Part 5

“Very few people do sleep,” said Agatha, “for the first time in a strange place.”

“The place isn’t strange. That’s what I complain of. That’s what keeps me awake. No place ever will be strange when It’s there. And it was there last night.”

“Darling—” Milly murmured.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “The Thing that keeps me awake. Of course if I’d slept last night I’d have known it wasn’t there. But when I didn’t sleep—”

He left it to them to draw the only possible conclusion.

They dropped the subject. They turned to other things and talked a little while, sitting with him in his room with the drawn blinds. From time to time when they appealed to him he gave an urbane assent, a murmur, a suave motion of his hand. When the light went they lit a lamp. Agatha stayed and dined with them, that being the best thing she could do.

At nine o’clock she rose and said good-night to Harding Powell. He smiled a drawn smile.

“Ah—if I could sleep—,” he said.

“That’s the worst of it—his not sleeping,” said Milly at the gate.

“He will sleep. He will sleep,” said Agatha.

Milly sighed. She knew he wouldn’t.

The plan, she said, was no good after all. It wouldn’t work.

III

How could it? There was nothing behind it. All Milly’s plans had been like that; they fell to dust; they _were_ dust. There had been always that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror; the futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing’s eyes. As if he couldn’t see through it. As if, with the supernatural ludicity, the invincible cunning of the insane, he didn’t see through anything and provide for it. It was really only his indestructible urbanity, persisting through the wreck of him, that bore, tolerantly, temperately, with Milly and her plans. Without it he might be dangerous. With it, as long as it lasted, little Milly, plan as she would, was safe.

But they couldn’t count on its lasting. Agatha had realized that from the moment when she had seen him draw down the blind again after his wife had drawn it up. That was the maddest thing he had done yet. She had shuddered at it as at an act of violence. It outraged, cruelly, his exquisite quality. It was so unlike him.

She was not sure that Milly hadn’t even made things worse by her latest plan, the flight to Sarratt End. It emphasized the fact that they were flying, that they had to fly. It had brought her to the house with the drawn blinds in the closed, barred valley, to the end of the world, to the end of her tether. And when she realized that it _was_ the end, when he realized it....

Agatha couldn’t leave him there. She couldn’t (when she had the secret) leave him to poor Milly and her plans. That had been in her mind when she had insisted on it that he would sleep.

She knew what Milly meant by her sigh and the look she gave her. If Milly could have been impolite she would have told her that it was all very well to say so, but how were they going to make him? And she, too, felt that something more was required of her than that irritating affirmation. She had got to make him. His case, his piteous case, cried out for an extension of the gift.

She hadn’t any doubt as to its working. There were things she didn’t know about it yet, but she was sure of that. She had proved it by a hundred experimental intermissions, abstentions, and recoveries. In order to be sure you had only to let go and see how you got on without it. She had tried in that way, with scepticism and precaution, on herself.

But not in the beginning. She could not say that she had tried it in the beginning at all, even on herself. It had simply come to her, as she put it, by a divine accident. Heaven knew she had needed it. She had been, like Rodney Lanyon, on the verge, where he, poor dear, had brought her; so impossible had it been then to bear her knowledge and, what was worse, her divination of the things he bore from Bella. It was her divination, her compassion, that had wrecked her as she stood aside, cut off from him, he on the verge and she near it, looking on, powerless to help while Bella tore at him. Talk of the verge, the wonder was they hadn’t gone clean over it, both of them.

She couldn’t say then from what region, what tract of unexplored, incredible mystery her help had come. It came one day, one night when she was at her worst. She remembered how, with some resurgent, ultimate instinct of surrender, she had sunk on the floor of her room, flung out her arms across the bed in the supreme gesture of supplication, and thus gone, eyes shut and with no motion of thought or sense in her, clean into the blackness where, as if it had been waiting for her, the thing had found her.

