Part 13

She reached under the pillow, pulled out the little flattened handkerchief, and stood up.

“I must hurry. I’d give anything if to-day were over. I suppose life is like this, just day after day.”

“Give me that,” he said, taking the handkerchief. “I’ve seen it before.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said, still in the same dull tone. “It’s a new one.”

“Yes, I have. Last night.”

“Last night?”

“Yes, under your pillow.”

“You?”

She stared, her face quivering. Suddenly the line of her mouth seemed to collapse and run downward. Something tight had broken, something proud and fierce had bent. She was crying.

“Oh, Geordie, life is so much queerer than I ever knew. Why didn’t you tell me? I had such beastly dreams. I wish I could die.”

The old name recalled one of his own for her.

“Leopard, Leopard ... you silly little half-tamed leopard. What do I care about your dreams? It’ll all be all right in the morning.”

“It _is_ the morning, and it isn’t all right. _You_ take them for the Picnic, let me stay at home. I _won’t_ see Mr. Martin. Take him away. He’s so like _you_, Geordie, but with all your beastliness left out. Your _nice_ beastliness, your _dear_ beastliness, everything that makes me hate and adore you.”

“Now, listen. I’ve got a great idea. I didn’t half take my bath, I was so keen to tell it to you. Let’s get married.”

She looked at him in such quaint misery, her face all wrinkled and slippery with tears, he was almost angry again.

“Damn it, I mean _really_ married. The first time doesn’t count, it’s only a Promotion Scheme, your genial old prayer book admits it. But the Bible says it’s better to marry than to burn, doesn’t it?”

“Let’s do both.”

(Why, he thought, she’s got almost as much sense as Joyce.)

“That’s the way to talk,” he said. “Because I’d much rather marry a woman with a sense of humour. All right, we’ll pretend we’ve been living in sin, and now I’m going to make an honest woman of you. Wilt thou, Phyllis, have this man to thy wedded husband----”

“We _have_ been living in sin. It’s sin to be unhappy and hateful.”

“Of course it is. And if either of you know any impediment---- Where’s that prayer book of yours? I love that marriage--service stuff so much, it’d be worth while to get spliced every now and then just to hear it. It’s so gorgeously earthy. Remember that bit where as soon as he’s tied ’em up the parson has misgivings, and sings out in alarm ‘O Lord, save thy servant and thy handmaid!’”

“No, don’t read me the prayer book now, I can’t stand it. I want to get my bath.”

“Run along then.” He threw her blue robe around her shoulders. “We’ve got to go through with the Picnic, for the children’s sake. We’ll make it the happiest day in the world.”

“You don’t think it’s too late?”

He watched her down the passage, and then stood by the window seat looking out. The morning was very moist, there was fog over the bay, the hall had a faint musty odour like damp wallpaper. Certainly it was going to rain. Never mind, it would be one of those steady drumming rains that make a house so cosy. He was surprised to see that Joyce was in the garden already, she had set up her easel near the tea table and was painting. No, he thought, I shan’t let her go: we _can_ all be happy together. If Phyl knew how much she owes to Joyce she’d fall at her feet. How wise women would be if they knew that a man who has only loved one has never loved any. But better not mention it. Who wants them to be wise, poor ... half-tamed leopards!

“There’s someone in the bathroom,” Phyllis said, coming back.

“Martin, probably.”

“No, it’s Ruth. I can smell her all down the passage. That mignonette she uses. Funny how sharp one’s nose is in damp weather.”

“If we ever come here again we’ll have the house repapered.”

She knelt on the seat beside him.

“Don’t let’s come again.”

Her look followed his into the quiet garden. Both were silent. George guessed well enough why Joyce was there. She was doing a sketch for him, something to leave him. In that little figure at the easel was all the honour and disaster of all the world.

Side by side, his arm about her, he and Phyllis looked down into the cool green refreshment of birdsong and dew. The light was filled with a sense of mist, too thin to be seen, but sunshine was incapable behind it. Filmy air globed them in, as the glimmering soap-bubble spheres a breath of the soap’s perfume. A dream, a fog stained with dim colour, a bubble of glamour, farce, and despair; all the sane comfortable words are no more than wind. One gush of violets rebuts them. Life is too great for those who live it. Purposely they wound and mar it, to bring it to their own tragic dimension. What was Joyce’s word?... Inadequate. Yes, not all the beauty of the world can allay the bitter disproportion. And Time will come to rob us even of this precious grievance, this pang we carry in our dusty knapsack like the marshal’s silver baton. And Time will come and take my lust away....

