurt me before."

But the oculist in Durlingham said it _was_ her glasses. She wasn't going blind. It wasn't likely that she ever would go blind.

For a week before the new glasses came Mamma sat, patient and gentle, in her chair, with her eyes shut and her hands folded in her lap. And you read aloud to her: the Bible and _The Times_ in the morning, and Dickens in the afternoon. And in the evening you played draughts and Mamma beat you.

Mamma said, "I shall be quite sorry when the new glasses come."

Mary was sorry too. They had been so happy.

XI.

April. Mark's ship had left Port Said nine days ago.

Mamma had come in with the letter.

"I've got news for you. Guess."

"Mark's coming to-day."

"No.... Mr. Jourdain was married yesterday."

"Who--to?"

"Some girl he used to see in Sussex."

(That one. She was glad it was the little girl, the poor one. Nice of Maurice to marry her.)

"Do you mind, Mary?"

"No, not a bit. I hope they'll be happy. I want them to be happy.... Now, you see--that was why he didn't want to marry me."

Her mother sat down on the bed. There was something she was going to say.

"Well--thank goodness that's the last of it."

"Does Mark know?"

"No, he does not. You surely don't imagine anybody would tell him a thing like that about his sister?"

"Like what?"

"Well--he wouldn't think it very nice of you."

"You talk as if I was Aunt Charlotte.... Do you think I'm like her?"

"I never said you were like her...."

"You think--you think and won't say."

"Well, if you don't want to be thought like your Aunt Charlotte you should try and behave a little more like other people. For pity's sake, do while Mark's here, or he won't like it, I can tell you."

"I don't do anything Mark wouldn't like."

"You do very queer things sometimes, though you mayn't think so.... I'm not the only one that notices. If you really want to know, that was what Mr. Jourdain was afraid of--the queer things you say and do. You told me yourself you'd have gone to him if he hadn't come to you."

She remembered. Yes, she had said that.

"Did he know about Aunt Charlotte?"

"You may be sure he did."

Mamma didn't know. She never would know what it had been like, that night. But there were things you didn't know, either.

"What did Aunt Charlotte _do_?"

"Nothing. She just fell in love with every man she met. If she'd only seen him for five minutes she was off after him. Ordering her trousseau and dressing herself up. She was no more mad than I am except just on that one point."

"Aunt Lavvy said that was why Uncle Victor never married. He was afraid of something--something happening to his children. What do you think he thought would happen?"

Her mother's foot tapped on the floor.

"I'm sure I can't tell you what he thought. And I don't know what there was to be afraid of. I wish you wouldn't throw your stockings all about the room."

Mamma picked up the stockings and went away. You could see that she was annoyed. Annoyed with Uncle Victor for having been afraid to marry.

A dreadful thought came to her. "Does Mamma really think I'm like Aunt Charlotte? I won't be like her. I won't.... I'm not. There was Jimmy and there was Maurice Jourdain. But I didn't fall in love with the Proparts or the Manistys, or Norman Waugh, or Harry Craven, or Dr. Charles. Or Mr. Sutcliffe.... She _said_ I was as bad as Aunt Charlotte. Because I said I'd go to Maurice.... I meant, just to see him. What did she think I meant?... Oh, not _that_.... Would I really have gone? Got into the train and gone? _Would_ I?"

She would never know.

"I wish I knew what Uncle Victor was afraid of."

Wondering what he had been afraid of, she felt afraid.

XXV

I.

She waited.

Mamma and Mark had turned their backs to her as they clung together. But there was his sparrow-brown hair, clipped close into the nape of his red-brown neck. If only Mamma wouldn't cry like that--

"Mark--"

"Is that Minky?"

They held each other and let go in one tick of the clock, but she had stood a long time seeing his eyes arrested in their rush of recognition. Disappointed.

The square dinner-table stretched itself into an immense white space between her and Mark. It made itself small again for Mark and Mamma. Across the white space she heard him saying things: about Dan meeting him at Tilbury, and poor Victor coming to Liverpool Street, and Cox's. Last night he had stayed at Ilford, he had seen Bella and Edward and Pidgeon and Mrs. Fisher and the Proparts. "Do you remember poor Edward and his sheep? And Mary's lamb!"

Mark hadn't changed, except that he was firmer and squarer, and thinner, because he had had fever. And his eyes--He was staring at her with his disappointed eyes.

She called to him. "You don't know me a bit, Mark."

He laughed. "I thought I'd see somebody grown up. Victor said Mary was dreadfully mature. What did he mean?"

Mamma said she was sure she didn't know.

"What do you do with yourself all day, Minky?"

"Nothing much. Read--work--play tennis with Mr. Sutcliffe."

"Mr.--Sutcliffe?"

"Never mind Mr. Sutcliffe. Mark doesn't want to hear about him."

"Is there a _Mrs._ Sutcliffe?"

"Yes."

"Does _she_ play?"

"No. She's too old. Much older than he is."

"That'll do, Mary."

Mamma's eyes blinked. Her forehead was pinched with vexation. Her foot tapped on the floor.

Mark's eyes kept up their puzzled stare.

"What's been happening?" he said. "What's the matter? Everywhere I go there's a mystery. There was a mystery at Ilford. About Dan. And about poor Charlotte. I come down here and there's a mystery about some people called Sutcliffe. And a mystery about Mary." He laughed again. "Minky seems to be in disgrace, as if she'd done something.... It's awfully queer. Mamma's the only person something hasn't happened to."

"I should have thought everything had happened to me," said Mamma.

"That makes it queerer."

Mamma went up with Mark into his room. Papa's room. You could hear her feet going up and down in it, and the squeaking wail of the wardrobe door as she opened and shut it.

She waited, listening. When she heard her mother come downstairs she went to him.

Mark didn't know that the room had been Papa's room. He didn't know that she shivered when she saw him sitting on the bed. She had stood just there where Mark's feet were and watched Papa die. She could feel the basin slipping, slipping from the edge of the bed.

Mark wasn't happy. There was something he missed, something he wanted. She had meant to say, "It's all right. Nothing's happened. I haven't done anything," but she couldn't think about it when she saw him sitting there.

"Mark--what is it?"

"I don't know, Minky."

"_I_ know. You've come back, and it isn't like what you thought it would be."

"No," he said, "it isn't.... I didn't think it would be so awful without Papa."

II.

The big package in the hall had been opened. The tiger's skin lay on the drawing-room carpet.

Mark was sorry for the tiger.

"He was only a young cat. You'd have loved him, Minky, if you'd seen him, with his shoulders down--very big cat--shaking his haunches at you, and his eyes shining and playing; cat's eyes, sort of swimming and shaking with his fun."

"How did you feel?"

"Beastly mean to go and shoot him when he was happy and excited."

"Five years without any fighting.... Anything else happen?"

"No. No polo. No fighting. Only a mutiny in the battery once."

"What was it like?"

"Oh, it just tumbled into the office and yelled and waved jabby things and made faces at you till you nearly burst with laughing."

"You laughed?" Mamma said. "At a mutiny?"

"Anybody would. Minky'd have laughed if she'd been there. It frightened them horribly because they didn't expect it. The poor things never know when they're being funny."

"What happened," said Mary, "to the mutiny?"

"That."

"Oh--Mark--" She adored him.

She went to bed, happy, thinking of the tiger and the mutiny. When Catty called her in the morning she jumped out of bed, quickly, to begin another happy day. Everything was going to be interesting, to be exciting.

At any minute anything might happen, now that Mark had come home.

III.

"Mark, are you coming?"

She was tired of waiting on the flagstones, swinging her stick. She called through the house for him to come. She looked through the rooms, and found him in the study with Mamma. When they saw her they stopped talking suddenly, and Mamma drew herself up and blinked.

Mark shook his head. After all, he couldn't come.

Mamma wanted him. Mamma had him. As long as they lived she would have him. Mamma and Mark were happy together; their happiness tingled, you could feel it tingling, like the happiness of lovers. They didn't want anybody but each other. You existed for them as an object in some unintelligible time and in a space outside their space. The only difference was that Mark knew you were there and Mamma didn't.

She chose the Garthdale road. Yesterday she had gone that way with Mamma and Mark. She had not talked to him, for when she talked the pinched, vexed look came into Mamma's face though she pretended she hadn't heard you. Every now and then Mark had looked at her over his shoulder and said, "Poor Minx." It was as if he said, "I'm sorry, but you see how it is. I can't help it."

And just here, where the moor track touched the road, she had left them, clearing the water-courses, and had gone up towards Karva.

She had looked back and seen them going slowly towards the white sickle of the road, Mark very upright, taut muscles held in to his shortened stride; Mamma pathetic and fragile, in her shawl, moving with a stiff, self-hypnotised air.

Her love for them was a savage pang that cut her eyes and drew her throat tight.

Then suddenly she had heard Mark whooping, and she had run back, whooping and leaping, down the hill to walk with them again.

She turned back now, at the sickle. Perhaps Mark would come to meet her.

He didn't come. She found them sitting close on the drawing-room sofa; the tea-table was pushed aside; they were looking at Mark's photographs. She came and stood by them to see.

Mark didn't look up or say anything. He went on giving the photographs to Mamma, telling her the names. "Dicky Carter. Man called St. John. Man called Bibby--Jonas Bibby. Allingham. Peters. Gunning, Stobart Hamilton. Sir George Limond, Colonel Robertson."

Photographs of women. Mamma's fingers twitched as she took them, one by one. Women with smooth hair and correct, distinguished faces. She looked at each face a long time; her mouth half-smiled, half-pouted at them. She didn't hand on the photographs to you, but laid them down on the sofa, one by one, as if you were not there.

A youngish woman in a black silk gown; Mrs. Robertson, the Colonel's wife. A girl in a white frock; Mrs. Dicky Carter, she had nursed Mark through his fever. A tall woman in a riding habit and a solar topee, standing very straight, looking very straight at you, under the shadow of the topee. Mamma didn't mind the others so much, but she was afraid of this one. There was danger under the shadow of the topee.

"Lady Limond." Mark had stayed with them at Simla.

"Oh. Very handsome face."

"Very handsome."

You could see by Mark's face that he didn't care about Lady Limond.

Mamma had turned again to the girl in the white frock who had nursed him.

"Are those all, Mark?"

"Those are all."

She took off her glasses and closed her eyes. Her face was smooth now: her hands were quiet. She had him. She would always have him.

But when he went away for a fortnight to stay with the man called St. John, she was miserable till he had come back, safe.

IV.

Whit Sunday morning. She would walk home with Mark after church while Mamma stayed behind for the Sacrament.

But it didn't happen. Mark scowled as he turned out into the aisle to make way for her. He went back into the pew and sat there, looking stiff and stubborn. He would go up with Mamma to the altar rails. He would eat the bread and drink the wine.

That afternoon she took her book into the garden. Mark came to her there. Mamma, tired with the long service, dozed in the drawing-room.

Mark read over her shoulder: "'Wir haben in der Transcendentalen Aesthetik hinreichend bewiesen.' Do it in English."

"'In the Transcendental Aesthetic we have sufficiently proved that all that is perceived in space or time, and with it all objects of any experience possible to us are mere Vorstellungen--Vorstellungen-- ideas--presentations, which, so far as they are presented, whether as extended things or series of changes, have no existence grounded in themselves outside our thoughts--'"

"Why have you taken to that dreadful stodge?"

"I'm driven to it. It's like drink; once you begin you've got to go on."

"What on earth made you begin?"

"I wanted to know things--to know what's real and what isn't, and what's at the back of everything, and whether there _is_ anything there or not. And whether you can know it or not. And how you can know anything at all, anyhow. I'd give anything ... Are you listening?"

"Yes, Minky, you'd give anything--"

"I'd give everything--everything I possess--to know what the Thing-in-itself is."

"I'd rather know Arabic. Or how to make a gun that would find its own range and feed itself with bullets sixty to the minute."

"That would be only knowing a few; more things. I want _the_ thing. Reality, Substance, the Thing-in-itself. Spinoza calls it God. Kant doesn't; but he seems to think it's all the God you'll ever get, and that, even then, you can't know it. Transcendental Idealism is just another sell."

"Supposing," Mark said, "there isn't any God at all."

"Then I'd rather know _that_ than go on thinking there was one when there wasn't."

"But you'd feel sold?"

"Sort of sold. But it's the risk--the risk that makes it so exciting ... Why? Do _you_ think there isn't any God?"

"I'm afraid I think there mayn't be."

"Oh, Mark--and you went to the Sacrament. You ate it and drank it."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"You don't believe in it any more than I do."

"I never said anything about believing in it."

"_You ate and drank it_."

"Poor Jesus said he wanted you to do that and remember him. I did it and remembered Jesus."

"I don't care. It was awful of you."

"Much more awful to spoil Mamma's pleasure in God and Jesus. I did it to make her happy. Somebody had to go with her. You wouldn't, so I did ... It doesn't matter, Minky. Nothing matters except Mamma."

"Truth matters. You'd die rather than lie or do anything dishonourable. Yet that was dishonourable."

"I'd die rather than hurt Mamma ... If you make her unhappy, Minky, I shall hate you."

V.

"You can't go in that thing."

They were going to the Sutcliffes' dance. Mamma hadn't told Mark she didn't like them. She wanted Mark to go to the dance. He had said Morfe was an awful hole and it wasn't good for you to live in it.

The frock was black muslin, ironed out. Mamma's black net Indian scarf, dotted with little green and scarlet flowers, was drawn tight over her hips to hide the place that Catty had scorched with the iron. The heavy, brilliant, silk-embroidered ends, green and scarlet, hung down behind. She felt exquisitely light and slender.

Mamma was shaking her head at Mark as he stared at you.

"If you knew," he said, "what you look like ... That's the way the funny ladies dress in the bazaars--If you'd only take that awful thing off."

"She can't take it off," Mamma said. "He's only teasing you."

Funny ladies in the bazaars--Funny ladies in the bazaars. Bazaars were Indian shops ... Shop-girls ... Mark didn't mean shop-girls, though. You could tell that by his face and by Mamma's ... Was that what you really looked like? Or was he teasing? Perhaps you would tell by Mrs. Sutcliffe's face. Or by Mr. Sutcliffe's.

Their faces were nicer than ever. You couldn't tell. They would never let you know if anything was wrong.

Mrs. Sutcliffe said, "What a beautiful scarf you've got on, my dear."

"It's Mamma's. She gave it me." She wanted Mrs. Sutcliffe to know that Mamma had beautiful things and that she would give them. The scarf was beautiful. Nothing could take from her the feeling of lightness and slenderness she had in it.

Her programme stood: Nobody. Nobody. Norman Waugh. Dr. Charles. Mr. Sutcliffe. Mr. Sutcliffe. Nobody. Nobody again, all the way down to Mr. Sutcliffe, Mr. Sutcliffe, Mr. Sutcliffe. Then Mark. Mr. Sutcliffe had wanted the last dance, the polka; but she couldn't give it him. She didn't want to dance with anybody after Mark.

The big, long dining-room was cleared; the floor waxed. People had come from Reyburn and Durlingham. A hollow square of faces. Faces round the walls. Painted faces hanging above them: Mr. Sutcliffe's ancestors looking at you.

The awful thing was she didn't know how to dance. Mark said you didn't have to know. It would be all right. Perhaps it would come, suddenly, when you heard the music. Supposing it came like skating, only after you had slithered a lot and tumbled down?

The feeling of lightness and slenderness had gone. Her feet stuck to the waxed floor as if they were glued there. She was frightened.

It had begun. Norman Waugh was dragging her round the room. Once. Twice. She hated the feeling of his short, thick body moving a little way in front of her. She hated his sullen bull's face, his mouth close to hers, half open, puffing. From the walls Mr. Sutcliffe's ancestors looked at you as you shambled round, tied tight in your Indian scarf, like a funny lady in the bazaars. Raised eyebrows. Quiet, disdainful faces. She was glad when Norman Waugh left her on the window-seat.

Dr. Charles next. He was kind. You trod on his feet and he pretended he had trodden on yours.

"My dancing days are over."

"And mine haven't begun."

They sat out and she watched Mark. He didn't dance very well: he danced tightly and stiffly as if he didn't like it; but he danced: with Miss Frewin and Miss Louisa Wright, because nobody else would; with the Acroyds because Mrs. Sutcliffe made him; five dances with Dorsy Heron, because he liked her, because he was sorry for her, because he found her looking sad and shy in a corner. You could see Dorsy's eyes turn and turn, restlessly, to look at Mark, and her nose getting redder as he came to her.

Dr. Charles watched them. You knew what he was thinking. "She's in love with him. She can't take her eyes off him."

Supposing you told her the truth? "He won't marry you. He won't care for you. He won't care for anybody but Mamma. Can't you see, by the way he looks at you, the way he holds you? It's no use your caring for him. It'll only make your little nose redder."

He wouldn't mind her red nose; her little proud, high-bridged nose. He liked her small face, trying to look austere with shy hare's eyes; her vague mouth, pointed at the corners in a sort of sharp tenderness; her smooth, otter-brown hair brushed back and twisted in a tight coil at the nape of her neck. Dorsy was sweet and gentle and unselfish. He might have cared for Dorsy if it hadn't been for Mamma. Anyhow, for one evening in her life Dorsy was happy, dancing round and round, with her wild black hare's eyes shining.

Mr. Sutcliffe. She stood up. She would have to tell him.

"I can't dance."

"Nonsense. You can run and you can jump. Of course you can dance."

