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

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

Roddy's chant pursued her up the lane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be all right.

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

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

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




XXIII


I.

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

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

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

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

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


II.

"Mamma--"

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

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

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

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


III.

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

"You wouldn't do that, Mary?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I can't think what he means."

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

"About all those letters. What letters?"

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

"When?"

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

"Persecuting?"

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

"What--_does_ he want?"

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

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

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

"You don't like him."

"Do _you_?"

"I--love him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Faithful! To a horrid man like that!"

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

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

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

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


IV.

Incredible; impossible; but it had happened.

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

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

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

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

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


V.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What did you cut it all off for?"

"Oh, just for fun."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

"Are you glad?"

"Very glad."

"Why do you sit on the fender?"

"I'm cold."

"Cold and glad."

A long pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_She_ said it."

"It sounds rather silly of her."

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

"Because Papa's dead."

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

"It'll grow again."

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

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

The next day he was gone.


VI.

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

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

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

"Forget what?"

"What it used to feel like."

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

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

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

"You must do _something_."

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

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

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

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

"Will you marry me, Mary?"


VII.

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

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

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

"You used to like it."

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

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

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

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

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

"Lots of hair?"

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

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

"Yes, Mary."

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

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

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

"She thinks I am."

Silence. He peered into her face.

"Are you jealous of her, Mary?"

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

"I was going to marry one of them."

"Then why didn't you?"

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

"Little beast!"

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

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

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

"_That_--Madam--is Heine."


VIII.

"My dearest Maurice--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I say, you run like the wind."

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

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

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

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


IX.

"'Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder.'"

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

   "KikerikГјh! sie glaubten
    Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

He came on the last day of November.


X.

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

"Yes. Something's made me unhappy."

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

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

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

"For always?"

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

"Of course I would. Like a shot."

"And supposing--I never settled it?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What sort of bother?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


XI.

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

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

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

"Is it as bad as all that?"

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

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

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

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

"Tell me what he says."

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

"He _would_ do that."

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

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

"Yes."

"Then why on earth didn't you?"

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

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

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

"You'd rather be jilted?"

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

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

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


XII.

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

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

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

Mamma had left her alone with Aunt Lavvy.

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

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

"Should you say _I_ was unhappy?"

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

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

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

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

"I suppose he was a Unitarian?"

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

"_Why_?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Didn't he love anybody?"

"Yes, Mary; he loved your mother."

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

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

"Afraid?"

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

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

"Victor has got a great deal."

"And you--you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

   "KikerikГјh! sie glaubten
    Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."




XXIV


I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sang it to comfort you.

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

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


II.

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

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

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

"Because I used to think I was pretty."

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

She ignored the dexterous application.

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

"Nobody said you were ugly."

"Maurice Jourdain did."

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

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

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

"He never threatened me."

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

"What did he say?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not if it makes you any more contented."

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

"Oh, go along with you!"

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


III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restlessness. That was desire. It must be.

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

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

There was Swinburne:

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

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

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


V.

Passion Week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She hated her mother and she adored her.

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


VI.

April, May, June.

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

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

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

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

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

It was in June last year that Maurice Jourdain had come to her: June the
twenty-fourth. To-day was the twenty-fifth. He must have remembered.

The hayfields shone, ready for mowing. Under the wind the shimmering hay
grass moved like waves of hot air, up and up the hill.

She slipped through the gap by Morfe Bridge and went up the fields to the
road on Greffington Edge. She lay down among the bracken in the place
where Roddy and she had sat two years ago when they had met Mr. Sutcliffe
coming down the road.

The bracken hid her. It made a green sunshade above her head. She shut
her eyes.

   "KikerikГјh! sie glaubten
    Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."

That was all nonsense. Maurice Jourdain would never have crept in the
little hen-house and hidden himself under the straw. He would never have
crowed like a cock. Mark and Roddy would. And Harry Craven and Jimmy.
Jimmy would certainly have hidden himself under the straw.

Supposing Jimmy had had a crystal mind. Shining and flashing. Supposing
he had never done that awful thing they said he did. Supposing he had had
Mark's ways, had been noble and honourable like Mark--

The interminable reverie began. He was there beside her in the bracken.
She didn't know what his name would be. It couldn't be Jimmy or Harry or
any of those names. Not Mark. Mark's name was sacred.

Cecil, perhaps.

_Why_ Cecil? _Cecil_?--You ape! You drivelling, dribbling idiot! That was
the sort of thing Aunt Charlotte would have thought of.

She got up with a jump and stretched herself. She would have to run if
she was to be home in time for tea.

From the top hayfield she could see the Sutcliffes' tennis court; an
emerald green space set in thick grey walls. She drew her left hand
slowly down her right forearm. The muscle was hardening and thickening.

Mamma didn't like it when you went by yourself to play singles with Mr.
Sutcliffe. But if Mr. Sutcliffe asked you you would simply have to go.
You would have to play a great many singles against Mr. Sutcliffe if you
were to be in good form next year when Mark came home.


VII.

She was always going to the Sutcliffes' now. Her mother shook her head
when she saw her in her short white skirt and white jersey, slashing at
nothing with her racquet, ready. Mamma didn't like the Sutcliffes. She
said they hadn't been nice to poor Papa. They had never asked him again.
You could see she thought you a beast to like them.

"But, Mamma darling, I can't help liking them."

And Mamma would look disgusted and go back to her pansy bed and dig her
trowel in with little savage thrusts, and say she supposed you would
always have your own way.