So learn to live on farce. To savour its venom, like the Eastern King, dose and larger dose, until one can relish and thrive on a diet of acid that would blast the normal heart. Isn’t it this very disproportion that makes the glory? There would be no laughter in a perfect world. Ever after, digesting his secret poison, he would search other faces too for the sign of that healing bane.

He felt that Phyllis was about to say something. He erased his mind, to be ready to receive her thought; as one parent holds out arms to take the baby from the other.

“I think she’s rather wonderful. I think I could....”

Joy and clean gusto, the blessed hilarity of living! Why, it was so divinely simple, if Phyl would care to understand....

“Dearest, if you ... if you only....”

The half-tamed leopard stirred and showed a yellow spark. George’s mind, uneasily changing itself, made swift cusping arcs like the tracks of a turning car. Ruth came rustling from the bathroom. She was amazed to see them doing a foxtrot together.

“Good-morning!” he said. “Perhaps you didn’t know, this is our wedding day.”

“Hurry up,” he whispered to Phyllis. “Grab the bath while you can. I’ll get dressed, I’ll just have time to mend that railing before breakfast.”

XXI

Joyce had slipped out early. There was something unbearable in the house’s morning stir, its sense of preparation for living in which she would have no part.

Under the pine trees she was far enough from the house to consider it as a whole. She studied its weatherbeaten secrecy. She had the anxious apprehension of the artist, who needs to _feel_ his subject, purge it of mere reality, before he can begin work. The long line of the roof sagged a little, like an animal inured to carry burdens. The two semicircled bays, flanking the veranda, kept the garden under scrutiny. Each of all those windows had its own outlook on life. A thread of smoke stole from the kitchen chimney, sifting into the hazy morning. Imperceptible greyness was in the nebulous light, filtered through a gauze of ocean fog. The house was waiting, waiting. That vapoury air dimmed the bright world like breath on a mirror. Yet, for her mood, it was somehow right. A morning of fire and blue would have been indecent.

Houses, built for rest and safety, and then filled with the tension of such trivial sufferings. I wonder if any one has ever done a true portrait of a house? The opaque pearly light now seemed to her more sincere than any glamour of sun or moon. But how reluctant it was to surrender its meaning. She could hear the excited voices of the children, calling to and fro. Her mind was still pursuing something, she didn’t know just what. It was like trying to think of a forgotten word. The house hasn’t yet quite got over being empty so long, she thought. It’s still a little bit empty. Or it believed that being lived in again would be such fun, and now it’s disappointed. It had forgotten that life is like this.

She began to paint. This picture was for George, to remind him of things he did not know he knew. It must have love in it, and something more, too. The name of this picture, she said to herself, is A Portrait of a House Saying Good-bye.

The shading was very odd along the veranda, between the two turreted bays and beneath the overhang of the sleeping porch. The light came from no direction, it was latent and diffused, softened in slopes and patches among many angles. She had already dabbed in the profile of the building when she realized what it was that she wanted. It was not the outside of the house but an interior that was forming in her mind. She left the outline tentative, as it was, and imagined the side of the house to be transparent. Under the sharp projection of the balcony her brush struck through the glassed veranda and found itself in the dining room. The tinted panes gave her a clean spot of colour to focus on. Below these the room was obscure, but then the brush had discovered a pool of candlelight to dip in. Shadowy figures were sitting there, but just as she was about to sketch them they seemed to dissolve from their chairs and run toward the windows, looking outward furtively. There was another, too, outside the little sitting room, whispering in a dapple of black and silver chiaroscuro. Oh, if I could only catch what this means. If someone could help me. If George were here to help me. His large patience, his dear considering voice with the wandering parentheses of thought that she had so often mocked and loved. Voice so near her now and soon so impossible to hear. No one would help her. No one can ever help the artist. Others she saves, herself she cannot save....