"I don't know how to."

"The sooner you learn the better. I'll teach you in two minutes."

He steered her into the sheltered bay behind the piano. They practised.

"Mark's looking at us."

"Is he? What has he done to you, Mary? We'll go where he can't look at us."

They went out into the hall.

"That's it; your feet between mine. In and out. Don't throw your shoulders back. Don't keep your elbows in. It's not a hurdle race."

"I wish it was."

"You won't in a minute. Don't count your steps. Listen for the beat. It's the beat that does it."

She began to feel light and slender again.

"Now you're off. You're all right."

Off. Turning and turning. You steered through the open door; in and out among the other dancers; you skimmed; you swam, whirling, to the steady tump-tump of the piano, and the queer, exciting squeak of the fiddles--

Whirling together, you and Mr. Sutcliffe and the piano and the two fiddles. One animal, one light, slender animal, whirling and playing. Every now and then his arm tightened round your waist with a sort of impatience. When it slackened you were one light, slender animal again, four feet and four arms whirling together, the piano was its heart, going tump-tump, and the fiddles--

"Why did I think I couldn't do it?"

"Funk. Pure funk. You wanted to dance--you wanted to so badly that it frightened you."

His arm tightened.

As they passed she could see Mrs. Sutcliffe sitting in an arm-chair pushed back out of the dancers' way. She looked tired and bored and a little anxious.

When the last three dances were over he took her back to Mark.

Mark scowled after Mr. Sutcliffe.

"What does he look at you like that for?"

"Perhaps he thinks I'm--a funny lady in a bazaar."

"_That's_ the sort of thing you oughtn't to say."

"_You_ said it."

"All the more reason why you shouldn't."

He put his arm round her and they danced. They danced.

"You can do it all right now," he said.

"I've learnt. He taught me. He took me outside and taught me. I'm not frightened any more."

Mark was dancing better now. Better and better. His eyes shone down into yours. He whispered.

"Minky--Poor Minky--Pretty Minky."

He swung you. He lifted you off your feet. He danced like mad, carrying you on the taut muscle of his arm.

Somebody said, "That chap's waked up at last. Who's the girl?"

Somebody said, "His sister."

Mark laughed out loud. You could have sworn he was enjoying himself.

But when he got home he said he hadn't enjoyed himself at all. And he had a headache the next day. It turned out that he hadn't wanted to go. He hated dancing. Mamma said he had only gone because he thought you'd like it and because he thought it would be good for you to dance like other people.

VI.

"Why are you always going to the Sutcliffes'?" Mark said suddenly.

"Because I like them."

They were coming down the fields from Greffington Edge in sight of the tennis court.

"You oughtn't to like them when they weren't nice to poor Papa. If Mamma doesn't want to know them you oughtn't to."

Mark, too. Mark saying what Mamma said. Her heart swelled and tightened. She didn't answer him.

"Anyhow," he said, "you oughtn't to go about all over the place with old Sutcliffe." When he said "old Sutcliffe" his eyes were merry and insolent as they used to be. "What do you do it for?"

"Because I like him. And because there's nobody else who wants to go about with me."

"There's Miss Heron."

"Dorsy isn't quite the same thing."

"Whether she is or isn't you've got to chuck it."

"Why?"

"Because Mamma doesn't like it and I don't like it. That ought to be enough." (Like Papa.)

"It isn't enough."

"Minky--why are you such a brute to little Mamma?"

"Because I can't help it ... It's all very well for you--"

Mark turned in the path and looked at her; his tight, firm face tighter and firmer. She thought: "He doesn't know. He's like Mamma. He won't see what he doesn't want to see. It would be kinder not to tell him. But I can't be kind. He's joined with Mamma against me. They're two to one. Mamma must have said something to make him hate me." ...Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps he had only seen her disapproving, reproachful face ... "If he says another word--if he looks like that again, I shall tell him."

"It's different for you," she said. "Ever since I began to grow up I felt there was something about Mamma that would kill me if I let it. I've had to fight for every single thing I've ever wanted. It's awful fighting her, when she's so sweet and gentle. But it's either that or go under."

"Minky--you talk as if she hated you."

"She does hate me."

"You lie." He said it gently, without rancour.

"No. I found that out years ago. She doesn't _know_ she hates me. She never knows that awful sort of thing. And of course she loved me when I was little. She'd love me now if I stayed little, so that she could do what she liked with me; if I'd sit in a corner and think as she thinks, and feel as she feels and do what she does."

"If you did you'd be a much nicer Minx."

"Yes. Except that I _should_ be lying then, the whole time. Hiding my real self and crushing it. It's your _real_ self she hates--the thing she can't see and touch and get at--the thing that makes you different. Even when I was little she hated it and tried to crush it. I remember things--"

"You don't love her. You wouldn't talk like that about her if you loved her."

"It's _because_ I love her. Her self. _Her_ real self. When she's working in the garden, planting flowers with her blessed little hands, doing what she likes, and when she's reading the Bible and thinking about God and Jesus, and when she's with _you_, Mark, happy. That's her real self. I adore it. Selves are sacred. You ought to adore them. Anybody's self. Catty's.... I used to wonder what the sin against the Holy Ghost was. They told you nobody knew what it was. _I_ know. It's that. Not adoring the self in people. Hating it. Trying to crush it."

"I see. Mamma's committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, has she?"

"Yes."

He laughed. "You mustn't go about saying those things. People will think you mad."

"Let them. I don't care--I don't care if _you_ think I'm mad. I only think it's beastly of you to say so."

"You're not madder than I am. We're all mad. Mad as hatters. You and me and Dank and Roddy and Uncle Victor. Poor Charlotte's the sanest of the lot, and she's the only one that's got shut up."

"Why do you say she's the sanest?"

"Because she knew what she wanted."

"Yes. She knew what she wanted. She spent her whole life trying to get it. She went straight for that one thing. Didn't care a hang what anybody thought of her."

"So they said poor Charlotte was mad."

"She was only mad because she didn't get it."

"Yes, Minx.... Would poor Minky like to be married?"

"No. I'm not thinking about that. I'd like to write poems. And to get away sometimes and see places. To get away from Mamma."

"You little beast."

"Not more beast than you. You got away. Altogether. I believe you knew."

"Knew what?"

Mark's face was stiff and red. He was angry now.

"That if you stayed you'd be crushed. Like Roddy. Like me."

"I knew nothing of the sort."

"Deep down inside you you knew. You were afraid. That's why you wanted to be a soldier. So as not to be afraid. So as to get away altogether."

"You little devil. You're lying. Lying."

He threw his words at you softly, so as not to hurt you. "Lying. Because you're a beast to Mamma you'd like to think I'm a beast, too."

"No--no." She could feel herself making it out more and more. Flash after flash. Till she knew him. She knew Mark.

"You _had_ to. To get away from her, to get away from her sweetness and gentleness so that you could be yourself; so that you could be a man."

She had a tremendous flash.

"You haven't got away altogether. Half of you still sticks. It'll never get away.... You'll never love anybody. You'll never marry."

"No, I won't. You're right there."

"Yes. Papa never got away. That was why he was so beastly to us."

"He wasn't beastly to us."

"He was. You know he was. You're only saying that because it's what Mamma would like you to say.... He couldn't help being beastly. He couldn't care for us. He couldn't care for anybody but Mamma."

"That's why I care for _him_," Mark said.

"I know.... None of it would have mattered if we'd been brought up right. But we were brought up all wrong. Taught that our selves were beastly, that our wills were beastly and that everything we liked was bad. Taught to sit on our wills, to be afraid of our selves and not trust them for a single minute.... Mamma was glad when I was jilted, because that was one for _me_."

"Were you jilted?"

"Yes. She thought it would make me humble. I always was. I am. I'm afraid of my self _now_. I can't trust it. I keep on asking people what they think when _I_ ought to _know_.... But I'm going to stop all that. I'm going to fight."

"Fight little Mamma?"

"No. Myself. The bit of me that claws on to her and can't get away. My body'll stay here and take care of her all her life, but my _self_ will have got away. It'll get away from all of them. It's got bits of them sticking to it, bits of Mamma, bits of Papa, bits of Roddy, bits of Aunt Charlotte. Bits of you, Mark. I don't _want_ to get away from you, but I shall have to. You'd kick me down and stamp on me if you thought it would please Mamma. There mayn't be much left when I'm done, but at least it'll be me."

"Mad. Quite mad, Minx. You ought to be married."

"And leave little Mamma? ... I'll race you from the bridge to the top of the hill."

He raced her. He wasn't really angry. Deep down inside him he knew.

VII.

November, and Mark's last morning. He had got promotion. He was going back to India with a new battery. He would be stationed at Poona, a place he hated. Nothing ever happened as he wanted it to happen.

She was in Papa's room, helping him to pack. The wardrobe door gave out its squeaking wail again and again as he opened it and threw his things on to the bed. Her mother had gone away because she couldn't bear to see them, his poor things.

They were all folded now and pressed down into the boxes and portmanteaus. She sat on the bed with Mark's sword across her knees, rubbing vaseline on the blade. Mark came and stood before her, looking down at her.

"Minky, I don't like going away and leaving Mamma with you.... When I went before you promised you'd be kind to her."

"What do I do?"

There was a groove down the middle of the blade for the blood to run in.

"Do? You do nothing. Nothing. You don't talk to her. You don't want to talk to her. You behave as if she wasn't there."

The blade was blunt. It would have to be sharpened before Mark took it into a battle. Mark's eyes hurt her. She tried to fix her attention on the blade.

"What makes you?"

"I don't know," she said. "Whatever it is it was done long ago."

"She hasn't got anybody," he said. "Roddy's gone. Dan's no good to her. She won't have anybody but you."

"I know, Mark. I shall never go away and leave her."

"Don't talk about going away and leaving her!"

* * * * *

He didn't want her to see him off at the train. He wanted to go away alone, after he had said good-bye to Mamma. He didn't want Mamma to be left by herself after he had gone.

They stood together by the shut door of the drawing-room. She and her mother stood between Mark and the door. She had said good-bye a minute ago, alone with him in Papa's room. But there was something they had missed--

She thought: "We must get it now, this minute. He'll say good-bye to Mamma last. He'll kiss her last. But I must kiss him again, first."

She came to him, holding up her face. He didn't see her; but when his arm felt her hand it jerked up and pushed her out of his way, as he would have pushed anything that stood there between him and Mamma.

XXVI

I.

Old Mr. Peacock of Sarrack was dead, and Dr. Kendal was the oldest man in the Dale. He was not afraid of death; he was only afraid of dying before Mr. Peacock died. Mamma had finished building the rockery in the garden. You had carried all the stones. There were no more stones to carry. That was all that had happened in the year and nine months since Mark had gone.

To you nothing happened. Nothing ever would happen. At twenty-one and a half you were old too, and very wise. You had given up expecting things to happen. You put 1883 on your letters to Mark and Dan and Roddy, instead of 1882. Then 1884. You measured time by the poems you wrote and by the books you read and by the Sutcliffes' going abroad in January and coming back in March.

You had advanced from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment and the Prolegomena. And in the end you were cheated. You would never know the only thing worth knowing. Reality. For all you knew there was no Reality, no God, no freedom, no immortality. Only doing your duty. "You can because you ought." Kant, when you got to the bottom of him, was no more exciting than Mamma. "_Du kannst, weil du sollst_."

Why not "You can because you shall"? It would never do to let Mamma know what Kant thought. She would say "Your Bible could have told you that."

There was Schopenhauer, though. _He_ didn't cheat you. There was "_reine Anschauung_," pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted "_Wille und Vorstellung_," the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy.

And there was Mamma's disapproving, reproachful face. Sometimes you felt that you couldn't stand it for another minute. You wanted to get away from it, to the other end of the world, out of the world, to die. When you were dead perhaps you would know. Or perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps death would cheat you, too.

II.

"Oh--have I come too soon?"

She had found Mr. Sutcliffe at his writing-table in the library, a pile of papers before him. He turned in his chair and looked at her above the fine, lean hand that passed over his face as if it brushed cobwebs.

"They didn't tell me you were busy."

"I'm not. I ought to be, but I'm not."

"You _are_. I'll go and talk to Mrs. Sutcliffe till you've finished."

"No. You'll stay here and talk to me. Mrs. Sutcliffe really _is_ busy."

"Sewing-party?"

"Sewing-party."

She could see them sitting round the dining-room: Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin, Mrs. Belk with her busy eyes, and Miss Kendal and Miss Louisa, Mrs. Oldshaw and Dorsy; and Mrs. Horn, the grocer's wife, very stiff in a corner by herself, sewing unbleached calico and hot red flannel, hot sunlight soaking into them. The library was dim, and leathery and tobaccoey and cool.

The last time she came on a Wednesday Mrs. Sutcliffe had popped out of the dining-room and made them go round to the tennis court by the back, so that they might not be seen from the windows. She wondered why Mrs. Sutcliffe was so afraid of them being seen, and why she had not looked quite pleased.

And to-day--there was something about Mr. Sutcliffe.

"You don't want to play?"

"After tea. When it's cooler. We'll have it in here. By ourselves." He got up and rang the bell.

The tea-table between them, and she, pouring out the tea. She was grown up. Her hair was grown up. It lay like a wreath, plaited on the top of her head.

He was smoothing out the wrinkles of one hand with the other, and smiling. "Everybody busy except you and me, Mary.... How are you getting on with Kant?"

"I've done with him. It's taken me four years. You see, either the German's hard or I'm awfully stupid."

"German hard, I should imagine. Do you _like_ Kant?"

"I like him awfully when he says exciting things about Space and Time. I don't like him when he goes maundering on about his old Categorical Imperative. You can because you ought--putting you off, like a clergyman."

"Kant said that, did he? That shows what an old humbug he was.... And it isn't true, Mary, it isn't true."

"If it was it wouldn't prove anything. That's what bothers me."

"What bothers me is that it isn't true. If I did what I ought I'd be the busiest man in England. I wouldn't be sitting here. If I even did what I want--Do you know what I should like to do? To farm my own land instead of letting it out to these fellows here. I don't suppose you think me clever, but I've got ideas."

"What sort of ideas?"

"Practical ideas. Ideas that can be carried out. That ought to be carried out because they can. Ideas about cattle-breeding, cattle-feeding, chemical manuring, housing, labour, wages, everything that has to do with farming."

Two years ago you talked and he listened. Now that you were grown up he talked to you and you listened. He had said it would make a difference. That was the difference it made.

"Here I am, a landowner who can't do anything with his land. And I can't do anything for my labourers, Mary. If I keep a dry roof over their heads and a dry floor under their feet I'm supposed to have done my duty.... People will tell you that Mr. Sootcliffe's the great man of the place, but half of them look down on him because he doesn't farm his own land, and the other half kow-tow to him because he doesn't, because he's the landlord. And they all think I'm a dangerous man. They don't like ideas. They're afraid of 'em.... I'd like to sell every acre I've got here and buy land--miles and miles of it--that hasn't been farmed before. I'd show them what farming is if you bring brains to it."

"I see. You _could_ do that."

"Could I? The land's entailed. I can't sell it away from my son. And _he_'ll never do anything with it."

"Aren't there other things you could have done?"

"I suppose I could have got the farmers out. Turned them off the land they've sweated their lives into. Or I could have sold my town house instead of letting it and bought land."

"Of course you could. Oh--why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I? Ah--now you've got me. Because I'm a lazy old humbug, Mary. All my farming's in my head when it isn't on my conscience."

"You don't really like farming: you only think you ought to. What do you really like?"

"Going away. Getting out of this confounded country into the South of France. I'm not really happy, Mary, till I'm pottering about my garden at Agaye."

She looked where he was looking. Two drawings above the chimney-piece. A chain of red hills swung out into a blue sea. The Estérel. A pink and white house on the terrace of a hill. House and hill blazing out sunshine.

Agaye. Agaye. Pottering about his garden at Agaye. He was happy there.

"Well, you can get away. To Agaye."

"Not as much as I should like. My wife can't stand more than six weeks of it."

"So that you aren't really happy at Agaye.... I thought I was the only person who felt like that. Miserable because I've been doing my own things instead of sewing, or reading to Mamma."

"That's the way conscience makes cowards of us all."

"If it was even _my_ conscience. But it's Mamma's. And her conscience was Grandmamma's. And Grandmamma's--"

"And mine?"

"Isn't yours a sort of landlord's conscience? Your father's?"

"No. No. It's mine all right. My youth had a conscience."

"Are you sure it wasn't put off with somebody else's?"

"Perhaps. At Oxford we were all social reformers. The collective conscience of the group, perhaps. I wasn't strong enough to rise to it. Wasn't strong enough to resist it...."

Don't you do that, my child. Find out what you want, and when you see your chance coming, take it. Don't funk it."

"I don't see _any_ chance of getting away."

"Where do you want to get away to?"

"There. Agaye."

He leaned forward. His eyes glittered. "You'd like that?"

"I'd like it more than anything on earth."

"Then," he said, "some day you'll go there."

"No. Don't let's talk about it. I shall never go."

"I don't see why not. I don't really see why not."

She shook her head. "No. That sort of thing doesn't happen."

III.

