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.