She had saved him. She had saved Phyllis’s George, given Phyllis the greatest gift of all. Given her back those Georges, enriched with understanding and fear. But could she save her own poor phantom, or even herself? At any rate she was going back to her own life. She thought of that adored city waiting for her, its steep geometries of building, its thousand glimpses that inflame the artist’s eye. Extraordinary: you’d expect to find a painter exultantly at work on every street corner; and how rarely you see ’em!--The correct miseries of polite departure, a few gruesome hours in the train (ripping out the stitches of her golden fancy) and she would be there. There, where the whole vast miracle seemed, in moments of ecstasy, to have been planned for her special amazement and pleasure. The subway, with rows of shrewd and weary faces; girls with their short skirts and vivid scarves; men with shaven, sharply modelled mouths ... the endless beauty of people, and their blessed insensibility to the infernal pang.... Yes, that was what Phyllis could do for him better than she: dull and deaden that nerve in his mind: chloroform George the Fourth, the poor little bastard!

She was going back to her own life. Back to the civilized pains of art: its nostalgia for lost simplicity, its full and generous tolerance, its self-studious doubt, its divinely useless mirth, its disregard of things not worth discussing among the cheerfully disenchanted. Ah, never try to explain things you know are true. As soon as you begin to do that, they seem doubtful.

A darkness kept coming into the picture. It was as though the silence that had been stored up in that house was now draining out of it, seeping into the absorbent air. The fog was thickening and distorted perspectives. The house was out of drawing. That tricky shadow under the balcony was baffling: it made the whole porch seem out of plumb. Holding up a brush to get a true horizontal, she saw that Martin was coming across the lawn.

“Why, it’s Bunny!” he said, pointing to the figure she had suggested with a few hasty strokes. “I know now why she wanted you to help me.”

Joyce did not look up.

“You must go, at once,” she said.

“I was lying in bed, waiting for it to be time to get up. I saw that some of the wallpaper, by the window, was torn. When I looked at it I found the mouse pattern underneath. It’s the old nursery.”

“That’s what Bunny meant! Go and look in the cupboard, see if you can find it, the mouse I gave you. That’s your only chance.”

“I think I understand now.”

“You mean, you know that we’re the same----”

“Yes, that this is what we’re all coming to. Except Bunny ... and--and you. _You_ haven’t done it, not quite....”

“Martin, I’m worst of all,” she cried. “I’m neither one nor the other.”

“No, I think Ben is the worst,” he said slowly. “It’s too bad; he was such a nice boy. Of course George is pretty awful, but I didn’t know him before.”

“Quick, go away. Don’t try to learn too much. You must go for _their_ sake. If they find out who you are----”

She had a sick presentiment that they must hurry. And still he lingered, and she could feel Time sloping toward some bottomless plunge.

“Perhaps I don’t want to go. There’s something I don’t quite understand. You all look at each other so queerly: look, and then turn away. And you and George in the garden. What is it? What’s happened that hurts you all so?”

How could she answer? How tell him that the world is often too fierce for its poor creatures, overstrains and soils them in their most secret nerves; and that with all their horrors they would not have it otherwise. He had come like the unspoiled essence of living, groping blindly for what it divines to be happy and real and true; he was thwarted and damned by the murderous pettiness of his own scarred brethren. If I had two friends called Food and Hunger, I’d never introduce them to each other. Must she, who was born to love him, be the one to tell him this?

“You _must_ go. Don’t you see, it isn’t only us. It’s you too. You and George.... Oh, I tried not to tell you. George is just you grown up.”

He looked at her, appalled.

“You’re the George that was once. That’s why he hates you so.--You’re George the Fifth, I suppose,” she said, forgetting he wouldn’t understand.

“I _won’t_ be like George!” he exclaimed. “But I shan’t go unless you’ll come with me. It wouldn’t be any fun unless you were there. Help us to get away, and we’ll never come again.”

She did not tell him that she could never go back; that he must go alone; that they would always be lonely.

“Are you _sure_?” he asked pitiably. “Have I got to be like _that_? Like George, I mean?”

“Hurry, hurry,” was all she could say.

He was running toward the house.

* * * * *

She tried to follow, but some sluggish seizure was about her limbs. The house, shadowy in deepening mist, loomed over her. She seemed to hear its passages patter with racing feet. There was a face at the pantry window. Perhaps there was a face at every window. There always is. She dared not look.

There _were_ racing feet. The three children burst onto the porch above her.

“Time for breakfast!” they called. “And then we’ll be ready for the Picnic!”

Now she knew. The whole dumb face of the house had been warning her; George’s premonition last night was the same. She tried wildly to wave them back, but her voice was sealed. Frolicking with anticipation, Janet and Sylvia and Rose ran to the railing and leaned over to shout to her.