She stitched and stitched, making new underclothing. It was going to happen. Summer and Christmas and the New Year had gone. In another week it would happen. She would be sitting with the Sutcliffes in the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée express, going with them to Agaye. She had to have new underclothing. They would be two days in Paris. They would pass, in the train, through Dijon, Avignon, Toulon and Cannes, then back to Agaye. She had no idea what it would be like. Only the sounds, Agaye, rose up out of the other sounds, like a song, a slender foreign song, bright and clear, that you could sing without knowing what it meant. She would stay there with the Sutcliffes, for weeks and weeks, in the pink and white house on the terrace. Perhaps they would go on into Italy.

Mr. Sutcliffe was going to send to Cook's for the tickets to-morrow. Expensive, well-fitting clothes had come from Durlingham, so that nothing could prevent it happening.

Mr. Sutcliffe was paying for her ticket. Uncle Victor had paid for the clothes. He had kept on writing to Mamma and telling her that she really ought to let you go. Aunt Bella and Uncle Edward had written, and Mrs. Draper, and in the end Mamma had given in.

At first she had said, "I won't hear of your going abroad with the Sutcliffes," and, "The Sutcliffes seem to think they've a right to take you away from me. They've only to say 'Come' and you'll go." Then, "I suppose you'll have to go," and, "I don't know what your Uncle Victor thinks they'll do for you, but he shan't say I've stood in your way." And suddenly her face left off disapproving and reproaching and behaved as it did on Christmas Days and birthdays.

She smiled now as she sat still and sewed, as she watched you sitting still and sewing, making new underclothes.

Aunt Bella would come and stay with Mamma, then Aunt Lavvy, then Mrs. Draper, so that she would not be left alone.

Stitch--stitch. She wondered: Supposing they weren't coming? Could she have left her mother alone, or would she have given up going and stayed? No. She couldn't have given it up. She had never wanted anything in her life as she wanted to go to Agaye with the Sutcliffes. With Mr. Sutcliffe. Mrs. Sutcliffe didn't count; she wouldn't do anything at Agaye, she would just trail about in the background, kind and smiling, in a shawl. She might almost as well not be there.

The happiness was too great. She could not possibly have given it up.

She went on stitching. Mamma went on stitching. Catty brought the lamp in.

Then Roddy's telegram came. From Queenstown.

"Been ill. Coming home. Expect me to-morrow. Rodney."

She knew then that she would not go to Agaye.

IV.

But not all at once.

When she thought of Roddy it was easy to say quietly to herself, "I shall have to give it up." When she thought of Mr. Sutcliffe and the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train and the shining, gold-white, unknown towns, it seemed to her that it was impossible to give up going to Agaye. You simply could not do it.

She shut her eyes. She could feel Mr. Sutcliffe beside her in the train and the carriage rocking. Dijon, Avignon, Cannes. She could hear his voice telling her the names. She would stand beside him at the window, and look out. And Mrs. Sutcliffe would sit in her corner, and smile at them kindly, glad because they were so happy.

"Roddy doesn't say he _is_ ill," her mother said. "I wonder what he's coming home for."

Supposing you had really gone? Supposing you were at Agaye when Roddy--

The thought of Roddy gave her a pain in her heart. The thought of not going to Agaye dragged at her waist and made her feel weak, suddenly, as if she were trying to stand after an illness.

She went up to her room. The shoulder line of Greffington Edge was fixed across the open window, immovable, immutable. Her knees felt tired. She lay down on her bed, staring at the immovable, immutable white walls. She tried to think of Substance, of the Reality behind appearances. She could feel her mind battering at the walls of her body, the walls of her room, the walls of the world. She could hear it crying out.

She was kneeling now beside her bed. She could see her arms stretched out before her on the counterpane, and her hands, the finger-tips together. She pressed her weak, dragging waist tighter against the bed.

"If Anything's there--if Anything's there--make me give up going. Make me think about Roddy. Not about myself. About Roddy. _Roddy_. Make me not want to go to Agaye."

She didn't really believe that anything would happen.

Her mind left off crying. Outside, the clock on the Congregational Chapel was striking six. She was aware of a sudden checking and letting go, of a black stillness coming on and on, hushing sound and sight and the touch of her arms on the rough counterpane, and her breathing and the beating of her heart. There was a sort of rhythm in the blackness that caught you and took you into its peace. When the thing stopped you could almost hear the click.

She stood up. Her white room was grey. Across the window the shoulder of the hill had darkened. Out there the night crouched, breathing like an immense, quiet animal. She had a sense of exquisite security and clarity and joy. She was not going to Agaye. She didn't want to go.

She thought: "I shall have to tell the Sutcliffes. Now, this evening. And Mamma. They'll be sorry and Mamma will be glad."

But Mamma was not glad. Mamma hated it when you upset arrangements. She said, "I declare I never saw anybody like you in my life. After all the trouble and expense."

But you could see it was Roddy she was thinking about. She didn't want to believe there was anything the matter with him. If you went that would look as though he was all right.

"What do you suppose the Sutcliffes will think? And your Uncle Victor? With all those new clothes and that new trunk?"

"He'll understand."

"_Will_ he!"

"Mr. Sutcliffe, I mean."

V.

She went down to Greffington Hall that night and told him. He understood.

But not quite so well as Mrs. Sutcliffe. She gave you a long look, sighed, and smiled. Almost you would have thought she was glad. _He_ didn't look at you. He looked down at his own lean fine hands hanging in front of him. You could see them trembling slightly. And when you were going he took you into the library and shut the door.

"Is this necessary, Mary?" he said.

"Yes. We don't quite know what's wrong with Roddy."

"Then why not wait and see?"

"Because I _do_ know. And Mamma doesn't. There's something, or he wouldn't have come home."

A long pause. She noticed little things about him. The proud, handsome corners of his mouth had loosened; his eyelids didn't fit nicely as they used to do; they hung slack from the eyebone.

"You care more for Roddy than you do for Mark," he said.

"I don't care for him half so much. But I'm sorry for him. You can't be sorry for Mark.... Roddy wants me and Mark doesn't. He wants nobody but Mamma."

"He knows what he wants.... Well. It's my fault. I should have known what I wanted. I should have taken you a year ago."

"If you had," she said, "it would have been all over now."

"I wonder, would it?"

For the life of her she couldn't imagine what he meant.

When she got home she found her mother folding up the work in the work-basket.

"Well, anyhow," Mamma said, "you've laid in a good stock of underclothing."

VI.

She was sitting in the big leather chair in the consulting-room. The small grey-white window panes and the black crooked bough of the apple tree across them made a pattern in her brain. Dr. Charles stood before her on the hearthrug. She saw his shark's tooth, hanging sharp in the snap of his jaws. He was powerful, savage and benevolent.

He had told her what was wrong with Roddy.

"What--does--it--mean?"

The savage light went out of his eyes. They were dull and kind under his red shaggy eyebrows.

"It means that you won't have him with you very long, Mary."

That Roddy would die. That Roddy would die. _Roddy_. That was what he had come home for.

"He ought never to have gone out with his heart in that state. It beats me how he's pulled through those five years. Five weeks of it were enough to kill him.... Jem Alderson must have taken mighty good care of him."

Jem Alderson. She remembered. The big shoulders, the little screwed up eyes, the long moustaches, the good, gladiator face. Jem Alderson had taken care of him. Jem Alderson had cared.

"I don't know what your mother could have been thinking of to let him go."

"Mamma doesn't think of things. It wasn't her fault. She didn't know. Uncle Edward and Uncle Victor made him."

"They ought to be hung for it."

"They didn't know, either. It was my fault. _I_ knew."

It seemed to her that she had known, that she had known all the time, that she remembered knowing.

"Did he tell you?"

"He didn't tell anybody.... Did he know?"

"Yes, Mary. He came to me to be overhauled. I told him he wasn't fit to go."

"I did _try_ to stop him."

"Why?"

He looked at her sharply, as if he were trying to find out something, to fix responsibility.

"Because I _knew_."

"You couldn't have known if nobody told you."

"I did know. If he dies I shall have killed him. I ought to have stopped him. I was the only one who knew."

"You couldn't have stopped him. You were only a child yourself when it happened. If anybody was to blame it was his mother."

"It wasn't. She didn't know. Mamma never knows anything she doesn't want to know. She can't see that he's ill now. She talks as if he ought to do something. She can't stand men who don't do things like Mark and Dan."

"What on earth does she suppose he could do? He's no more fit to do anything than my brother James.... You'll have to take care of him, Mary."

A sharp and tender pang went through her. It was like desire; like the feeling you had when you thought of babies: painful and at the same time delicious.

"Could you?" said Dr. Charles.

"Of course I can."

"If he's taken care of he might live--"

She stood up and faced him. "How long?"

"I don't know. Perhaps--" He went with her to the door. "Perhaps," he said, "quite a long time."

(But if he didn't live she would have killed him. She had known all the time, and she had let him go.)

Through the dining-room window she could see Roddy as he crouched over the hearth, holding out his hands to the fire.

He was hers, not Mamma's, to take care of. Sharp, delicious pain!

VII.

"Oh, Roddy--look! Little, little grouse, making nice noises."

The nestlings went flapping and stumbling through the roots of the heather. Roddy gazed at them with his fixed and mournful eyes. He couldn't share your excitement. He drew back his shoulders, bracing himself to bear it; his lips tightened in a hard, bleak grin. He grinned at the absurdity of your supposing that he could be interested in anything any more.

Roddy's beautiful face was bleached and sharpened; the sallow, mauve-tinted skin stretched close over the bone; but below the edge of his cap you could see the fine spring of his head from his neck, like the spring of Mark's head.

They were in April now. He was getting better. He could walk up the lower slopes of Karva without panting.

"Why are we ever out?" he said. "Supposing we went home?"

"All right. Let's."

He was like that. When he was in the house he wanted to be on the moor; when he was on the moor he wanted to be back in the house. They started to go home, and he turned again towards Karva. They went on till they came to the round pit sunk below the track. They rested there, sitting on the stones at the bottom of the pit.

"Mary," he said, "I can't stay here. I shall have to go back. To Canada, I mean."

"You shall never go back to Canada," she said.

"I must. Not to the Aldersons. I can't go there again, because--I can't tell you why. But if I could I wouldn't. I was no good there. They let you know it."

"Jem?"

"No. _He_ was all right. That beastly woman."

"What woman?"

"His aunt. She didn't want me there. I wasn't fit for anything but driving cattle and cleaning out their stinking pigsties.... She used to look at me when I was eating. You could see she was thinking 'He isn't worth his keep.' ... Her mouth had black teeth in it, with horrible gummy gaps between. The women were like that. I wanted to hit her on the mouth and smash her teeth.... But of course I couldn't."

"It's all over. You mustn't think about it."

"I'm not. I'm thinking about the other thing.... The thing I did. And the dog, Mary; the dog."

She knew what was coming.

"You can't imagine what that place was like. Their sheep-run was miles from the farm. Miles from anything. You had to take it in turns to sleep there a month at a time, in a beastly hut. You couldn't sleep because of that dog. Jem _would_ give him me. He yapped. You had to put him in the shed to keep him from straying. He yapped all night. The yapping was the only sound there was. It tore pieces out of your brain.... I didn't think I could hate a dog.... But I did hate him. I simply couldn't stand the yapping. And one night I got up and hung him. I hung him."

"You didn't, Roddy. You know you didn't. The first time you told me that story you said you found him hanging. Don't you remember? He was a bad dog. He bit the sheep. Jem's uncle hung him."

"No. It was me. Do you know what he did? He licked my hands when I was tying the rope round his neck. He played with my hands. He was a yellow dog with a white breast and white paws.... And that isn't the worst. That isn't It."

"It?"

"The other thing. What I did.... I haven't told you that. You couldn't stand me if you knew. It was why I had to go. Somebody must have known. Jem must have known."

"I don't believe you did anything. Anything at all."

"I tell you I did."

"No, Roddy. You only think you did. You only think you hung the dog."

They got up out of the pit. They took the track to the schoolhouse lane. A sheep staggered from its bed and stalked away, bleating, with head thrown back and shaking buttocks. Plovers got up, wheeling round, sweeping close. "_Pee_-vit--_Pee_-vit. Pee-_vitt_!"

"This damned place is full of noises," Roddy said.

VIII.

"The mind can bring it about, that all bodily modifications or images of things may be referred to the idea of God."

The book stood open before her on the kitchen table, propped against the scales. As long as you were only stripping the strings from the French beans you could read.

The mind can bring it about. The mind can bring it about. "He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much the more in proportion as he more understands himself and his emotions."

Fine slices of French beans fell from the knife, one by one, into the bowl of clear water. Spinoza's thought beat its way out through the smell of steel, the clean green smell of the cut beans, the crusty, spicy smell of the apple pie you had made. "He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return."

"'Shall we gather at the river--'" Catty sang as she went to and fro between the kitchen and the scullery. Catty was happy now that Maggie had gone and she had only you and Jesus with her in the kitchen. Through the open door you could hear the clack of the hatchet and the thud on the stone flags as Roddy, with slow, sorrowful strokes, chopped wood in the backyard.

"Miss Mary--" Catty's thick, loving voice and the jerk of her black eyes warned her.

Mamma looked in at the door.

"Put that book away," she said. She hated the two brown volumes of Elwes's Spinoza you had bought for your birthday. "The dinner will be ruined if you read."

"It'll be ruined if I don't read."

For then your mind raged over the saucepans and the fragrant, floury pasteboard, hungry and unfed. It couldn't bring anything about. It snatched at the minutes left over from Roddy and the house and Mamma and the piano. You knew what every day would be like. You would get up early to practise. When the cooking and the housework was done Roddy would want you. You would play tennis together with Mr. Sutcliffe and Dorsy Heron. Or you would go up on to the moors and comfort Roddy while he talked about the "things" he had done in Canada and about getting away and about the dog. You would say over and over again, "You know you didn't hang him. It was Jem's uncle. He was a bad dog. He bit the sheep." In the winter evenings you would sew or play or read aloud to Mamma and Roddy, and Roddy would crouch over the fender, with his hands stretched out to the fire, not listening.

But Roddy was better. The wind whipped red blood into his cheeks. He said he would be well if it wasn't for the bleating of the sheep, and the crying of the peewits and the shouting of the damned villagers. And people staring at him. He would be well if he could get away.

Then--he would be well if he could marry Dorsy.

So the first year passed. And the second. And the third year. She was five and twenty. She thought: "I shall die before I'm fifty. I've lived half my life and done nothing."

IX.

Old Dr. Kendal was dead. He had had nothing more to live for. He had beaten Mr. Peacock of Sarrack. Miss Kendal was wearing black ribbons in her cap instead of pink. And Maggie's sister was dead of her cancer.

The wall at the bottom of the garden had fallen down and Roddy had built it up again.

He had heaved up the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't have built a better wall.

It had all happened in the week when she was ill and went to stay with Aunt Lavvy at Scarborough. Yesterday evening, when she got home, Roddy had come in out of the garden to meet her. He was in his shirt sleeves; glass beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, his face was white with excitement. He had just put the last dab of mortar to the last stone.

In the blue and white morning Mary and her mother stood in the garden, looking at the wall. In its setting of clean white cement, Roddy's bit showed like the map of South Africa. They were waiting for him to come down to breakfast.

"I must say," Mamma said, "he's earned his extra half-hour in bed."

She was pleased because Roddy had built the wall up and because he was well again.

They had turned. They were walking on the flagged path by the flower-border under the house. Mamma walked slowly, with meditative pauses, and bright, sidelong glances for her flowers.

"If only," she said, "he could work without trampling the flowers down."

The sun was shining on the flagged path. Mamma was stooping over the bed; she had lifted the stalk of the daffodil up out of the sunk print of Roddy's boot. Catty was coming down the house passage to the side door. Her mouth was open. Her eyes stared above her high, sallow cheeks. She stood on the doorstep, saying something in a husky voice.

"Miss Mary--will you go upstairs to Master Roddy? I think there's something the matter with him. I think--"

Upstairs, in his narrow iron bed, Roddy lay on his back, his lips parted, his eyes--white slits under half-open lids--turned up to the ceiling. His arms were squared stiffly above his chest as they had pushed back the bedclothes. The hands had been clenched and unclenched; the fingers still curled in towards the palms. His face had a look of innocence and candour.

Catty's thick, wet voice soaked through his mother's crying. "Miss Mary--he went in his first sleep. His hair's as smooth as smooth."

X.

She was alone with Dan in the funeral carriage.

Her heart heaved and dragged with the grinding of the brakes on the hill; the brake of the hearse going in front; the brake of their carriage; the brake of the one that followed with Dr. Charles in it.

When they left off she could hear Dan crying. He had begun as soon as he got into the carriage.

She tried to think of Dr. Charles, sitting all by himself in the back carriage, calm and comfortable among the wreaths. But she couldn't. She couldn't think of anything but Dan and the black hearse in front of them. She could see it when the road turned to the right; when she shut her eyes she could see the yellow coffin inside it, heaped with white flowers; and Roddy lying deep down in the coffin. The sides were made high to cover his arms, squared over his chest as if he had been beating something off. She could see Roddy's arms beating off his thoughts, and under the fine hair Roddy's face, innocent and candid.

Dr. Charles said it wasn't that. He had just raised them in surprise. A sort of surprise. He hadn't suffered.

Dan's dark head was bowed forward, just above the level of her knees. His deep, hot eyes were inflamed with grief; they kept on blinking, gushing out tears over red lids. He cried like a child, with loud sobs and hiccoughs that shook him. _Her_ eyes were dry; burning dry; the lids choked with something that felt like hot sand, and hurt.

(If only the carriage didn't smell of brandy. That was the driver. He must have sat in it while he waited.)