It had found her. Agatha was precise on that point. She had not found it. She had not even stumbled on it, blundered up against it in the blackness. The way it worked, the wonder of her instantaneous well-being, had been the first, the very first hint she had that it was there.

She had never quite recaptured her primal, virgin sense of it; but to set against that, she had entered more and more into possession. She had found out the secret of its working and had controlled it, reduced it to an almost intelligible method. You could think of it as a current of transcendent power, hitherto mysteriously inhibited. You made the connection, having cut off all other currents that interfered, and then you simply turned it on. In other words, if you could put it into words at all, you shut your eyes and ears, you closed up the sense of touch, you made everything dark around you and withdrew into your innermost self; you burrowed deep into the darkness there till you got beyond it; you tapped the Power, as it were, underground at any point you pleased and turned it on in any direction.

She could turn it on to Harding Powell without any loss to Rodney Lanyon; for it was immeasurable, inexhaustible.

She looked back at the farm-house with its veiled windows. Formless and immense, the shadow of Harding Powell swayed uneasily on one of the yellow blinds. Across the field her own house showed pure and dim against the darkening slope behind it, showed washed and watered white in the liquid, lucid twilight. Her house was open always and on every side; it flung out its casement arms to the night and to the day. And now all the lamps were lit, every doorway was a golden shaft, every window a golden square; the whiteness of its walls quivered and the blurred edges flowed into the dark of the garden. It was the fragile shell of a sacred and a burning light.

She did not go in all at once. She crossed the river and went up the hill through the beech-wood. She walked there every evening in the darkness, calling her thoughts home to sleep. The Easter moon, golden-white and holy, looked down at her, shrined under the long, sharp arch of the beech-trees; it was like going up and up towards a dim sanctuary where the holiest sat enshrined. A sense of consecration was upon her. It came, solemn and pure and still, out of the tumult of her tenderness and pity; but it was too awful for pity and for tenderness; it aspired like a flame and lost itself in light; it grew like a wave till it was vaster than any tenderness or any pity. It was as if her heart rose on the swell of it and was carried away into a rhythm so tremendous that her own pulses of compassion were no longer felt, or felt only as the hushed and delicate vibration of the wave. She recognized her state. It was the blessed state desired as the condition of the working of the gift.

She turned when the last arch of the beech-trees broke and opened to the sky at the top of the hill, where the moon hung in immensity, free of her hill, free of the shrine that held her. She went down with slow soft footsteps as if she carried herself, her whole fragile being, as a vessel, a crystal vessel for the holy thing, and was careful lest a touch of the earth should jar and break her.

IV

She went still more gently and with half-shut eyes through her illuminated house. She turned the lights out in her room and undressed herself in the darkness. She laid herself on the bed with straight lax limbs, with arms held apart a little from her body, with eyelids shut lightly on her eyes; all fleshly contacts were diminished.

It was now as if her being drank at every pore the swimming darkness; as if the rhythm of her heart and of her breath had ceased in the pulse of its invasion. She sank in it and was covered with wave upon wave of darkness. She sank and was upheld; she dissolved and was gathered together again, a flawless crystal. She was herself the heart of the charmed circle, poised in the ultimate unspeakable stillness, beyond death, beyond birth, beyond the movement, the vehemence, the agitations of the world. She drew Harding Powell into it and held him there.

To draw him to any purpose she had first to loosen and destroy the fleshly, sinister image of him that, for the moment of evocation, hung like a picture on the darkness. In a moment the fleshly image receded, it sank back into the darkness. His name, Harding Powell, was now the only earthly sign of him that she suffered to appear. In the third moment his name was blotted out. And then it was as if she drew him by intangible, supersensible threads; she touched, with no sense of peril, his innermost essence; the walls of flesh were down between them; she had got at him.

And having got at him she held him, a bloodless spirit, a bodiless essence, in the fount of healing. She said to herself, “He will sleep now. He will sleep. He will sleep.” And as she slid into her own sleep she held and drew him with her.