“See if there are any cobwebs! If there are, it’s not going to rain.”

Time swayed over her like an impending tree, tremulous, almost cut through. It seemed so gingerly poised that perhaps the mere fury of her will could hold it stable for a moment. Where was Martin? Oh, if he found the mouse in time he would get back before this happened and perhaps his memory would be wiped clean. She saw George appear at the door of the porch with tools in his hands, and his face turn ghastly.

“We’re going to have ginger ale at the Picnic,” Sylvia was calling.

She tried to hold Time still with her mind. She was frantically motioning the children back, crying out and wondering whether her voice made any sound. The balustrade was going, she saw the old splintery wood cracking, swaying, sagging. There was a snapping crash of breaking posts. The children’s faces, flushed with gaiety, their mouths open, suddenly changed. They leaned forward and still farther forward, holding out their arms to her as though for an embrace. They were beginning to fall. After so many little tears and troubles, how could they know that this was more than one last strange tenderness. And as the railing shattered and they fell, she saw that Martin was at the door of the porch. He had found it.

XXII

The candles were still smoking on the cake, the children all trooping toward the hall.

“Wait, wait!” he cried. “Come back a minute!”

They turned in surprise. The Grown-Ups, very large in the doorway, looked like gigantic prison guards faced by some sudden unexpected insurrection. One of them brushed against the bronze gongs hanging at one side of the door. They jangled softly as if calling them all to attention.

“Don’t let’s play that game,” he said breathlessly. “It’s too terrible.”

“What game?” asked Mrs. Richmond.

“We made up a game. A game of spies, to----” He realized that he couldn’t possibly explain with the Parents standing there. He caught Joyce’s eye. She looked frightened.

“Why, Martin, how silly you are,” chirped Phyllis. “Of course we weren’t going to play it, not really.”

“He’s not silly!” Joyce shouted fiercely. “_I_ was going to play it.”

“So was I,” Bunny flashed. “Phyllis is telling fibs. We _were_ going to play it. We were going to spy on Grown-Ups, to find out whether they have a good time.”

“Bunny, Bunny,” said her mother reprovingly. “Tell Phyllis you’re sorry. You mustn’t forget she’s a guest.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Phyllis primly. “When I grow up I’m going to have a lot of children and teach them lovely manners.”

“When _I_ grow up,” Bunny exclaimed, “my children won’t never have to say Thank you or they’re sorry unless they really mean it.”

“When _I_ grow up,” Ruth said, “I’m going to do without children. They’re too much of a burden.”

“Perhaps when the time comes,” said one of the guards, “they’ll find it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Martin turned hopelessly to the boys. “Ben, don’t _you_ grow up. It isn’t fun. Ben, I--I _advise_ you not to grow up.”

“Quit your kidding,” Ben retorted. “What’s biting you?”

“_Ben!_” exclaimed an indignant parent. “Where on earth do you pick up that way of talking. I’m amazed at you.”

Martin saw it was too late. Already something had happened. Just the invasion of elders into the room had changed them all.

“Mother!” he appealed. “Tell the truth, it’s awfully important, cross your heart and hope to die. _Do_ you have a good time?”

A chorus of laughter from the adults.

“Why, dear, what an absurd question. Do we look so miserable?”

“They won’t tell us,” he cried bitterly. “They’re all liars!”

There was an appalled silence.

“It’s time to get them home. Parties always upset them. Ben, stop biting your nails.”

“Joyce, what on earth are you snivelling about? Really, it seems as though the more you do for them the less they appreciate it.”

The rain had thinned to a drizzle. Martin stood uneasily in the hall while the others collected umbrellas and rubbers and repeated their curtsies. The house smelt of raincoats and fresh wallpaper.

“Martin, what _is_ it? Don’t you see I’m busy talking to Mrs. Clyde? What do you keep twitching my arm for?”

He had only wanted to ask her if they could invite Joyce to stay to supper. But he couldn’t shout it out before everyone.

“Well, then, if you didn’t want anything special, why are you bothering me? Go and say good-bye to Joyce. Say it politely, and tell her you hope she’ll come again. And after that your father wants to speak to you.”

But Joyce had already gone, and when she looked back, to try to show him she understood, she did not see him. His father was asking him if a boy ten years old didn’t know better than to insult his parents like that.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.