Dan left off crying and sat up suddenly.

"What's that hat doing there?"

He had taken off his tall hat as he was getting into the carriage and laid it on the empty seat. He pointed at the hat.

"That isn't my hat," he said.

"Yes, Dank. You put it there yourself."

"I didn't. My hat hasn't got a beastly black band on it."

He rose violently, knocking his head against the carriage roof.

"Here--I must get out of this."

He tugged at the window-strap, hanging on to it and swaying as he tugged. She dragged him back into his seat.

"Sit down and keep quiet."

She put her hand on his wrist and held it. Down the road the bell of Renton Church began tolling. He turned and looked at her unsteadily, his dark eyes showing bloodshot as they swerved.

"Mary--is Roddy really dead?"

A warm steam of brandy came and went with his breathing.

"Yes. That's why you must keep quiet."

Mr. Rollitt was standing at the open gate of the churchyard. He was saying something that she didn't hear. Then he swung round solemnly. She saw the flash of his scarlet hood. Then the coffin.

She began to walk behind it, between two rows of villagers, between Dorsy Heron and Mr. Sutcliffe. She went, holding Dan tight, pulling him closer when he lurched, and carrying his tall hat in her hand.

Close before her face the head of Roddy's coffin swayed and swung as the bearers staggered.

XI.

"Roddy ought never to have gone to Canada."

Her mother had turned again, shaking the big bed. They would sleep together for three nights; then Aunt Bella would come, as she came when Papa died.

"But your Uncle Victor would have his own way."

"He didn't know."

She thought: "But _I_ knew. I knew and I let him go. Why did I?"

It seemed to her that it was because, deep down inside her, she had wanted him to go. Deep down inside her she had been afraid of the unhappiness that would come through Roddy.

"And I don't think," her mother said presently, "it _could_ have been very good for him, building that wall."

"You didn't know."

She thought: "I'd have known. If I'd been here it wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't have let him. I'd no business to go away and leave him. I might have known."

"Lord, if Thou hadst been here our brother had not died."

The yellow coffin swayed before her eyes, heaped with the white flowers. Yellow and white. Roddy's dog. His yellow dog with a white breast and white paws. And a rope round his neck. Roddy thought he had hanged him.

At seven she got up and dressed and dusted the drawing-room. She dusted everything very carefully, especially the piano. She would never want to play on it again.

The side door stood open. She went out. In the bed by the flagged path she saw the sunk print of Roddy's foot and the dead daffodil stalk lying in it. Mamma had been angry.

She had forgotten that. She had forgotten everything that happened in the minutes before Catty had come down the passage.

She filled in the footprint and stroked the earth smooth above it, lest Mamma should see it and remember.

XXVII

I.

Potnia, Potnia Nux--

_Lady, our Lady, Night, You who give sleep to men, to men labouring and suffering-- Out of the darkness, come, Come with your wings, come down On the house of Agamemnon._

Time stretched out behind and before you, time to read, to make music, to make poems in, to translate Euripides, while Mamma looked after her flowers in the garden; Mamma, sowing and planting and weeding with a fixed, vehement passion. You could hear Catty and little Alice, Maggie's niece, singing against each other in the kitchen as Alice helped Catty with her work. You needn't have been afraid. You would never have anything more to do in the house. Roddy wasn't there.

Agamemnon--that was where you broke off two years ago. He didn't keep you waiting long to finish. You needn't have been afraid.

Uncle Victor's letter came on the day when the gentians flowered. One minute Mamma had been happy, the next she was crying. When you saw her with the letter you knew. Uncle Victor was sending Dan home. Dan was no good at the office; he had been drinking since Roddy died. Three months.

Mamma was saying something as she cried. "I suppose he'll be here, then, all his life, doing nothing."

II.

Mamma had given Papa's smoking-room to Dan. She kept on going in and out of it to see if he was there.

"When you've posted the letters you might go and see what Dan's doing."

Everybody in the village knew about Dan. The postmistress looked up from stamping the letters to say, "Your brother was here a minute ago." Mr. Horn, the grocer, called to you from the bench at the fork of the roads, "Ef yo're lookin' for yore broother, he's joost gawn oop daale."

If Mr. Horn had looked the other way when he saw you coming you would have known that Dan was in the Buck Hotel.

The white sickle of the road; a light at the top of the sickle; the Aldersons' house.

A man was crossing from the moor-track to the road. He carried a stack of heather on his shoulder: Jem's brother, Ned. He stopped and stared. He was thicker and slower than Jem; darker haired; fuller and redder in the face; he looked at you with the same little, kind, screwed-up eyes.

"Ef yo're lookin' for yore broother, 'e's in t' oose long o' us. Wull yo coom in? T' missus med gev yo a coop o' tea."

She went in. There was dusk in the kitchen, with a grey light in the square of the window and a red light in the oblong of the grate. A small boy with a toasting-fork knelt by the hearth. You disentangled a smell of stewed tea and browning toast from thick, deep smells of peat smoke and the sweat drying on Ned's shirt. When Farmer Alderson got up you saw the round table, the coarse blue-grey teacups and the brown glazed teapot on a brown glazed cloth.

Dan sat by the table. Dumpling, Ned's three-year-old daughter, sat on Dan's knee; you could see her scarlet cheeks and yellow hair above the grey frieze of his coat-sleeve. His mournful black-and-white face stooped to her in earnest, respectful attention. He was taking a piece of butterscotch out of the silver paper. Dumpling opened her wet, red mouth.

Rachel, Ned's wife, watched them, her lips twisted in a fond, wise smile, as she pressed the big loaf to her breast and cut thick slices of bread-and-jam. She had made a place for you beside her.

"She sengs ersen to slape wid a li'l' song she maakes," Rachel said. "Tha'll seng that li'l' song for Mester Dan, wuntha?"

Dumpling hid her face and sang. You had to stoop to hear the cheeping that came out of Dan's shoulder.

"Aw, dinny, dinny dy-Doomplin', Dy-Doomplin', dy-Doomplin', Dinny, dinny dy-Doomplin', Dy-Doomplin' daay."

"Ef tha'll seng for Mester Dan," Farmer Alderson said, "tha'llt seng for tha faather, wuntha, Doomplin'?"

"Naw."

"For Graffer then?"

"Naw."

Dumpling put her head on one side, butting under Dan's chin like a cat. Dan's arm drew her closer. He was happy there, in the Aldersons' kitchen, holding Dumpling on his knee. There was something in his happiness that hurt you as Roddy's unhappiness had hurt. All your life you had never really known Dan, the queer, scowling boy who didn't notice you, didn't play with you as Roddy played or care for you as Mark had cared. And suddenly you knew him; better even than Roddy, better than Mark.

III.

The grey byre was warm with the bodies of the cows and their grassy, milky breath. Dan, in his clean white shirt sleeves, crouched on Ned's milking stool, his head pressed to the cow's curly red and white flank. His fingers worked rhythmically down the teat and the milk squirted and hissed and pinged against the pail. Sometimes the cow swung round her white face and looked at Dan, sometimes she lashed him gently with her tail. Ned leaned against the stall post and watched.

"Thot's t' road, thot's t' road. Yo're the foorst straanger she a' let milk 'er. She's a narvous cow. 'Er teats is tander."

When the milking was done Dan put on his well-fitting coat and they went home over Karva to the schoolhouse lane.

Dan loved the things that Roddy hated: the crying of the peewits, the bleating of the sheep, the shouts of the village children when they saw him and came running to his coat pockets for sweets. He liked to tramp over the moors with the shepherds; he helped them with the dipping and shearing and the lambing.

"Dan, you ought to be a farmer."

"I know," he said, "that's why they stuck me in an office."

IV.

"If the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks that he is killed, they do not understand; for this one does not kill, nor is that one killed."

Passion Week, two years after Roddy's death; Roddy's death the measure you measured time by still.

Mamma looked up from her Bible; she looked over her glasses with eyes tired of their everlasting reproach.

"What have you got there, Mary?"

"The Upanishads from the Sacred Book of the East."

"Tchtt! It was that Buddhism the other day."

"Religion."

"Any religion except your own. Or else it's philosophy. You're destroying your soul, Mary. I shall write to your Uncle Victor and tell him to ask Mr. Sutcliffe not to send you any more books from that library."

"I'm seven and twenty, Mamma ducky."

"The more shame for you then," her mother said.

The clock on the Congregational Chapel struck six. They put down their books and looked at each other.

"Dan not back?" Mamma knew perfectly well he wasn't back.

"He went to Reyburn."

"T't!" Mamma's chin nodded in queer, vexed resignation. She folded her hands on her knees and waited, listening.

Sounds of wheels and of hoofs scraping up the hill. The Morfe bus, back from Reyburn. Catty's feet, running along the passage. The front door opening, then shutting. Dan hadn't come with the bus.

"Perhaps," Mamma said, "Ned Anderson'll bring him."

"Perhaps.... ('There is one eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts, who, though one, fulfils the desires of many....') Mamma--why won't you let him go to Canada?"

"It was Canada that killed poor Roddy."

"It won't kill Dan. He's different."

"And what good would he be there? If your Uncle Victor can't keep him, who will, I should like to know?"

"Jem Alderson would. He'd take him for nothing. He told Ned he would. To make up for Roddy."

"Make up! He thinks that's the way to make up! I won't have Dan's death at my door. I'd rather keep him for the rest of my life."

"How about Dan?"

"Dan's safe here."

"He's safe on the moor with Alderson looking after the sheep, and he's safe in the cowshed milking the cows; but he isn't safe when Ned drives into Reyburn market."

"Would it be safer in Canada?"

"Yes. He'd be thirty miles from the nearest pub. He'd be safer here if you didn't give him money."

"The boy has to have money to buy clothes."

"I could buy them."

"I daresay! You can't treat a man of thirty as if he was a baby of three."

She thought. "No. You can only treat a woman.... 'There is one eternal thinker'--"

A knock on the door.

"There," her mother said, "that's Dan."

Mary went to the door. Ned Alderson stood outside; he stood slantways, not looking at her.

"Ah tried to maake yore broother coom back long o' us, but 'e would na."

"Hadn't I better go and meet him?"

"Naw. Ah would na. Ah wouldn' woorry; there's shepherds on t' road wi' t' sheep. Mebbe 'e'll toorn oop long o' they. Dawn' woorry ef tes laate like."

He went away.

They waited, listening while the clock struck the hours, seven; eight; nine. At ten her mother and the servants went to bed. She sat up, and waited, reading.

"...My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists.... That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it."

Substance, the Thing-in-itself--You were It. Dan was It. You could think away your body, Dan's body. One eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts. Dreaming horrible dreams. Dan's drunkenness. Why?

Eleven. A soft scuffle. The scurry of sheep's feet on the Green. A dog barking. The shepherds were back from Reyburn.

Feet shuffled on the flagstone. She went to the door. Dan leaned against the doorpost, bent forward heavily; his chin dropped to his chest. Something slimy gleamed on his shoulder and hip. Wet mud of the ditch he had fallen in. She stiffened her muscles to his weight, to the pull and push of his reeling body.

Roddy's room. With one lurch he reached Roddy's white bed in the corner.

She looked at the dressing-table. A strip of steel flashed under the candlestick. The blue end of a matchbox stuck up out of the saucer. There would be more matches in Dan's coat pocket. She took away the matches and the razor.

Her mother stood waiting in the doorway of her room, small and piteous in her nightgown. Her eyes glanced off the razor, and blinked.

"Is Dan all right?"

"Yes. He came back with the sheep."

V.

The Hegels had come: The _Logik_. Three volumes. The bristling Gothic text an ambush of secret, exciting, formidable things. The titles flamed; flags of strange battles; signals of strange ships; challenging, enticing to the dangerous adventure.

After the first enchantment, the Buddhist Suttas and the Upanishads were no good. Nor yet the Vedânta. You couldn't keep on saying, "This is That," and "Thou art It," or that the Self is the dark blue bee and the green parrot with red eyes and the thunder-cloud, the seasons and the seas. It was too easy, too sleepy, like lying on a sofa and dropping laudanum, slowly, into a rotten, aching tooth. Your teeth were sound and strong, they had to have something hard to bite on. You wanted to think, to keep on thinking. Your mind wasn't really like a tooth; it was like a robust, energetic body, happy when it was doing difficult and dangerous things, balancing itself on heights, lifting great weights of thought, following the long march into thick, smoky battles.

"Being and Not-Being are the same": ironic and superb defiance. And then commotion; as if the infinite stillness, the immovable Substance, had got up and begun moving--Rhythm of eternity: the same for ever: for ever different: for ever the same.

Thought _was_ the Thing-in-itself.

This man was saying, over and over and all the time what you had wanted Kant to say, what he wouldn't say, what you couldn't squeeze out of him, however you turned and twisted him.

You jumped to where the name "Spinoza" glittered like a jewel on the large grey page.

Something wanting. You knew it, and you were afraid. You loved him. You didn't want him to be found out and exposed, like Kant. He had given you the first incomparable thrill.

Hegel. Spinoza. She thought of Spinoza's murky, mysterious face. It said, "I live in you, still, as he will never live. You will never love that old German man. He ran away from the cholera. He bolstered up the Trinity with his Triple Dialectic, to keep his chair at Berlin. _I_ refused their bribes. They excommunicated me. You remember? Cursed be Baruch Spinoza in his going out and his coming in."

You had tried to turn and twist Spinoza, too; and always he had refused to come within your meaning. His Substance, his God stood still, in eternity. He, too; before the noisy, rich, exciting Hegel, he drew back into its stillness; pure and cold, a little sinister, a little ironic. And you felt a pang of misgiving, as if, after all, he might have been right. So powerful had been his hold.

Dan looked up. "What are you reading, Mary?"

"Hegel."

"Haeckel--that's the chap Vickers talks about."

Vickers--she remembered. Dan lived with Vickers when he left Papa.

"He's clever," Dan said, "but he's an awful ass."

"Who? Haeckel?"

"No. Vickers."

"You mean he's an awful ass, but he's clever."

VI.

One Friday evening an unusual smell of roast chicken came through the kitchen door. Mary put on the slender, long-tailed white gown she wore when she dined at the Sutcliffes'.

Dan's friend, Lindley Vickers, was sitting on the sofa, talking to Mamma. When she came in he left off talking and looked at her with sudden happy eyes. She remembered Maurice Jourdain's disappointed eyes, and Mark's. Dan became suddenly very polite and attentive.

All through dinner Mr. Vickers kept on turning his eyes away from Mamma and looking at her; every time she looked she caught him looking. His dark hair sprang in two ridges from the parting. His short, high-bridged nose seemed to be looking at you, too, with its wide nostrils, alert. His face did all sorts of vivid, interesting things; you wondered every minute whether this time it would be straight and serious or crooked and gay, whether his eyes would stay as they were, black crystals, or move and show grey rings, green speckled.

He was alive, running over with life; no, not running over, vibrating with it, holding it in; he looked as if he expected something delightful to happen, and waited, excited, ready.

He began talking, about Hegel. "'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.'"

She heard herself saying something. Dan turned and looked at her with a sombre, thoughtful stare. Mamma smiled, and nodded her chin as much as to say "Did you ever hear such nonsense?" She knew that was the way to stop you.

Mr. Vickers's eyes were large and attentive. When you stopped his mouth gave such a sidelong leap of surprise and amusement that you laughed. Then he laughed.

Dan said, "What's the joke?" And Mr. Vickers replied that it wasn't a joke.

In the drawing-room Mamma said, "I won't have any of those asides between you and Mr. Vickers, do you hear?"

Mary thought that so funny that she laughed. She knew what Mamma was thinking, but she was too happy to care. Her intelligence had found its mate.

You played, and at the first sound of the piano he came in and stood by you and listened.

You had only to play and you could make him come to you. He would get up and leave Dan in the smoking-room; he would leave Mamma in the garden. When you played the soft Schubert _Impromptu_ he would sit near you, very quiet; when you played the _Appassionata_ he would get up and stand close beside you. When you played the loud, joyful Chopin _Polonaise_ he would walk up and down; up and down the room.

Saturday evening. Sunday evening. (He was going on Monday very early.)

He sang,

"'Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath Das man vom liebsten was man hat Muss scheiden.'"

Dan called out from his corner, "Translate. Let's know what it's all about."

He pounded out the accompaniment louder. "We won't, will we?" He jumped up suddenly. "Play the _Appassionata_."

She played and he talked.

"I can't play if you talk."

"Yes, you can. I wish I hadn't got to go to-morrow."

"Have you" (false note) "got to go?"

"I suppose so."

"If Dan asked you, would you stop?"

"Yes."

He slept in Papa's room. When she heard his door shut she went to Dan.

"Dan, why don't you ask him to stay longer?"

"Because I don't want him to."

"I thought he was your friend."

"He is my friend. The only one I've got."

'Then--why--?"

"That's why." He shut the door on her.

She got up early. Dan was alone in the dining-room.

He said, "What have you come down for?"

"To give you your breakfasts."

"Don't be a little fool. Go back to your room."

Mr. Vickers had come in. He stood by the doorway, looking at her and smiling. "Why this harsh treatment?" he said. He had heard Dan.

Now and then he smiled again at Dan, who sat sulking over his breakfast.

Dan went with him to Durlingham. He was away all night.

Next day, at dinner-time, they appeared again together. Mr. Vickers had brought Dan back. He was going to stay for another week. At the Buck Hotel.