He would sleep; he would be all right as long as _she_ slept. Her sleep, she had discovered, did more than carry on the amazing act of communion and redemption. It clinched it. It was the seal on the bond.

Early the next morning she went over to the Farm. The blinds were up; the doors and windows were flung open. Milly met her at the garden gate. She stopped her and walked a little way with her across the field. “It’s worked,” she said. “It’s worked after all, like magic.” For a moment Agatha wondered whether Milly had guessed anything; whether she divined the Secret and had brought him there for that, and had refused to acknowledge it before she knew.

“What has?” she asked.

“The plan. The place. He slept last night. Ten hours straight on end. I know, for I stayed awake and watched him. And this morning—oh, my dear, if you could see him! He’s all right. He’s all right.”

“And you think,” said Agatha, “it’s the place?”

Milly knew nothing, guessed, divined nothing.

“Why, what else can it be?” she said.

“What does _he_ think?”

“He doesn’t think. He can’t account for it. He says himself it’s miraculous.”

“Perhaps,” said Agatha, “it is.”

They were silent a moment over the wonder of it.

“I can’t get over it,” said Milly presently. “It’s so odd that it should make all that difference. I could understand it if it had worked that way at first. But it didn’t. Think of him yesterday. And yet—if it isn’t the place, what is it? What is it?”

Agatha did not answer. She wasn’t going to tell Milly what it was. If she did, Milly wouldn’t believe her, and Milly’s unbelief might work against it. It might prove, for all she knew, an inimical, disastrous power.

“Come and see for yourself.” Milly spoke as if it had been Agatha who doubted.

They turned again towards the house. Powell had come out and was in the garden, leaning on the gate. They could see how right he was by the mere fact of his being there, presenting himself like that to the vivid light.

He opened the gate for them, raising his hat and smiling as they came. His face witnessed to the wonder worked on him. The colour showed clean, purged of his taint. His eyes were candid and pure under brows smoothed by sleep.

As they went in he stood for a moment in the open doorway and looked at the view, admiring the river and the green valley and the bare upland fields under the wood. He had always had (it was part of his rare quality) a prodigious capacity for admiration.

“My God,” he said, “how beautiful the world is!”

He looked at Milly. “And all that isn’t a patch on my wife.”

He looked at her with tenderness and admiration, and the look was the flower, the perfection of his sanity.

Milly drew in her breath with a little sound like a sob. Her joy was so great that it was almost unbearable.

Then he looked at Agatha and admired the green gown she wore. “You don’t know,” he said, “how exquisitely right you are.”

She smiled. She knew how exquisitely right _he_ was.

V

Night after night, she continued and without an effort. It was as easy as drawing your breath; it was indeed the breath you drew. She found that she had no longer to devote hours to Harding Powell, any more than she gave hours to Rodney; she could do his business in moments, in points of inappreciable time. It was as if from night to night the times swung together and made one enduring timeless time. For the process belonged to a region that was not of times or time.

She wasn’t afraid, then, of not giving enough time to it, but she _was_ afraid of omitting it altogether. She knew that every intermission would be followed by a relapse, and Harding’s state did not admit of any relapses.

Of course, if time _had_ counted, if the thing was measurable, she would have been afraid of losing hold of Rodney Lanyon. She held him now by a single slender thread, and the thread was Bella. She “worked” it regularly now through Bella. He was bound to be all right as long as Bella was; for his possibilities of suffering were thus cut off at their source. Besides, it was the only way to preserve the purity of her intention, the flawlessness of the crystal.

That was the blessedness of her attitude to Harding Powell. It was passionless, impersonal. She wanted nothing of Harding Powell except to help him, and to help Milly, dear little Milly. And never before had she been given so complete, so overwhelming a sense of having helped. It was nothing—unless it was a safeguard against vanity—that they didn’t know it, that they persisted in thinking it was Milly’s plan that worked. Not that that altogether accounted for it to Harding Powell. He said so at last to Agatha.