You would go down to Greffington Hall and find Mr. Sutcliffe sitting
under the beech tree on the lawn, in white flannels, looking rather tired
and bored. And Mrs. Sutcliffe, a long-faced, delicate-nosed Beauty of
Victorian Albums, growing stout, wearing full skirts and white cashmere
shawls and wide mushroomy hats when nobody else did. She had an air of
doing it on purpose, to be different, like royalty. She would take your
hand and press it gently and smile her downward, dragging smile, and she
would say, "How is your mother? Does she mind the hot weather? She must
come and see me when it's cooler." That was the nice way she had, so that
you mightn't think it was Mamma's fault, or Papa's, if they didn't see
each other often. And she would look down at her shawl and gather it
about her, as if in spirit she had got up and gone away.

And Mr. Sutcliffe would be standing in front of you, looking suddenly
years younger, with his eyes shining and clean as though he had just
washed them.

And after tea you would play singles furiously. For two hours you would
try to beat him. When you jumped the net Mrs. Sutcliffe would wave her
hand and nod to you and smile. You had done something that pleased her.

To-day, when it was all over, Mr. Sutcliffe took her back into the house,
and there on the hall table were the books he had got for her from the
London Library: The Heine, the Goethe's _Faust_, the Sappho, the Darwin's
_Origin of Species_, the Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung_.

"Five? All at once?"

"I get fifteen. As long as we're here you shall have your five."

He walked home with her, carrying the books. Five. Five. And when you had
finished them there would be five more. It was unbelievable.

"Why are you so nice to me? Why? _Why_?"

"I think it must be because I like you, Mary."

Utterly unbelievable.

"Do--you--_really_--like me?"

"I liked you the first day I saw you. With your brother. On Greffington
Edge."

"I wonder why." She wondered what he was thinking, what, deep down inside
him, he was really thinking.

"Perhaps it was because you wanted something I could give you....
Tennis.... You wanted it so badly. Everything you want you want so
badly."

"And I never knew we were going to be such friends."

"No more did I. And I don't know now how long it's going to last."

"Why shouldn't it last?"

"Because next year 'Mark' will have come home and you'll have nothing to
say to me."

"Mark won't make a scrap of difference."

"Well--if it isn't 'Mark' ... You'll grow up, Mary, and it won't amuse
you to talk to me any more. I shan't know you. You'll wear long skirts
and long hair done in the fashion."

"I shall always want to talk to you. I shall never do up my hair. I cut
it off because I couldn't be bothered with it. But I was sold. I thought
it would curl all over my head, and it didn't curl."

"It curls at the tips," Mr. Sutcliffe said. "I like it. Makes you look
like a jolly boy, instead of a dreadful, unapproachable young lady. A
little San Giovanni. A little San Giovanni."

That was his trick: caressing his own words as if he liked them.

She wondered what, deep down inside him, he was really like.

"Mr. Sutcliffe--if you'd known a girl when she was only fourteen, and you
liked her and you never saw her again till she was seventeen, and then
you found that she'd gone and cut her hair all off, would it give you an
awful shock?"

"Depends on how much I liked her."

"If you'd liked her awfully--would it make you leave off liking her?"

"I think my friendship could stand the strain."

"If it wasn't just friendship? Supposing it was Mrs. Sutcliffe?"

"I shouldn't like my wife to cut her hair off. It wouldn't be at all
becoming to her."

"No. But when she was young?"

"Ah--when she was young--"

"Would it have made any difference?"

"No. No. It wouldn't have made any difference at all."

"You'd have married her just the same?"

"Just the same, Mary. Why?"

"Oh, nothing. I thought you'd be like that. I just wanted to make sure."

He smiled to himself. He had funny, secret thoughts that you would never
know.

"Well," she said, "I didn't beat you."

"Form not good enough yet--quite."

He promised her it should be perfect by the time Mark came home.


VIII.

"The pale pearl-purple evening--" The words rushed together. She couldn't
tell whether they were her own or somebody else's.

There was the queer shock of recognition that came with your own real
things. It wasn't remembering though it felt like it.

Shelley--"The pale purple even." Not pearl-purple. Pearl-purple was what
you saw. The sky to the east after sunset above Greffington Edge. Take
out "pale," and "pearl-purple evening" was your own.

The poem was coming by bits at a time. She could feel the rest throbbing
behind it, an unreleased, impatient energy.

Her mother looked in at the door. "What are you doing it for, Mary?"

"Oh--for nothing."

"Then for pity's sake come down into the warm room and do it there.
You'll catch cold."

She hated the warm room.

The poem would be made up of many poems. It would last a long time,
through the winter and on into the spring. As long as it lasted she would
be happy. She would be free from the restlessness and the endless idiotic
reverie of desire.


IX.

"From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory and hypocrisy; from
envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,

   "_Good Lord, deliver us_."

Mary was kneeling beside her mother in church.

"From fornication, and all other deadly sin--"

Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that
other people couldn't have, that you couldn't give to them; happiness
that was no good to Mamma, no good to anybody but you, secret and
selfish; that was your happiness. It was deadly sin.

She felt an immense, intolerable compassion for everybody who was
unhappy. A litany of compassion went on inside her: For old Dr. Kendal,
sloughing and rotting in his chair; for Miss Kendal; for all women
labouring of child; for old Mrs. Heron; for Dorsy Heron; for all
prisoners and captives; for Miss Louisa Wright; for all that were
desolate and oppressed; for Maggie's sister, dying of cancer; and for
Mamma, kneeling there, praying.

Sunday after Sunday.

And she would work in the garden every morning, digging in leaf mould and
carrying the big stones for the rockery; she would go to Mrs. Sutcliffe's
sewing parties; she would sit for hours with Maggie's sister, trying not
to look as if she minded the smell of the cancer. You were no good unless
you could do little things like that. You were no good unless you could
keep on doing them.