VII.

"Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath." He had no business to sing it, to sing it like that, so that you couldn't get the thing out of your head. That wouldn't have mattered if you could have got his voice out of your heart. It hung there, clawing, hurting. She resented this pain.

"Das man vom liebsten was man hat," the dearest that we have, "muss schei-ei-eden, muss schei-ei-eden."

Her fingers pressed and crept over the keys, in guilty, shamed silence; it would be awful if he heard you playing it, if Dan heard you or Mamma.

You had only to play and you could make him come.

Supposing you played the Schubert _Impromptu_--She found herself playing it.

He didn't come. He wasn't coming. He was going into Reyburn with Dan. And on Monday he would be gone. This time he would really go.

When you left off playing you could still hear him singing in your head. "Das man vom liebsten was man hat." "Es ist bestimmt--" But if you felt like that about it, then--

Her hands dropped from the keys.

It wasn't possible. He only came on Friday evening last week. This was Saturday morning. Seven days. It couldn't happen in seven days. He would be gone on Monday morning. Not ten days.

"I can't--I don't."

Something crossing the window pane made her start and turn. Nannie Learoyd's face, looking in. Naughty Nannie. You could see her big pink cheeks and her scarlet mouth and her eyes sliding and peering. Poor pretty, naughty Nannie. Nannie smiled when she met you on the Green, as if she trusted you not to tell how you saw her after dark slinking about the Back Lane waiting for young Horn to come out to her.

The door opened. Nannie slid away. It was only Mamma.

"Mary," she said, "I wish you would remember that Mr. Vickers has come to see Dan, and that he has only got two days more."

"It's all right. He's going into Reyburn with him."

"I'm sure," her mother said, "I wish he'd stay here."

She pottered about the room, taking things up and putting them down again. Presently Catty came for her and she went out.

Mary began to play the Sonata _Appassionata_. She thought: "I don't care if he doesn't come. I want to play it, and I shall."

He came. He stood close beside her and listened. Once he put his hand on her arm. "Oh no," he said. "_Not_ like that."

She stood up and faced him. "Tell me the truth, shall I ever be any good? Shall I ever play?"

"Do you really want the truth?"

"Of course I do."

Her mind fastened itself on her playing. It hid and sheltered itself behind her playing.

"Let's look at your hands."

She gave him her hands. He lifted them; he felt the small bones sliding under the skin, he bent back the padded tips, the joints of the fingers.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't have played magnificently," he said.

"Only I don't. I never have."

"No, you never have."

He came closer; she didn't know whether he drew her to him or whether he came closer. A queer, delicious feeling, a new feeling, thrilled through her body to her mouth, to her finger-tips. Her head swam slightly. She kept her eyes open by an effort.

He gave her back her hands. She remembered. They had been talking about her playing.

"I knew," she said, "it was bad in places."

"I don't care whether it's bad or good. It's you. The only part of you that can get out. You're very bad in places, but you do something to me all the same."

"What do I do?"

"You know what you do."

"I don't. I don't really. Tell me."

"If you don't know, I can't tell you--dear--"

He said it so thickly that she was not sure at the time whether he had really said it. She remembered afterwards.

"There's Dan," she whispered.

He swung himself off from her and made himself a rigid figure at the window. Dan stood in the doorway. He was trying to took as if she wasn't there.

"I say, aren't you coming to Reyburn?"

"No, I'm not."

"Why not?"

"I've got a headache."

"_What_?"

"Headache."

Outside on the flagstones she saw Nannie pass again and look in.

VIII.

An hour later she was sitting on the slope under the hill road of Greffington Edge. He lay on his back beside her in the bracken. Lindley Vickers.

Suddenly he pulled himself up into a sitting posture like her own. She was then aware that Mr. Sutcliffe had gone up the road behind them; he had lifted his hat and passed her without speaking.

"What does Sutcliffe talk to you about?"

"Farming."

"And what do you do?"

"Listen."

Below them, across the dale, they could see the square of Morfe on its platform.

"How long have you lived in that place?"

"Ten years. No; eleven."

"Women," he said, "are wonderful. I can't think where you come from. I knew your father, I know Dan and your mother, and Victor Olivier and your aunt--"

"Which aunt?"

"The Unitarian lady; and I knew Mark--and Rodney. They don't account for you."

"Does anybody account for anybody else?"

"Yes. You believe in heredity?"

"I don't know enough about it."

"You should read Haeckel--_The History of Evolution_, and Herbert Spencer and Ribot's _Heredity_. It would interest you.... No, it wouldn't. It wouldn't interest you a bit."

"It sounds as if it would rather."

"It wouldn't.... Look here, promise me you won't think about it, you'll let it alone. Promise me."

He was like Jimmy making you promise not to hang out of top-storey windows.

"No good making promises."

"Well," he said, "there's nothing in it.... I wish I hadn't said that about your playing. I only wanted to see whether you'd mind or not."

"I don't mind. What does it matter? When I'm making music I think there's nothing but music in all the world; when I'm doing philosophy I think there's nothing but philosophy in all the world; when I'm writing verses I think there's nothing but writing in all the world; and when I'm playing tennis I think there's nothing but tennis in all the world."

"I see. And when you suffer you think there's nothing but suffering in all the world."

"Yes."

"And when--and when--"

His face was straight and serious and quiet. His eyes covered her; first her face, then her breasts; she knew he could see her bodice quiver with the beating of her heart. She felt afraid.

"Then," he said, "you'll not think; you'll know."

She thought: "He didn't say it. He won't. He can't. It isn't possible."

"Hadn't we better go?"

He sprang to his feet.

"Much better," he said.

IX.

She would not see him again that day. Dan was going to dine with him at the Buck Hotel.

When Dan came back from Reyburn he said he wouldn't go. He had a headache. If Vickers could have a headache, so could he. He sulked all evening in the smoking-room by himself; but towards nine o'clock he thought better of it and went round, he said, to look Vickers up.

Her mother yawned over her book; and the yawns made her impatient; she wanted to be out of doors, walking, instead of sitting there listening to Mamma.

At nine o'clock Mamma gave one supreme yawn and dragged herself to bed.

She went out through the orchard into the Back Lane. She could see Nannie Learoyd sitting on the stone stairs of Horn's granary, waiting for young Horn to come round the corner of his yard. Perhaps they would go up into the granary and hide under the straw. She turned into the field track to the schoolhouse and the highway. In the dark bottom the river lay like a broad, white, glittering road.

She stopped by the schoolhouse, considering whether she would go up to the moor by the high fields and come back down the lane, or go up the lane and come back down the fields.

"Too dark to find the gaps if I come back by the fields." She had forgotten the hidden moon.

There was a breaking twilight when she reached the lane. She came down at a swinging stride. Her feet went on the grass borders without a sound.

At the last crook of the lane she came suddenly on a man and woman standing in her path by the stone wall. It would be Nannie Learoyd and young Horn. They were fixed in one block, their faces tilted backwards, their bodies motionless. The woman's arms were round the man's neck, his arms round her waist. There was something about the queer back-tilted faces--queer and ugly.

As she came on she saw them break loose from each other and swing apart: Nannie Learoyd and Lindley Vickers.

X.

She lay awake all night. Her brain, incapable of thought, kept turning round and round, showing her on an endless rolling screen the images of Lindley and Nannie Learoyd, clinging together, loosening, swinging apart, clinging together. When she came down on Sunday morning breakfast was over.

Sunday--Sunday. She remembered. Last night was Saturday night. Lindley Vickers was coming to Sunday dinner and Sunday supper. She would have to get away somewhere, to Dorsy or the Sutcliffes. She didn't want to see him again. She wanted to forget that she ever had seen him.

Her mother and Dan had shut themselves up in the smoking-room; she found them there, talking. As she came in they stopped abruptly and looked at each other. Her mother began picking at the pleats in her gown with nervous, agitated fingers. Dan got up and left the room.

"Well, Mary, you'll not see Mr. Vickers again. He's just told Dan he isn't coming."

Then he knew that she had seen him in the lane with Nannie.

"I don't want to see him," she said.

"It's a pity you didn't think of that before you put us in such a position."

She understood Lindley; but she wasn't even trying to understand her mother. The vexed face and picking fingers meant nothing to her. She was saying to herself, "I can't tell Mamma I saw him with Nannie in the lane. I oughtn't to have seen him. He didn't know anybody was there. He didn't want me to see him. I'd be a perfect beast to tell her."

Her mother went on: "I don't know what to do with you, Mary. One would have thought my only daughter would have been a comfort to me, but I declare you've given me more trouble than any of my children."

"More than Dan?"

"Dan hadn't a chance. He'd have been different if your poor father hadn't driven him out of the house. He'd be different now if your Uncle Victor had kept him.... It's hard for poor Dan if he can't bring his friends to the house any more because of you."

"Because of me?"

"Because of your folly."

She understood. Her mother believed that she had frightened Lindley away. She was thinking of Aunt Charlotte.

It would have been all right if she could have told her about Nannie; then Mamma would have seen why Lindley couldn't come.

"I don't care," she thought. "She may think what she likes. I can't tell her."

XI.

Lindley Vickers had gone. Nothing was left of him but Mamma's silence and Dan's, and Nannie's flush as she slunk by and her obscene smirk of satisfaction.

Then Nannie forgot him. As if nothing had happened she hung about Horn's yard and the Back Lane, waiting for young Horn. She smiled her trusting smile again. As long as you lived in Morfe you would remember.

Mary didn't blame her mother and Dan for their awful attitude. She couldn't blink the fact that she had begun to care for a man who was no better than young Horn, who had shown her that he didn't care for her by going to Nannie. If he could go to Nannie he was no better than young Horn.

She thought of Lindley's communion with Nannie as a part of him, essential, enduring. Beside it, her own communion with him was not quite real. She remembered his singing; she remembered playing to him and sitting beside him on the bracken as you remember things that have happened to you a long time ago (if they had really happened). She remembered phrases broken from their context (if they had ever had a context): "Das man vom liebsten was man hat...." "If you don't know I can't tell you--Dear." ... "And when--when--Then you won't think, you'll _know_."

She said to herself, "I must have been mad. It couldn't have happened. I must have made it up."

But, if you made up things like that you _were_ mad. It was what Aunt Charlotte had done. She had lived all her life in a dream of loving and being loved, a dream that began with clergymen and ended with the piano-tuner and the man who did the clocks. Mamma and Dan knew it. Uncle Victor knew it and he had been afraid. Maurice Jourdain knew it and he had been afraid. Perhaps Lindley Vickers knew it, too.

There must be something in heredity. She thought: "If there is I'd rather face it. It's cowardly not to."

Lindley Vickers had told her what to read. Herbert Spencer she knew. Haeckel and Ribot were in the London Library Catalogue at Greffington Hall. And Maudsley: she had seen the name somewhere. It was perhaps lucky that Mr. Sutcliffe had gone abroad early this year; for he had begun to follow her through Balzac and Flaubert and Maupassant, since when he had sometimes interfered with her selection.

The books came down in two days: Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_, the _Principles of Biology_, the _Principles of Psychology_; Haeckel's _History of Evolution_; Maudsley's _Body and Mind, Physiology and Pathology of Mind, Responsibility in Mental Disease_; and Ribot's _Heredity_. Your instinct told you to read them in that order, controlling personal curiosity.

For the first time in her life she understood what Spinoza meant by "the intellectual love of God." She saw how all things work together for good to those who, in Spinoza's sense, love God. If it hadn't been for Aunt Charlotte and Lindley Vickers she might have died without knowing anything about the exquisite movements and connections of the live world. She had spent most of her time in the passionate pursuit of things under the form of eternity, regardless of their actual behaviour in time. She had kept on for fifteen years trying to find out the reality--if there was any reality--that hid behind appearances, piggishly obtuse to the interest of appearances themselves. She had cared for nothing in them but their beauty, and its exciting play on her emotions. When life brought ugly things before her she faced them with a show of courage, but inwardly she was sick with fear.

For the first time she saw the ugliest facts take on enchantment, a secret and terrible enchantment. Dr. Mitchell's ape-faced idiot; Dr. Browne's girl with the goose-face and goose-neck, billing her shoulders like a bird.

There was something in Heredity. But the sheer interest of it made you forget about Papa and Mamma and Aunt Charlotte; it kept you from thinking about yourself. You could see why Ribot was so excited about his laws of Heredity: "They it is that are real...." "To know a fact thoroughly is to know the quality and quantity of the laws that compose it ... facts are but appearances, laws the reality."

There was Darwin's Origin of Species. According to Darwin, it didn't seem likely that anything so useless as insanity could be inherited at all; according to Maudsley and Ribot, it seemed even less likely that sanity could survive. To be sure, after many generations, insanity was stamped out; but not before it had run its course through imbecility to idiocy, infecting more generations as it went.

Maudsley was solemn and exalted in his desire that there should be no mistake about it. "There is a destiny made for a man by his ancestors, and no one can elude, were he able to attempt it, the tyranny of his organisation."

You had been wrong all the time. You had thought of your family, Papa and Mamma, perhaps Grandpapa and Grandmamma, as powerful, but independent and separate entities, in themselves sacred and inviolable, working against you from the outside: either with open or secret and inscrutable hostility, hindering, thwarting, crushing you down. But always from the outside. You had thought of yourself as a somewhat less powerful, but still independent and separate entity, a sacred, inviolable self, struggling against them for completer freedom and detachment. Crushed down, but always getting up and going on again; fighting a more and more successful battle for your own; beating them in the end. But it was not so. There were no independent, separate entities, no sacred, inviolable selves. They were one immense organism and you were part of it; you were nothing that they had not been before you. It was no good struggling. You were caught in the net; you couldn't get out.

And so were they. Mamma and Papa were no more independent and separate than you were. Dan had gone like Papa, but Papa had gone like Grandpapa and Grandmamma Olivier. Nobody ever said anything about Grandpapa Olivier; so perhaps there had been something queer about him. Anyhow, Papa couldn't help drinking any more than Mamma could help being sweet and gentle; they hadn't had a choice or a chance.

How senseless you had been with your old angers and resentments. Now that you understood, you could never feel anger or resentment any more. As long as you lived you could never feel anything but love for them and compassion. Mamma, Papa and Aunt Charlotte, Dan and Roddy, they were caught in the net. They couldn't get out.

Dan and Roddy--But Mark had got out. Why not you?

They were not all alike. Papa and Uncle Victor were different; and Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy. Papa had married and handed it on; he hadn't cared. Uncle Victor hadn't married; he had cared too much; he had been afraid.

And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers had been afraid; everybody who knew about Aunt Charlotte would be afraid, and if they didn't know you would have to tell them, supposing--

You would be like Aunt Lavvy. You would live in Morfe with Mamma for years and years as Aunt Lavvy had lived with Grandmamma. First you would be like Dorsy Heron; then like Louisa Wright; then like Aunt Lavvy.

No; when you were forty-five you would go like Aunt Charlotte.

XII.

Anyhow, she had filled in the time between October and March when the Sutcliffes came back.

If she could talk to somebody about it--But you couldn't talk to Mamma; she would only pretend that she hadn't been thinking about Aunt Charlotte at all. If Mark had been there--But Mark wasn't there, and Dan would only call you a little fool. Aunt Lavvy? She would tell you to love God. Even Aunt Charlotte could tell you that.

She could see Aunt Charlotte sitting up in the big white bed and saying "Love God and you'll be happy," as she scribbled letters to Mr. Marriott and hid them under the bedclothes.

Uncle Victor? Uncle Victor was afraid himself.

Dr. Charles--He looked at you as he used to look at Roddy. Perhaps he knew about Aunt Charlotte and wondered whether you would go like her. Or, if he didn't wonder, he would only give you the iron pills and arsenic he gave to Dorsy.

Mrs. Sutcliffe? You couldn't tell a thing like that to Mrs. Sutcliffe. She wouldn't know what you were talking about; or if she did know she would gather herself up, spiritually, in her shawl, and trail away.

Mr. Sutcliffe--He would know. If you could tell him. You might take back Maudsley and Ribot and ask him if he knew anything about heredity, and what he thought of it.

She went to him one Wednesday afternoon. He was always at home on Wednesday afternoons. She knew how it would be. Mrs. Sutcliffe would be shut up in the dining-room with the sewing-party. You would go in. You would knock at the library door. He would be there by himself, in the big arm-chair, smoking and reading; the small armchair would be waiting for you on the other side of the fireplace. He would be looking rather old and tired, and when he saw you he would jump up and pull himself together and be young again.

The library door closed softly. She was in the room before he saw her.

He was older and more tired than you could have believed. He stooped in his chair; his long hands rested on his knees, slackly, as they had dropped there. Grey streaks in the curly lock of hair that _would_ fall forward and be a whisker.

His mouth had tightened and hardened. It held out; it refused to become old and tired.

"It's Mary," she said.

"My dear--"

He dragged himself to his feet, making his body very straight and stiff. His eyes glistened; but they didn't smile. Only his eyelids and his mouth smiled. His eyes were different, their blue was shrunk and flattened and drawn back behind the lense.

When he moved, pushing forward the small arm-chair, she saw how lean and stiff he was.

"I've been ill," he said.

"Oh--!"

"I'm all right now."

"No. You oughtn't to have come back from Agaye."

"I never do what I ought, Mary."