They were returning, he and she, by the edge of the wood at the top of the steep field after a long walk. He had asked her to go with him—it was her country—for a good stretch, further than Milly’s little feet could carry her. They stood a moment up there and looked around them. April was coming on, but the ploughed land at their feet was still bare; the earth waited. On that side of the valley she was delicately unfruitful, spent with rearing the fine, thin beauty of the woods. But, down below, the valley ran over with young grass and poured it to the river in wave after wave, till the last surge of green rounded over the water’s edge. Rain had fallen in the night, and the river had risen; it rested there, poised. It was wonderful how a thing so brimming, so shining, so alive could be so still; still as marsh water, flat to the flat land.

At that moment, in a flash that came like a shifting of her eyes, the world she looked at suffered a change.

And yet it did not change. All the appearances of things, their colours, the movement and the stillness remained as if constant in their rhythm and their scale; but they were heightened, intensified; they were carried to a pitch that would have been vehement, vibrant, but that the stillness as well as the movement was intense. She was not dazzled by it or confused in any way. Her senses were exalted, adjusted to the pitch.

She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become insubstantial, but that she knew, in a flash, that what she saw was the very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid as crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent.

Agatha in her moment saw that the whole world brimmed and shone and was alive with the joy that was its life, joy that flowed flood-high and yet was still. In every leaf, in every blade of grass, this life was manifest as a strange, a divine translucence. She was about to point it out to the man at her side when she remembered that he had eyes for the beauty of the earth, but no sense of its secret and supernatural light. Harding Powell denied, he always had denied, the supernatural. And when she turned to him her vision had passed from her.

They must have another tramp some day, he said. He wanted to see more of this wonderful place. And then he spoke of his recovery.

“It’s all very well,” he said, “but I can’t account for it. Milly says it’s the place.”

“It _is_ a wonderful place,” said Agatha.

“Not so wonderful as all that. You saw how I was the day after we came. Well—it can’t be the place altogether.”

“I rather hope it isn’t,” Agatha said.

“Do you? What do you think it is, then?”

“I think it’s something in you.”

“Of course, of course. But what started it? That’s what I want to know. Something’s happened. Something queer and spontaneous and unaccountable. It’s—it’s uncanny. For, you know, I oughtn’t to feel like this. I got bad news this morning.”

“Bad news?”

“Yes. My sister’s little girl is very ill. They think it’s meningitis. They’re in awful trouble. And I—I’m feeling like this.”

“Don’t let it distress you.”

“It doesn’t distress me. It only puzzles me. That’s the odd thing. Of course, I’m sorry, and I’m anxious and all that; but I _feel_ so well.”

“You _are_ well. Don’t be morbid.”

“I haven’t told my wife yet. About the child, I mean. I simply daren’t. It’ll frighten her. She won’t know how I’ll take it, and she’ll think it’ll make me go all queer again.”

He paused and turned to her.

“I say, if she _did_ know how I’m taking it, she’d think _that_ awfully queer, wouldn’t she?” He paused.

“The worst of it is,” he said, “I’ve got to tell her.”

“Will you leave it to me?” Agatha said. “I think I can make it all right.”

“How?” he queried.

“Never mind how. I can.”

“Well,” he assented, “there’s hardly anything you can’t do.”

That was how she came to tell Milly.

She made up her mind to tell her that evening as they sat alone in Agatha’s house. “Harding,” Milly said, “was happy over there with his books; just as he used to be, only more so.” So much more so that she was a little disturbed about it. She was afraid it wouldn’t last. And again she said it was the place, the wonderful place.

“If you want it to last,” Agatha said, “don’t go on thinking it’s the place.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? I feel that he’s safe here. He’s out of it. Things can’t reach him.”

“Bad news reached him to-day.”

“Aggy—what?” Milly whispered in her fright.

“His sister is very anxious about her little girl.”

“What’s wrong?”

Agatha repeated what she had heard from Harding Powell.