She remembered how beautiful and strong he used to be, when he danced and when he played tennis, and when he walked up and down the hills. His beauty and his strength had never moved her to anything but a happy, tranquil admiration. She remembered how she had seen Maurice Jourdain tired and old (at thirty-three), and how she had been afraid to look at him. She wondered, "Was that my fault, or his? If I'd cared should I have minded? If I cared for Mr. Sutcliffe I wouldn't mind his growing tired and old. The tireder and older he was the more I'd care."

Somehow you couldn't imagine Lindley Vickers growing old and tired.

She gave him back the books: Ribot's _Heredity_ and Maudsley's _Physiology and Pathology of Mind_. He held them in his long, thin hands, reading the titles. His strange eyes looked at her over the tops of the bindings. He smiled.

"When did you order these, Mary?"

"In October."

"That's the sort of thing you do when I'm away, is it?"

"Yes--I'm afraid you won't care for them very much."

He still stood up, examining the books. He was dipping into Maudsley now and reading him.

"You don't mean to say you've _read_ this horrible stuff?"

"Every word of it. I _had_ to."

"You had to?"

"I wanted to know about heredity."

"And insanity?"

"That's part of it. I wanted to see if there was anything in it. Heredity, I mean. Do you think there is?"

She kept her eyes on him. He was still smiling.

"My dear child, you know as much as I do. Why are you worrying your poor little head about madness?"

"Because I can't help thinking I may go mad."

"I should think the same if I read Maudsley. I shouldn't be quite sure whether I was a general paralytic or an epileptic homicide."

"You see--I'm not afraid because I've been reading him; I've been reading him because I was afraid. Not even afraid, exactly. As a matter of fact while you're reading about it you're so interested that you forget about yourself. It's only when you've finished that you wonder."

"What makes you wonder?"

He threw Maudsley aside and sat down in the big armchair.

"That's just what I don't think I can tell you."

"You used to tell me things, Mary. I remember a little girl with short hair who asked me whether cutting off her hair would make me stop caring for her."

"Not _you_ caring for _me_."

"Precisely. So, if you can't tell me who _can_ you tell?"

"Nobody."

"Come, then.... Is it because of your father? Or Dan?"

She thought: "After all, I can tell him."

"No. Not exactly. But it's somebody. One of Papa's sisters--Aunt Charlotte. You see. Mamma seems to think I'm rather like her."

"Does Aunt Charlotte read Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer, to find out whether the Thing-in-itself is mind or matter? Does she read Maudsley and Ribot to find out what's the matter with her mind?"

"I don't think she ever read anything."

"What _did_ she do?"

"Well--she doesn't seem to have done much but fall in love with people."

"She'd have been a very abnormal lady if she'd never fallen in love at all, Mary."

"Yes; but then she used to think people were in love with her when they weren't."

"How old is Aunt Charlotte?"

"She must be ages over fifty now."

"Well, my dear, you're just twenty-eight, and I don't think you've been in love yet."

"That's it. I have."

"No. You've only thought you were. Once? Twice, perhaps? You may have been very near it--for ten minutes. But a man might be in love with you for ten years, and you wouldn't be a bit the wiser, if he held his tongue about it.... No. People don't go off their heads because their aunts do, or we should all of us be mad. There's hardly a family that hasn't got somebody with a tile loose."

"Then you don't think there's anything in it?"

"I don't think there's anything in it in your case. Anything at all."

"I'm glad I told you."

She thought: "It isn't so bad. Whatever happens he'll be here."

XIII.

The sewing-party had broken up. She could see them going before her on the road, by the garden wall, by the row of nine ash-trees in the field, round the curve and over Morfe Bridge.

Bobbing shoulders, craning necks, stiff, nodding heads in funny hats, turning to each other.

When she got home she found Mrs. Waugh, and Miss Frewin in the drawing-room with Mamma. They had brought her the news.

The Sutcliffes were going. They were trying to let Greffington Hall. The agent, Mr. Oldshaw, had told Mr. Horn. Mr. Frank, the Major, would be back from India in April. He was going to be married. He would live in the London house and Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe would live abroad.

Mamma said, "If their son's coming back they've chosen a queer time to go away."

XIV.

It couldn't be true.

You knew it when you dined with them, when you saw the tranquil Regency faces looking at you from above the long row of Sheraton chairs, the pretty Gainsborough lady smiling from her place above the sideboard.

As you sat drinking coffee out of the dark blue coffee cups with gold linings you knew it couldn't be true. You were reassured by the pattern of the chintzes--pink roses and green leaves on a pearl-grey ground--by the crystal chains and pendants of the chandelier, by the round black mirror sunk deep in the bowl of its gilt frame.

They couldn't go; for if they went, the quiet, gentle life of these things would be gone. The room had no soul apart from the two utterly beloved figures that sat there, each in its own chintz-covered chair.

"It isn't true," she said, "that you're going?"

She was sitting on the polar bear hearthrug at Mrs. Sutcliffe's feet.

"Yes, Mary."

The delicate, wrinkled hand came out from under the cashmere shawl to stroke her arm. It kept on stroking, a long, loving, slow caress. It made her queerly aware of her arm--white and slender under the big puff of the sleeve--lying across Mrs. Sutcliffe's lap.

"He'll be happier in his garden at Agaye."

She heard herself assenting. "_He_'ll be happier." And breaking out. "But I shall never be happy again."

"You mustn't say that, my dear."

The hand went on stroking.

"There's no place on earth," she said, "where I'm so happy as I am here."

Suddenly the hand stopped; it stiffened; it drew back under the cashmere shawl.

She turned her head towards Mr. Sutcliffe in his chair on the other side of the hearthrug.

His face had a queer, strained look. His eyes were fixed, fixed on the white, slender arm that lay across his wife's lap.

And Mrs. Sutcliffe's eyes were fixed on the queer, strained face.

XV.

Uncle Victor's letter was almost a relief.

She had not yet allowed herself to imagine what Morfe would be like without the Sutcliffes. And, after all, they wouldn't have to live in it. If Dan accepted Uncle Victor's offer, and if Mamma accepted his conditions.

Uncle Victor left no doubt as to his conditions. He wouldn't take Dan back unless Mamma left Morfe and made a home for him in London. He wanted them all to live together at Five Elms.

The discussion had lasted from a quarter-past nine till half-past ten. Mamma still sat at the breakfast-table, crumpling and uncrumpling the letter.

"I wish I knew what to do," she said.

"Better do what you want," Dan said. "Stay here if you want to. Go back to Five Elms if you want to. But for God's sake don't say you're doing it on my account."

He got up and went out of the room.

"Goodness knows I don't want to go back to Five Elms. But I won't stand in Dan's way. If your Uncle Victor thinks I ought to make the sacrifice, I shall make it."

"And Dan," Mary said, "will make the sacrifice of going back to Victor's office. It would be simpler if he went to Canada."

"Your uncle can't help him to go to Canada. He won't hear of it.... I suppose we shall have to go."

They were going. You could hear Mrs. Belk buzzing round the village with the news. "The Oliviers are going."

One day Mrs. Belk came towards her, busily, across the Green.

She stopped to speak, while her little iron-grey eyes glanced off sideways, as if they saw something important to be done.

The Sutcliffes were not going, after all.

XVI.

When it was all settled and she thought that Dan had gone into Reyburn a fortnight ago to give notice to the landlord's solicitors, one evening, as she was coming home from the Aldersons' he told her that he hadn't been to the solicitors at all.

He had arranged yesterday for his transport on a cattle ship sailing next week for Montreal.

He said he had always meant to go out to Jem Alderson when he had learnt enough from Ned.

"Then why," she said, "did you let Mamma tell poor Victor--"

"I wanted her to have the credit of the sacrifice," he said.

And then: "I don't like leaving you here--"

An awful thought came to her.

"Are you sure you aren't going because of me?"

"You? What on earth are you thinking of?"

"That time--when you wouldn't ask Lindley Vickers to stop on."

"Oh ... I didn't ask him because I knew he wanted to stop altogether. And I don't approve of him."

She turned and stared at him. "Then it wasn't that you didn't approve of _me_?"

"What put that in your head?"

"Mamma. She told me you couldn't ask anybody again because of me. She said I'd frightened Lindley Vickers away. Like Aunt Charlotte."

Dan smiled, a sombre, reminiscent smile.

"You don't mean to say you still take Mamma seriously? _I_ never did."

"But--Mark--"

"Or him either."

It hurt her like some abominable blasphemy.

XVII

Nothing would ever happen. She would stay on in Morfe, she and Mamma: without Mark, without Dan, without the Sutcliffes....

They were going....

They were gone.

XXVIII

I.

She lay out on the moor, under the August sun. Her hands were pressed like a bandage over her eyes. When she lifted them she caught the faint pink glow of their flesh. The light throbbed and nickered as she pressed it out, and let it in.

The sheep couched, panting, in the shade of the stone covers. She lay so still that the peewits had stopped their cry.

Something bothered her....

_And in the east one pure, prophetic star_--one pure prophetic star--_Trembles between the darkness and the dawn_.

What you wrote last year. No reason why you shouldn't write modern plays in blank verse if you wanted to. Only people didn't say those things. You couldn't do it that way.

Let the thing go. Tear it to bits and burn them in the kitchen fire.

If you lay still, perfectly still, and stopped thinking the other thing would come back.

_In dreams He has made you wise, With the wisdom of silence and prayer, God, who has blinded your eyes, With the dusk of your hair_.

The Mother. The Mother. Mother and Son.

_You and he are near akin. Would you slay your brother-in-sin? What he does yourself shall do_--

That was the Son's hereditary destiny.

Lying on her back under Karva, she dreamed her "Dream-Play"; saying the unfinished verses over and over again, so as to remember them when she got home. She was unutterably happy.

She thought: "I don't care what happens so long as I can go on."

She jumped up to her feet. "I must go and see what Mamma's doing."

Her mother was sewing in the drawing-room and waiting for her to come to tea. She looked up and smiled.

"What are you so pleased about?" she said.

"Oh, nothing."

Mamma was adorable, sitting there like a dove on its nest, dressed in a dove's dress, grey on grey, turning dove's eyes to you in soft, crinkly lids. She held her head on one side, smiling at some secret that she kept. Mamma was happy, too.

"What are you looking such an angel for?"

Mamma lifted up her work, showing an envelope that lay on her lap, the crested flap upwards, a blue gun-carriage on a white ground, and the motto: "_Ubique_."

Catty had been into Reyburn to shop and had called for the letters. Mark was coming home in April.

"Oh--Mamma--"

"There's a letter for you, Mary."

(Not from Mark.)

"If he gets that appointment he won't go back." She thought: "She'll never be unhappy again. She'll never be afraid he'll get cholera."

For a minute their souls met and burned together in the joy they shared.

Then broke apart.

"Aren't you going to show me Mr. Sutcliffe's letter?"

"Why should I?"

"You don't mean to say there's anything in it I can't see?"

"You can see it if you like. There's nothing in it."

That was why she hadn't wanted her to see it. For anything there was in it you might never have known him. But Mrs. Sutcliffe had sent her love.

Mamma looked up sharply.

"Did you write to him, Mary?"

"Of course I did."

"You'll not write again. He's let you know pretty plainly he isn't going to be bothered."

(It wasn't that. It couldn't be that.)

"Did they say anything more about your going there?"

"No."

"That ought to show you then.... But as long as you live you'll give yourself away to people who don't want you."

"I'd rather you didn't talk about them."

"I should like to know what I _can_ talk about," said Mamma.

She folded up her work and laid it in the basket.

Her voice dropped from the sharp note of resentment.

"I wish you'd go and see if those asters have come."

II.

The asters had come. She had carried out the long, shallow boxes into the garden. She had left her mother kneeling beside them, looking with adoration into the large, round, innocent faces, white and purple, mauve and magenta and amethyst and pink. If the asters had not come the memory of the awful things they had said to each other would have remained with them till bed-time; but Mamma would be happy with the asters like a child with its toys, planning where they were to go and planting them.

She went up to her room. After thirteen years she had still the same childish pleasure in the thought that it was hers and couldn't be taken from her, because nobody else wanted it.

The bookshelves stretched into three long rows on the white wall above her bed to hold the books Mr. Sutcliffe had given her; a light blue row for the Thomas Hardys; a dark blue for the George Merediths; royal blue and gold for the Rudyard Kiplings. And in the narrow upright bookcase in the arm of the T facing her writing-table, Mark's books: the Homers and the Greek dramatists. Their backs had faded from puce colour to drab.

Mark's books.--When she looked at them she could still feel her old, childish lust for possession, her childish sense of insecurity, of defeat. And something else. The beginning of thinking things about Mamma. She could see herself standing in Mark's bedroom at Five Elms and Mamma with her hands on Mark's books. She could hear herself saying, "You're afraid."

"What did I think Mamma was afraid of?"

Mamma was happy out there with the asters.

There would be three hours before dinner.

She began setting down the fragments of the "Dream-Play" that had come to her: then the outlines. She saw very clearly and precisely how it would have to be. She was intensely happy.

* * * * *

She was still thinking of it as she went across the Green to the post office, instead of wondering why the postmistress had sent for her, and why Miss Horn waited for her by the house door at the side, or why she looked at her like that, with a sort of yearning pity and fear. She followed her into the parlour behind the post office.

Suddenly she was awake to the existence of this parlour and its yellow cane-bottomed chairs and round table with the maroon cloth and the white alabaster lamp that smelt. The orange envelope lay on the maroon cloth. Miss Horn covered it with her hand.

"It's for Mr. Dan," she said. "I daren't send it to the house lest your mother should get it."

She gave it up with a slow, unwilling gesture.

"It's bad news, Miss Mary."

"_Your Brother Died This Evening_."

Her heart stopped, staggered and went on again. _"Poona"_--Mark--

"_Your Brother Died This Evening_.--SYMONDS."

"This evening" was yesterday. Mark had died yesterday.

Her heart stopped again. She had a sudden feeling of suffocation and sickness.

Her mind left off following the sprawl of the thick grey-black letters on the livid pink form.

It woke again to the extraordinary existence of Miss Horn's parlour. It went back to Mark, slowly, by the way it had come, by the smell of the lamp, by the orange envelope on the maroon cloth.

Mark. And something else.

Mamma--Mamma. She would have to know.

Miss Horn still faced her, supporting herself by her spread hands pressed down on to the table. Her eyes had a look of gentle, helpless interrogation, as if she said, "What are you going to do about it?"

She did all the necessary things; asked for a telegram form, filled it in: "_Send Details_, MARY OLIVIER"; and addressed it to Symonds of "E" Company. And all the time, while her hand moved over the paper, she was thinking, "I shall have to tell Mamma."

III.

The five windows of the house stared out at her across the Green. She avoided them by cutting through Horn's yard and round by the Back Lane into the orchard. She was afraid that her mother would see her before she had thought how she would tell her that Mark was dead. She shut herself into her room to think.

She couldn't think.

She dragged herself from the window seat to the chair by the writing-table and from the chair to the bed.

She could still feel her heart staggering and stopping. Once she thought it was going to stop altogether. She had a sudden pang of joy. "If it would stop altogether--I should go to Mark. Nothing would matter. I shouldn't have to tell Mamma that he's dead." But it always went on again.

She thought of Mark now without any feeling at all except that bodily distress. Her mind was fixed in one centre of burning, lucid agony. Mamma.

"I can't tell her. I can't. It'll kill her.... I don't see how she's to live if Mark's dead.... I shall send for Aunt Bella. She can do it. Or I might ask Mrs. Waugh. Or Mr. Rollitt."

She knew she wouldn't do any of these things. She would have to tell her.

She heard the clock strike the half hour. Half-past five. Not yet. "When it strikes seven I shall go and tell Mamma."

She lay down on her bed and listened for the strokes of the clock. She felt nothing but an immense fatigue, an appalling heaviness. Her back and arms were loaded with weights that held her body down on to the bed.

"I shall never be able to get up and tell her."

Six. Half-past. At seven she got up and went downstairs. Through the open side door she saw her mother working in the garden.

She would have to get her into the house.

"Mamma--darling."

But Mamma wouldn't come in. She was planting the last aster in the row. She went on scooping out the hole for it, slowly and deliberately, with her trowel, and patting the earth about it with wilful hands. There was a little smudge of grey earth above the crinkles in her soft, sallow-white forehead.

"You wait," she said.

She smiled like a child pleased with itself for taking its own way.

Mary waited.

She thought: "Three hours ago I was angry with her. I was angry with her. And Mark was dead then. And when she read his letter. He was dead yesterday."

IV.

Time was not good to you. Time was cruel. Time made you see.

Yet somehow they had gone through time. Nights of August and September when you got up before daybreak to listen at her door. Days when you did nothing. Mamma sat upright in her chair with her hands folded on her lap. She kept her back to the window: you saw her face darkening in the dusk. When the lamp came she raised her arm and the black shawl hung from it and hid her face. Nights of insane fear when you _had_ to open her door and look in to see whether she were alive or dead. Days when you were afraid to speak, afraid to look at each other. Nights when you couldn't sleep for wondering how Mark had died. They might have told you. They might have told you in one word. They didn't, because they couldn't; because the word was too awful. They would never say how Mark died. Mamma thought he had died of cholera.

You started at sounds, at the hiss of the flame in the grate, the fall of the ashes on the hearth, the tinkling of the front door bell.

You heard Catty slide back the bolt. People muttered on the doorstep. You saw them go back past the window, quietly, their heads turned away. They were ashamed.

You began to go out. You walked slowly, weighted more than ever by your immense, inexplicable fatigue. When you saw people coming you tried to go quicker; when you spoke to them you panted and felt absurd. A coldness came over you when you saw Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin with their heads on one side and their shocked, grieved faces. You smiled at them as you panted, but they wouldn't smile back. Their grief was too great. They would never get over it.

You began to watch for the Indian mail.

One day the letter came. You read blunt, jerky sentences that told you Mark had died suddenly, in the mess room, of heart failure. Captain Symonds said he thought you would want to know exactly how it happened.... "Well, we were 'cock-fighting,' if you know what that is, after dinner. Peters is the heaviest man in our battery, and Major Olivier was carrying him on his back. We oughtn't to have let him do it. But we didn't know there was anything wrong with his heart. He didn't know it himself. We thought he was fooling when he dropped on the floor.... Everything was done that could be done.... He couldn't have suffered.... He was happy up to the last minute of his life--shouting with laughter."

She saw the long lighted room. She saw it with yellow walls and yellow lights, with a long, white table and clear, empty wine-glasses. Men in straw-coloured bamboo armchairs turning round to look. She couldn't see their faces. She saw Mark's face. She heard Mark's voice, shouting with laughter. She saw Mark lying dead on the floor. The men stood up suddenly. Somebody without a face knelt down and bent over him.

It was as if she had never known before that Mark was dead and knew it now. She cried for the first time since his death, not because he was dead, but because he had died like that--playing.

He should have died fighting. Why couldn't he? There was the Boer War and the Khyber Pass and Chitral and the Soudan. He had missed them all. He had never had what he had wanted.

And Mamma who had cried so much had left off crying.

"The poor man couldn't have liked writing that letter, Mary. You needn't be angry with him."

"I'm not angry with him. I'm angry because Mark died like that."

"Heigh-h--" The sound in her mother's throat was like a sigh and a sob and a laugh jerking out contempt.

"You don't know what you're talking about. He's gone, Mary. If you were his mother it wouldn't matter to you how he died so long as he didn't suffer. So long as he didn't die of cholera."

"If he could have got what he wanted--"

"What's that you say?"

"If he could have got what he wanted."

"None of us ever get what we want in this world," said Mamma.

She thought: "It was her son--_her_ son she loved, not Mark's real, secret self. He's got away from her at last--altogether."

V.

She sewed.

Every day she went to the linen cupboard and gathered up all the old towels and sheets that wanted mending, and she sewed.

Her mother had a book in her lap. She noticed that if she left off sewing Mamma would take up the book and read, and when she began again she would put it down.

Her thoughts went from Mamma to Mark, from Mark to Mamma. She used to be pleased when she saw you sewing. "Nothing will ever please her now. She'll never be happy again.... I ought to have died instead of Mark.... That's Anthony Trollope she's reading."

The long sheet kept slipping. It dragged on her arm. Her arms felt swollen, and heavy like bars of lead. She let them drop to her knees.... Little Mamma.

She picked up the sheet again.

"Why are you sewing, Mary?"

"I must do _something_."

"Why don't you take a book and read?"

"I can't read."

"Well--why don't you go out for a walk?"

"Too tired."

"You'd better go and lie down in your room."

She hated her room. Everything in it reminded her of the day after Mark died. The rows of new books reminded her; and Mark's books in the narrow bookcase. They were hers. She would never be asked to give them back again. Yesterday she had taken out the Aeschylus and looked at it, and she had forgotten that Mark was dead and had felt glad because it was hers. To-day she had been afraid to see its shabby drab back lest it should remind her of that, too.

Her mother sighed and put her book away. She sat with her hands before her, waiting.

Her face had its old look of reproach and disapproval, the drawn, irritated look you saw when you came between her and Mark. As if your grief for Mark came between her and her grief, as if, deep down inside her, she hated your grief as she had hated your love for him, without knowing that she hated it.

Suddenly she turned on you her blurred, wounded eyes.

"Mary, when you look at me like that I feel as if you knew everything I'm thinking."

"I don't. I shall never know."

Supposing all the time she knew what you were thinking? Supposing Mark knew? Supposing the dead knew?

She was glad of the aching of her heart that dragged her thought down and numbed it.

The January twilight crept between them. She put down her sewing. At the stroke of the clock her mother stirred in her chair.

"What day of the month is it?" she said.

"The twenty-fifth."

"Then--yesterday was your birthday.... Poor Mary. I forgot.... I sit here, thinking. My own thoughts. They make me forget.... Come here."

She went to her, drawn by a passion stronger than her passion for Mark, her hard, proud passion for Mark.

Her mother put up her face. She stooped down and kissed her passionately, on her mouth, her wet cheeks, her dove's eyes, her dove's eyelids. She crouched on the floor beside her, leaning her head against her lap. Mamma's hand held it there.

"Are you twenty-nine or thirty?"

"Thirty."

"You don't look it. You've always been such a little thing.... You remember the silly question you used to ask me? 'Mamma--would you love me better if I was two?'"

She remembered. Long ago. When she came teasing for kisses. The silly question.

"You remember _that_?"

"Yes. I remember."

Deep down inside her there was something you would never know.

XXIX

I.

Mamma was planting another row of asters in the garden in the place of those that had died last September.

The outline of the map of South Africa had gone from the wall at the bottom. Roddy's bit was indistinguishable from the rest.

And always you knew what would happen. Outside, on the Green, the movements of the village repeated themselves like the play of a clock-work toy. Always the same figures on the same painted stand, marked with the same pattern of slanting roads and three-cornered grass-plots. Half-way through prayers the Morfe bus would break loose from High Row with a clatter, and the brakes would grind on the hill. An hour after tea-time it would come back with a mournful tapping and scraping of hoofs.

She had left off watching for the old red mail-cart to come round the corner at the bottom. Sometimes, at long intervals, there would be a letter for her from Aunt Lavvy or Dan or Mrs. Sutcliffe. She couldn't tell when it would come, but she knew on what days the long trolleys would stop by Mr. Horn's yard loaded with powdery sacks of flour, and on what days the brewer's van would draw up to the King's Head and the Farmers' Arms. When she looked out across the Green she caught the hard stare of the Belks' house, the tall, lean, grey house blotched with iron stains. It stood on the sheer edge where the platform dropped to the turn of the road. Every morning at ten o'clock its little door would open and Mr. Belk would come out and watch for his London paper. Every evening at ten minutes past ten the shadow of Mr. Belk would move across the yellow blind of the drawing-room window on the right; the light would go out, and presently a blond blur would appear behind the blind of the bedroom window on the left.

Every morning at twelve Mrs. Belk would hurry along, waddling and shaking, to leave the paper with her aunt, old Mrs. Heron, in the dark cottage that crouched at the top of the Green. Every afternoon at three Dorsy would bring it back again.

When Mary came in from the village Mamma would look up and say "Well?" as if she expected her to have something interesting to tell. She wished that something would happen so that she might tell Mamma about it. She tried to think of something, something to say that would interest Mamma.

"I met Mr. James on the Garthdale Road. Walking like anything."

"Did you?" Mamma was not interested in Mr. James.

She wondered, "Why can't I think of things like other people?" She had a sense of defeat, of mournful incapacity.

One day Catty came bustling in with the tea-things, looking important. She had brought news from the village.

Mrs. Heron had broken her thigh. She had slipped on the landing. Mrs. Belk was with her and wouldn't go away.

Catty tried to look sorry, but you could see she was pleased because she had something to tell you.

They talked about it all through tea-time. They were sorry for Mrs. Heron. They wondered what poor Dorsy would do if anything should happen to her. And through all their sorrow there ran a delicate, secret thrill of satisfaction. Something had happened. Something that interested Mamma.

Two days later Dorsy came in with her tale; her nose was redder, her hare's eyes were frightened.

"Mrs. Belk's there still," she said. "She wants to take Aunt to live with her. She wants her to send me away. She says it wouldn't have happened if I'd looked after her properly. And so it wouldn't, Mary, if I'd been there. But I'd a bad headache, and I was lying down for a minute when she fell.... She won't go. She's sitting there in Aunt's room all the time, talking and tiring her. Trying to poison Aunt's mind against me. Working on her to send me away."

Dorsy's voice dropped and her face reddened.

"She thinks I'm after Aunt's money. She's always been afraid of her leaving it to me. I'm only her husband's nephew's daughter. Mrs. Belk's her real niece....

"I'd go to-morrow, Mary, but Aunt wants me there. She doesn't like Mrs. Belk; I think she's afraid of her. And she can't get away from her. She just lies there with her poor leg in the splints; there's the four-pound weight from the kitchen scales tied on to keep it on the stretch. If you could see her eyes turning to me when I come....

"One thing--Mrs. Belk's afraid for her life of me. That's why she's trying to poison Aunt's mind."

When they saw Mrs. Belk hurrying across the Green to Mrs. Heron's house they knew what she was going for.

"Poor Dorsy!" they said.

"Poor Dorsy!"

They had something to talk to each other about now.

II.

Winter and spring passed. The thorn-trees flowered on Greffington Edge: dim white groves, magically still under the grey, glassy air.

May passed and June. The sleek waves of the hay-fields shone with the brushing of the wind, ready for mowing.

The elder tree by the garden wall was a froth of greenish white on green.

At the turn of the schoolhouse lane the flowers began: wild geraniums and rose campion, purple and blue and magenta, in a white spray of cow's parsley: standing high against the stone walls, up and up the green lane.

Down there, where the two dales spread out at the bottom, a tiny Dutch landscape. Flat pastures. Trees dotted about. A stiff row of trees at the end. No sky behind them. Trees green on green, not green on blue. The great flood of the sky dammed off by the hills.

She shut her eyes and saw the flat fields of Ilford, and the low line of flying trees; a thin, watery mirage against the hill.

Since Mark died she had begun to dream about Ilford. She would struggle and break through out of some dream about Morfe and find herself in Ley Street, going to Five Elms. She would get past the corner and see the red brick gable end. Sometimes, when she came up to the gate, the house would turn into Greffington Hall. Sometimes it would stand firm with its three rows of flat windows; she would go up the flagged path and see the sumach tree growing by the pantry window; and when the door was opening she would wake.

Sometimes the door stood open. She would go in. She would go up the stairs and down the passages, trying to find the schoolroom. She would know that Mark was in the schoolroom. But she could never find it. She never saw Mark. The passages led through empty, grey-lit rooms to the bottom of the kitchen stairs, and she would find a dead baby lying among the boots and shoes in the cat's cupboard.

Autumn and winter passed. She was thirty-two.

III.

When your mind stopped and stood still it could feel time. Time going fast, going faster and faster. Every year its rhythm swung on a longer curve.

Your mind stretched to the span of time. There was something exciting about this stretch, like a new sense growing. But in your dreams your mind shrank again; you were a child, a child remembering and returning; haunting old stairs and passages, knocking at shut doors. This child tried to drag you back, it teased you to make rhymes about it. You were not happy till you had made the rhymes.

There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to look for happiness in memory. Your happiness was _now_, in the moment that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.

Yesterday she had said to Dorsy Heron, "What I can't stand is seeing the same faces every day."

But the hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing heart.

She swung off the road beyond the sickle to the last moor-track that led to the other side of Karva. She came back by the southern slope, down the twelve fields, past the four farms.

The farm of the thorn-tree, the farm of the ash, the farm of the three firs and the farm all alone.

Four houses. Four tales to be written.

There was something in you that would go on, whatever happened. Whatever happened it would still be happy. Its happiness was not like the queer, sudden, uncertain ecstasy. She had never known _what_ that was. It came and went; it had gone so long ago that she was sure that whatever it had been it would never come again. She could only remember its happening as you remember the faint ecstasies of dreams. She thought of it as something strange and exciting. Sometimes she wondered whether it had really happened, whether there wasn't a sort of untruthfulness in supposing it had.

But that ecstasy and this happiness had one quality in common; they belonged to some part of you that was free. A you that had no hereditary destiny; that had got out of the net, or had never been caught in it.

You could stand aside and look on at its happiness with horror, it didn't care. It was utterly indifferent to your praise or blame, and the praise or blame of other people; or to your happiness and theirs. It was open to you to own it as your self or to detach yourself from it in your horror. It was stronger and saner than you. If you chose to set up that awful conflict in your soul that was your own affair.

Perhaps not your own. Supposing the conflict in you was the tug of the generations before you, trying to drag you back to them? Supposing the horror was _their_ horror, their fear of defeat?

She had left off being afraid of what might happen to her. It might never happen. And supposing it did, supposing it had to happen when you were forty-five, you had still thirteen years to write in.

"It shan't happen. I won't let it. I won't let them beat me."

IV.

Last year the drawer in the writing-table was full. This year it had overflowed into the top left-hand drawer of the dressing-table. She had to turn out all the handkerchiefs and stockings.

Her mother met her as she was carrying them to the wardrobe in the spare room. You could see she felt that there was something here that must be enquired into.

"I should have thought," she said, "that writing-table drawer was enough."

"It isn't."

"Tt-t--" Mamma nodded her head in a sort of exasperated resignation.

"Do you mean to say you're going to _keep_ all that?"

"All that? You should see what I've burnt."

"I should like to know what you're going to do with it!"

"So should I. That's just it--I don't know."

That night the monstrous thought came to her in bed: Supposing I published those poems--I always meant to do it some day. Why haven't I? Because I don't care? Or because I care too much? Because I'm afraid? Afraid that if somebody reads them the illusion they've created would be gone?

How do I know my writing isn't like my playing?

This is different. There's nothing else. If it's taken from me I shan't want to go on living.

You didn't want to go on living when Mark died. Yet you went on. As if Mark had never died.... And if Mamma died you'd go on--in your illusion.

If it is an illusion I'd rather know it.

How _can_ I know? There isn't anybody here who can tell me. Nobody you could believe if they told you--I can believe _myself_. I've burnt everything I've written that was bad.

You believe yourself to-day. You believed yesterday. How do you know you'll believe to-morrow?

To-morrow--

V.

Aunt Lavvy had come to stay.

When she came you had the old feeling of something interesting about to happen. Only you knew now that this was an illusion.

She talked to you as though, instead of being thirty-three, you were still very small and very young and ignorant of all the things that really mattered. She was vaguer and greyer, more placid than ever, and more content with God.

Impossible to believe that Papa used to bully her and that Aunt Lavvy had revolted.

"For thirty-three years, Emilius, thirty-three years"--

Sunday supper at Five Elms; on the table James Martineau's _Endeavours After the Christian Life_.

She wondered why she hadn't thought of Aunt Lavvy. Aunt Lavvy knew Dr. Martineau. As long as you could remember she had always given a strong impression of knowing him quite well.

But when Mary had made it clear what she wanted her to ask him to do, it turned out that Aunt Lavvy didn't know Dr. Martineau at all.

And you could see she thought you presumptuous.

VI.

When old Martha brought the message for her to go to tea with Miss Kendal, Mary slunk out through the orchard into the Back Lane. At that moment the prospect of talking two hours with Miss Kendal was unendurable.

And there was no other prospect. As long as she lived in Morfe there would be nothing--apart from her real, secret life there would be nothing--to look forward to but that. If it was not Miss Kendal it would be Miss Louisa or Dorsy or old Mrs. Heron. People talked about dying of boredom who didn't know that you could really die of it.

If only you didn't keep on wanting somebody--somebody who wasn't there. If, before it killed you, you could kill the desire to know another mind, a luminous, fiery crystal, to see it turn, shining and flashing. To talk to it, to listen to it, to love the human creature it belonged to.

She envied her youth its capacity for day-dreaming, for imagining interminable communions. Brilliant hallucinations of a mental hunger. Better than nothing.... If this went on the breaking-point must come. Suddenly you would go smash. Smash. Your mind would die in a delirium of hunger.

VII.

"It's a pity we can't go to his lecture," said Miss Kendal.

The train was moving out of Reyburn station. It was awful to think how nearly they had missed it. If Dr. Charles had stayed another minute at the harness-maker's.

Miss Kendal sat on the edge of the seat, very upright in her black silk mantle with the accordion-pleated chiffon frills. She had sat like that since the train began to pull, ready to get out the instant it stopped at Durlingham.

"I feel sure it's going to be all right," she said.

The white marabou feather nodded.

Her gentle mauve and sallow face was growing old, with soft curdlings and puckerings of the skin; but she still carried her head high, nodding at you with her air of gaiety, of ineffable intrigue.

"I wouldn't bring you, Mary, if I didn't feel sure."

If she had not felt sure she wouldn't have put on the grey kid gloves, the mantle and the bonnet with the white marabou feather. You don't dress like that to go shopping in Durlingham.

"You mean," Mary said, "that we shall see him."

Her heart beat calmly, stilled by the sheer incredibility of the adventure.

"Of course we shall see him. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield will manage that. It might have been a little difficult if the Professor had been staying anywhere else. But I know Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield very well. No doubt she's arranged for you to have a long talk with him."

"Does she know what I want to see him about?"

"Well--yes--I thought it best, my dear, to tell her just what you told me, so that she might see how important it is.... There's no knowing what may come of it.... Did you bring them with you?"

"No, I didn't. If he won't look at them I should feel such an awful fool."

"Perhaps," said Miss Kendal, "it is wiser not to assume beforehand. Nothing may come of it. Still, I can't help feeling something will.... When you're famous, Mary, I shall think of how we went into Durlingham together."

"Whatever comes of it I shall think of _you_."

The marabou feather quivered slightly.

"How long have we known each other?"

"Seventeen years."