“Oh—” Milly was dumb for an instant while she thought of her sister-in-law. Then she cried aloud:

“If the child dies, it’ll make him ill again?”

“No, Milly, it won’t.”

“It will, I tell you. It’s always been that sort of thing that does it.”

“And supposing there was something that keeps it off?”

“What is there? What is there?”

“I believe there’s something. Would you mind awfully if it wasn’t the place?”

“What do you mean, Agatha?” (There was a faint resentment in Milly’s agonized tone.)

It was then that Agatha told her. She made it out for her as far as she had made it out at all, with the diffidence that a decent attitude required.

Milly raised doubts which subsided in a kind of awe when Agatha faced her with the evidence of dates.

“You remember, Milly, the night when he slept?”

“I do remember. He said himself it was miraculous.” She meditated.

“And so you think it’s that?” she said presently.

“I do indeed. If I dared leave off (I daren’t) you’d see for yourself.”

“What do you think you’ve got hold of?”

“I don’t know yet.”

There was a long, deep silence which Milly broke.

“What do you _do_?” she said.

“I don’t do anything. It isn’t me.”

“I see,” said Milly. “I’ve prayed. You didn’t think I hadn’t?”

“It’s not that—not anything _you_ mean by it. And yet it is; only it’s more, much more. I can’t explain it. I only know it isn’t me.”

She was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable about having told her.

“And, Milly, you mustn’t tell him. Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“No, I won’t tell him.”

“Because, you see, he’d think it was all rot.”

“He would,” said Milly. “It’s the sort of thing he does think rot.”

“And that might prevent its working.”

Milly smiled faintly. “I haven’t the ghost of an idea what ‘it’ is. But whatever it is, can you go on doing it?”

“Yes, I think so. You see, it depends rather—”

“It depends on what?”

“Oh, on a lot of things—on your sincerity; on your—your purity. It depends so much on _that_ that it frightens you, lest, perhaps, you mightn’t, after all, be so very pure.”

Milly smiled again a little differently. “Darling, if that’s all, I’m not frightened. Only—supposing—supposing you gave out? You might, you know.”

“_I_ might. But It couldn’t. You mustn’t think it’s me, Milly. Because if anything happened to me, if I did give out, don’t you see how it would let him down? It’s as bad as thinking it’s the place.”

“Does it matter what it is—or who it is,” said Milly passionately; “as long as—” Her tears came and stopped her.

Agatha divined the source of Milly’s passion.

“Then you don’t mind, Milly? You’ll let me go on?” Milly rose; she turned abruptly, holding her head high, so that she might not spill her tears.

Agatha went with her over the grey field towards the farm. They paused at the gate. Milly spoke.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Certain.”

“And you won’t let go?” Her eyes shone towards her friend’s in the twilight. “You _will_ go on?”

“_You_ must go on.”

“Ah—how?”

“Believing that he’ll be all right.”

“Oh, Aggy, he was devoted to Winny. And if the child dies—”

VI

The child died three days later. Milly came over to Agatha with the news.

She said it had been an awful shock, of course. She’d been dreading something like that for him. But he’d taken it wonderfully. If he came out of it all right, she _would_ believe in what she called Agatha’s “thing.”

He did come out of it all right. His behaviour was the crowning proof, if Milly wanted more proof, of his sanity. He went up to London and made all the arrangements for his sister. When he returned he forestalled Milly’s specious consolations with the truth. It was better, he told her, that the dear little girl should have died, for there was distinct brain trouble anyway. He took it as a sane man takes a terrible alternative.

Weeks passed. He had grown accustomed to his own sanity and no longer marvelled at it.

And still, without intermission, Agatha went on. She had been so far affected by Milly’s fright (that was the worst of Milly’s knowing) that she held on to Harding Powell with a slightly exaggerated intensity. She even began to give more and more time to him, she who had made out that time in this process did not matter. She was afraid of letting go, because the consequences (Milly was perpetually reminding her of the consequences) of letting go would be awful.