"Is it so long?... I shall never forget the first day you came with your mother. I can see you now, Mary, sitting beside my poor father with your hand on his chair.... And that evening when you played to us, and dear Mr. Roddy was there...."

She thought: "Why can't I be kind--always? Kindness matters more than anything. Some day she'll die and she'll never have said or thought one unkind thing in all her poor, dreadful little life.... Why didn't I go to tea with her on Wednesday?"

On Wednesday her mind had revolted against its destiny of hunger. She had hated Morfe. She had felt angry with her mother for making her live in it, for expecting her to be content, for thinking that Dorsy and Miss Louisa and Miss Kendal were enough. She had been angry with Aunt Lavvy for talking about her to Miss Kendal.

Yet if it weren't for Miss Kendal she wouldn't be going into Durlingham to see Professor Lee Ramsden.

Inconceivable that she should be taken by Miss Kendal to see Professor Lee Ramsden. Yet this inconceivable thing appeared to be happening.

She tried to remember what she knew about him. He was Professor of English literature at the University of London. He had edited Anthologies and written Introductions. He had written a _History of English Literature_ from Chaucer to Tennyson and a monograph on Shelley.

She thought of his mind as a luminous, fiery crystal, shining.

Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 P.M. She heard Miss Kendal saying, "If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone." She had a supreme sense of something about to happen.

Heavenly the long, steep-curved glass roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights. Foreign and beautiful the black canal between the purplish rose-red walls, the white swans swaying on the black water, the red shaft of the clock-tower. It shot up high out of the Market-place, topped with the fantastically large, round, white eye of its clock.

She kept on looking up to the clock-tower. At four she would see him.

They walked about the town. They lunched and shopped. They sat in the Park. They kept on looking at the clock-tower.

At the bookseller's in the Market-place she bought a second-hand copy of Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_....

A black-grey drive between bushes of smutty laurel and arbutus. A black-grey house of big cut stones that stuck out. Gables and bow windows with sharp freestone facings that stuck out. You waited in a drawing-room stuffed with fragile mahogany and sea-green plush. Immense sea-green acanthus leaves, shaded in myrtle green, curled out from the walls. A suggestion of pictures heaved up from their places by this vigorous, thrusting growth.

Curtains, cream-coloured net, sea-green plush, veiled the black-grey walks and smutty lawns of the garden.

While she contemplated these things the long hand of the white marble tombstone clock moved from the hour to the quarter.

She was reading the inscription, in black letters, on the golden plinth: "Presented to Thomas Smythe-Caulfield, Esqr., M.P., by the Council and Teachers of St. Paul's Schools, Durlingham"--"Presented"--when Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield came in.

A foolish, overblown, conceited face. Grey hair arranged with art and science, curl on curl. Three-cornered eyelids, hutches for small, malevolently watching eyes. A sharp, insolent nose. Fish's mouth peering out above the backward slope of cascading chins.

Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield shook hands at a sidelong arm's-length, not looking at you, holding Miss Kendal in her sharp pointed stare. They were Kate and Eleanor: Eleanor and Kate.

"You're going to the lecture?"

"If it had been at three instead of eight--"

"The hour was fixed for the townspeople's convenience."

In five minutes you had gathered that you would not be allowed to see Professor Lee Ramsden; that Professor Lee Ramsden did not desire to see or talk to anybody except Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield; that he kept his best things for her; that _all sorts of people_ were trying to get at him, and that he trusted her to protect him from invasion; that you had been admitted in order that Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield might have the pleasure of telling you these things.

Mary saw that the moment was atrocious; but it didn't matter. A curious tranquillity possessed her: she felt something there, close to her, like a person in the room, giving her a sudden security. The moment that was mattering so abominably to her poor, kind friend belonged to a time that was not her time.

She heard the tinkle of tea cups outside the hall; then a male voice, male footsteps. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield made a large encircling movement towards the door. Something interceptive took place there.

As they went back down the black-grey drive between the laurel and arbutus Miss Kendal carried her head higher than ever.

"That is the first time in my life, Mary, that I've asked a favour."

"You did it for me." ("She hated it, but she did it for me.")

"Never mind. We aren't going to mind, are we? We'll do without them.... That's right, my dear. Laugh. I'm glad you can. I dare say I shall laugh myself to-morrow."

"I don't _want_ to laugh," Mary said. She could have cried when she looked at the grey gloves and the frilled mantle, and the sad, insulted face in the bonnet with the white marabou feather. (And that horrible woman hadn't even given her tea.)

The enormous eye of the town clock pursued them to the station.

As they settled into their seats in the Reyburn train Miss Kendal said, "It's a pity we couldn't go to the lecture."

She leaned back, tired, in her corner. She closed her eyes.

Mary opened Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_.

The beginning had begun.

XXX

I.

"What are you reading, Mary?"

"The New Testament.... Extraordinary how interesting it is."

"Interesting!"

"Frightfully interesting."

"You may say what you like, Mary; you'll change your mind some day. I pray every night that you may come to Christ; and you'll find in the end you'll have to come...."

No. No. Still, he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." If the Greek would bear it--within you.

Did they understand their Christ? Had anybody ever understood him? Their "Prince of Peace" who said he hadn't come to send peace, but a sword? The sword of the Self. He said he had come to set a man against his father and the daughter against her mother, and that because of him a man's foes should be those of his own household. "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild."

He was not meek and mild. He was only gentle with children and women and sick people. He was brave and proud and impatient and ironic. He wouldn't stay with his father and mother. He liked happy people who could amuse themselves without boring him. He liked to get away from his disciples, and from Lazarus and Martha and Mary of Bethany, and go to the rich, cosmopolitan houses and hear the tax-gatherer's talk and see the young Roman captains swaggering with their swords and making eyes at Mary of Magdala.

He was the sublimest rebel that ever lived.

He said, "The spirit blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it goes to. Everybody that is born from the spirit is like that." The spirit blows where it wants to.

He said it was a good thing for them that he was going away. If he didn't the Holy Ghost wouldn't come to them; they would never have any real selves; they would never be free. They would set him up as a god outside themselves and worship Him, and forget that the Kingdom of God was within them, that God was their real self.

Their hidden self was God. It was their Saviour. Its existence was the hushed secret of the world.

Christ knew--he must have known--it was greater than he was.

It was a good thing for them that Christ died. That was how he saved them. By going away. By a proud, brave, ironic death. Not at all the sort of death you had been taught to believe in.

And because they couldn't understand a death like that, they went and made a god of him just the same.

But the Atonement was that--Christ's going away.

II.

February: grey, black-bellied clouds crawling over Greffington Edge, over Karva, swelling out: swollen bodies crawling and climbing, coming together, joining. Monstrous bodies ballooning up behind them, mounting on top of them, flattening them out, pressing them down on to the hills; going on, up and up the sky, swelling out overhead, coming together.

One cloud, grey as sink water, over all the sky, shredded here and there, stirred by slight stretchings, and spoutings of thin steam.

Then the whole mass coming down, streaming grey sink water.

She came down the twelve fields on the south slope of Karva: she could say them by heart: the field with the big gap, the field above the four firs farm, the field below the farm of the ash-tree, the bare field, the field with the thorn tree, the field with the sheep's well, the field with the wild rose bush, the steep field of long grass, the hillocky field, the haunted field with the ash grove, the field with the big barn, the last field with the gap to the road.

She thought of her thirty-four years; of the verses she had sent to the magazines and how they had come back again; of the four farms on the hill, of the four tales not written.

The wet field grasses swept, cold, round her ankles.

Mamma sat waiting in her chair, in the drawing-room, in the clear, grey, glassy dusk of the cross-lights. She waited for the fine weather to come when she would work again in the garden. She waited for you to come to her. Her forehead unknitted itself; her dove's eyes brightened; she smiled, and the rough feathers of her eyebrows lay down, appeased.

At the opening of the door she stirred in her chair. She was glad when you came.

Catty brought in the lamp. When she turned up the wick the rising flame carved Mamma's face out of the dusk. Her pretty face, delicately dinted, whitened with a powdery down; stained with faint bistres of age. Her little, high-bridged nose stood up from the softness, clear and young, firm as ivory.

The globed light showed like a ball of fire, hung out in the garden, on the black, glassy darkness, behind the pane. Catty drew down the blind and went. You heard the click of the latch falling to behind her. The evening had begun.

They took up their books. Mamma hid her face behind Anthony Trollope, Mary hers behind Thomas Hardy. Presently she would hear Mamma sigh, then yawn.

Horrible tension.

Under the edge of her book she would see Anthony Trollope lying in Mamma's lap and Mamma's fingers playing with the fringe of her shawl. She would put Thomas Hardy down and take up Anthony Trollope and read aloud till Mamma's head began bowing in a doze. Then she would take up Thomas Hardy. When Mamma waked Hardy would go down under Trollope; when she dozed he would come to the top again.

After supper Mamma would be wide awake. She would sit straight up in her chair, waiting, motionless, ready. You would pick up your book but you would have no heart in it. You knew what she wanted. She knew that you knew. You could go on trying to read if you chose; but she would still sit there, waiting. You would know what she was thinking of.

The green box in the cabinet drawer.

The green box. You began to think of it, too, hidden, hidden in the cabinet drawer. You were disturbed by the thought of the green box, of the little figures inside it, white and green. You would get up and go to the cabinet drawer.

Mamma would put out her hands on the table, ready. She smiled with shut lips, pouting, half ashamed, half delighted. You would set out the green and white chequer board, the rows of pawns. And the game of halma would begin. White figures leap-frogging over green, green over white. Your hand and your eyes playing, your brain hanging inert, remembering, forgetting.

In the pauses of the game you waited; for the clock to strike ten, for Catty to bring in the Bible and the Prayer-book, for the evening to end. Old verses, old unfinished verses, coming and going.

In the long pauses of the game, when Mamma sat stone-still, hypnotised by the green and white chequers, her curved hand lifted, holding her pawn, her head quivering with indecision.

_In dreams He has made you wise With the wisdom of silence and prayer...._

Coming and going, between the leap-frogging of the green figures and the white.

_God, Who has blinded your eyes With the dusk of your hair...._

Brown hair, sleek and thin, brown hair that wouldn't go grey.

And the evening would go on, soundless and calm, with soft, annihilating feet, with the soft, cruel feet of oblivion.

III.

One day, when she came in, she heard the sound of the piano. The knocking of loose hammers on dead wires, the light, hacking clang of chords rolling like dead drum taps: Droom--Droom, Droom-era-room.

Alone in the dusk, Mamma was playing the Hungarian March, bowing and swaying as she played.

When the door opened she started up, turning her back on the piano, frightened, like a child caught in a play it is ashamed of. The piano looked mournful and self-conscious.

Then suddenly, all by itself, it shot out a cry like an arrow, a pinging, stinging, violently vibrating cry.

"I'm afraid," Mamma said, "something's happened to the piano."

IV.

They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered hand-writing: "Correspondence, Mary."

"Dear me," she said, "I didn't know I'd kept those letters."

She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see Uncle Victor's on the top, then Maurice Jourdain's. You heard the click of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim, yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert's.

"Tt-tt--"

"Oh, let me see that."

She looked over her mother's shoulder. They read together.

"We don't want her to go.... She made us love her more in one fortnight than girls we've had with us for years.... Perhaps some day we may have her again."

The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your "unbelief."

That was only the way she began.

"I say--I say!"

The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise. "Remarkable.--remarkable".--You would have thought there had never been such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier.

It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after.

"That was the letter you wouldn't let me read."

"What do you mean?"

"The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn't."

"Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don't believe I wouldn't let you read it."

"You didn't. I remember. You didn't want me to know--"

"Well," her mother said, giving in suddenly, "if I didn't, it was because I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don't suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time."

"Still--you kept it."

But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it.

She said, "I must have overlooked it. But we can burn it now."

She carried it across the room to the fire. She didn't want even now--even now. You saw again the old way of it, her little obstinate, triumphant smile, the look that paid you out, that said, "See how I've sold you."

The violet ashen sheet clung to the furred soot of the chimney: you could still see the blenched letters.

She couldn't really have thought it would make you conceited. That was only what she wanted to think she had thought.

"It wasn't easy to make you pleased with me all the time.... Still, I can't think why on earth you weren't pleased."

She knelt before the fire, watching the violet ashen bit of burnt-out paper, the cause, the stupid cause of it all.

Her mother had settled again, placidly, in her chair.

"Even if I _was_ a bit conceited.... I don't think I was, really. I only wanted to know whether I could do things. I wanted people to tell me just because I didn't know. But even if I was, what did it matter? You must have known I loved you--desperately--all the time."

"I didn't know it, Mary."

"Then you were stup--"

"Oh, say I was stupid. It's what you think. It's what you always have thought."

"You were--you were, if you didn't see it."

"See what?"

"How I cared--I can remember--when I was a kid--the awful feeling. It used to make me ill."

"I didn't know that. If you did care you'd a queer way of showing it."

"That was because I thought you didn't."

"Who told you I didn't care for you?"

"I didn't need to be told. I could see the difference."

Her mother sat fixed in a curious stillness. She held her elbows pressed tight against her sides. Her face was hard and still. Her eyes looked away across the room.

"You were different," she said. "You weren't like any of the others. I was afraid of you. You used to look at me with your little bright eyes. I felt as if you knew everything I was thinking. I never knew what you'd say or do next."

No. Her face wasn't hard. There was something else. Something clear. Clear and beautiful.

"I suppose I--I didn't like your being clever. It was the boys I wanted to do things. Not you."

"Don't--Mamma darling--_don't_."

The stiff, tight body let go its hold of itself. The eyes turned to her again.

"I was jealous of you, Mary. And I was afraid for my life you'd find it out."

V.

Eighteen ninety-eight. Eighteen ninety-nine. Nineteen hundred. Thirty-five--thirty-six--thirty-seven. Three years. Her mind kept on stretching; it held three years in one span like one year. The large rhythm of time appeased and exalted her.

In the long summers while Mamma worked in the garden she translated _Euripides_.

The _Bacchae_. You could do it after you had read Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ought to be.

Something between talking and singing. If you wrote verse that could be chanted: that could be whispered, shouted, screamed as they moved. Agave and her Maenads. Verse that would go with a throbbing beat, excited, exciting; beyond rhyme. That would be nearest to the Greek verse.

* * * * *

September, nineteen hundred.

Across the room she could see the pale buff-coloured magazine, on the table where, five minutes ago, Mamma had laid it down. She could see the black letters of its title and the squat column of the table of contents. The magazine with her poem in it.

And Mamma, sitting very straight, very still.

You would never know what she was thinking. She hadn't said anything. You couldn't tell whether she was glad or sorry; or whether she was afraid.

The air tingled with the thought of the magazine with your poem in it. But you would never know what she was thinking.

VI.

A long letter from Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward was worrying Mamma.

"He never could get on with your poor father. Or your Uncle Victor. He did his best to prevent him being made trustee.... And now he comes meddling, wanting to upset all their arrangements."

"Why?"

"Just because poor Victor's business isn't doing quite so well as it did."

"Yes, but why's he bothering _you_ about it?"

"Well, he says I ought to make another will, leaving half the boys' money to you. That would be taking it from Dan. He always had a grudge against poor Dan."

"But you mustn't do anything of the sort."

"Well--he knows your father provided for you. You're to have the Five Elms money that's in your Uncle Victor's business. You'd suppose, to hear him talk, that it wasn't safe there."

"Just tell him to mind his own business," Mary said.

"Actually," Mamma went on, "advising me not to pay back any more of Victor's money. I shall tell him I sent the last of it yesterday."

There would be no more debts to Uncle Victor. Mark had paid back his; Mamma had paid back Roddy's, scraping and scraping, Mark and Mamma, over ten years, over twenty.

A long letter from Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor was worrying Mamma.

"Don't imagine that I shall take this money. I have invested it for you, in sound securities. Not in my own business. That, I am afraid I ought to tell you, is no longer a sound security."

"Poor Victor--"

"It almost looks," Mamma said, "as if Edward might be right."

So right that in his next letter Uncle Victor prepared you for his bankruptcy.

"It will not affect you and Mary," he wrote. "I may as well tell you now that all the Five Elms money has been reinvested, and is safe. As for myself, I can assure you that, after the appalling anxiety of the last ten years, the thought of bankruptcy is a relief. A blessed relief, Caroline."

All through September and October the long letters came from Uncle Victor.

Then Aunt Lavvy's short letter that told you of his death.

Then the lawyer's letters.

It seemed that, after all, Uncle Victor had been mistaken. His affairs were in perfect order.

Only the Five Elms money was gone; and the money Mark and Mamma had paid back to him. He had taken it all out of his own business, and put it into the Sheba Mines and Joe's Reef, and the Golconda Company where he thought it would be safe.

The poor dear. The poor dear.

VII.

So that you knew--

Mamma might believe what Aunt Lavvy told her, that he had only gone to look out of the window and had turned giddy. Aunt Lavvy might believe that he didn't know what he was doing.

But you knew.

He had been afraid. Afraid. He wouldn't go up to the top-landing after they took Aunt Charlotte away; because he was afraid.

Then, at last, after all those years, he had gone up. When he knew he was caught in the net and couldn't get out. He had found that they had moved the linen cupboard from the window back into the night nursery. And he had bolted the staircase door on himself. He had shut himself up. And the great bare, high window was there. And the low sill. And the steep, bare wall, dropping to the lane below.

END OF BOOK FOUR